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It’s sunny in Glasgow – 20 degrees, what the locals call “taps-aff” weather. It is not a day for being inside, but that is exactly where we are headed. We are in a taxi to HMP Barlinnie, Scotland’s biggest and most infamous prison – known locally as the Bar-L or The Big Hoose – for a gig by the Skids.
“Ma son’s bin in an oot eh the Bar-L,” says the taxi driver. “Drugs,” he says. “The problem is, there’s mair drugs in there than there is oot here.”
A recent BBC documentary, Inside Barlinnie, captured His Majesty’s guests getting fucked up on paper soaked in chemicals. People were sending them letters impregnated with psychoactive drugs like Spice, and the prisoners would tear bits off and gobble them like acid tabs. To put a stop to it, the prison now makes photocopies of all correspondence and gives them the copies.
“Anuther hing they wid dae,” says the taxi driver, “is soak a pair a’ soaks in Valium–”
In Glasgow, ‘socks’ is pronounced ‘soaks’.
“–And then folk’d gie them the soaks and they’d soak thum in a sink – and then drink the water.”
He’s chuckling – I mean, it’s funny: the image, as well as the way he says it – but this is Glasgow, where jokes turn dark fast. “They come oot mair fucked up than when they went in,” he says.
To break that cycle, Barlinnie encourages its guests to use their time positively. Some prisoners are in their cells 23 hours a day – they get an hour for exercise, a designated period for showering, time to collect their meals – but some choose to stay in their cells, either through fear of what is outside the cell walls, or just as a way of coping.
The alternative is to get a job, volunteer for classes, or go to events. This week is Mental Health Week in The Big Hoose, and the Skids are one such event. There are posters up in communal areas, and people put their names down if they want to come. But still the numbers are hard to gauge: a recent performance by a theatre company was badly attended after some gang-related violence kicked off and some of the audience ended up confined to their cells.
The Skids have been invited in by David Poliri, a Residential Officer and punk rock fan, who’s part of a group of five who work within the Wellbeing Centre, offering workshops on art, music, and even yoga “with the hope of elevating the feelings of stress and isolation that many individuals suffer because of imprisonment”. 65 per cent of inmates have problems reading and writing, so music is a great connection.
“Is there anything I should avoid saying?” Skids singer Richard Jobson asks David. “I was thinking of telling some stories between the songs, and one of them is about how I lost my virginity to a member of Legs & Co after our first Top Of The Pops appearance.”
David laughs. “They’ll love that,” he says. “There’s nothing really off-limits, just use your common sense.”
Jobson is no stranger to prisons – he used to go and visit his brother, who was later murdered, in Saughton Prison in Edinburgh – but still, surely, even to him, this is a tough crowd. Is he nervous? “The Skids were the first band after The Clash to play Belfast,” he says. “Just off the Shankhill Road. I was more terrified of that than this.”
There are four of us: Jobson, guitarist Connor Whyte, drummer Nick Hernandez and me. Nick and I are just along for the ride: Richard and Connor will be performing acoustically, in front of up to 200 prisoners.
We have left our phones behind, gone through airport-like security, and now David leads us through half a dozen heavy-duty doors, which he opens and locks with a big set of keys, to the chapel that will serve as today’s venue.
“They’re amazing old buildings,” says David, as he shows us C Block, a tower of cells. “Like Chernobyl or something.” Above our heads are hundreds of blokes banged up, two to a cell – a cell with two beds, a toilet and a desk. It’s the same size, I realise later, as our bank of desks at work.
It’s hard to believe there’s anyone here. The prison yard is deserted, but the buildings around us are packed with people. Barlinnie was built in 1882 and designed to hold 900 prisoners. The population is currently around 1400 – it was once 1600 – with everyone two to a cell.
“We joke that this place has elastic walls,” says David.
The chapel building is a regular old church hall, with tiled floors and a high wooden ceiling. It has stereotypical church windows, but the glass is not stained, and there are no pews. The audience today will sit on regular chairs, like at a school assembly – the kind of chairs you could pick up and throw, if you wanted to.
Barlinnie’s history of rehabilitating prisoners through art is famous. In 1973, it created its Special Unit, a controversial initiative at the time, that sought to engage with prisoners rather than brutalise them, offering ‘art therapy’ and encouraging self-expression. Gangster Jimmy Boyle was in the Bar-L for murder when he wrote A Sense Of Freedom, an acclaimed account of his time inside that was later turned into a film. After his release, Boyle became a sculptor. A fellow inmate of the time, Larry Winters, wrote a book of poetry, The Silent Scream. Larry wasn’t lucky enough to have a second act: he overdosed in his cell before the book was published.
Other notable guests over the years have included notorious gangster Paul Ferris, serial killer Peter Manuel, footballer Duncan Ferguson (who served three months after headbutting Raith Rovers defender John McStay during a game – his third offense for assault) and Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only person to be convicted for the Lockerbie bombing.
There’s a rumour that the father of Stuart Adamson – the frontman and driving force behind Big Country, and guitarist and lead songwriter with Jobson in the Skids – also did some time here. In 2004, three years after Stuart took his own life, his father William Adamson was convicted of abusing three children, aged between seven and ten, over a six-year period from 1997. Around this time, a family member revealed to Stuart’s first wife that there had been abuse of some kind in his household growing up. It was something Stuart never spoke about but maybe it provided a clue to a man who could be insular, erratic, moody, and was driven to alcoholism and finally to suicide.
(By all accounts, William Adamson was sent to Perth Prison, but sex offenders are at high risk of violence in prison, often confined to Vulnerable Prisoner Units for their own safety, and he might have been moved. Barlinnie cannot confirm or deny.)
A call goes up. “OK! They’re moving!” The performance has been delayed – lunch went on too long, with a knock-on effect on the guards’ break – and we have been hanging around the hall, nervously waiting. But now, the men are being moved, one cell block at a time.
We have been sitting in the front row of the hall. “Where should we go?” Nick asks a guard.
“You can stay there,” says the guard with a shrug.
We look at our seats and think about the prospect of 200 criminals sitting behind us.
“Fuck that,” we say in unison. We grab some chairs and move up the back.
The prisoners start coming in, in groups of about ten – A-Hall, B-Hall etc – and slowly the room fills. They are ordinary-looking guys, young men – the vast majority under 40 – in regulation red tops, and surprisingly expensive trainers, and they come in quietly and start to fill the hall.
Connor, sitting down the front next to Richard, is thinking: “This is fine. There’s not even that many of them.”
But the prisoners keep on coming and, as they do, they get progressively scarier.
“I’d made the mistake of watching Inside Barlinnie the night before,” says Connor. “And I recognised one of the guys from the documentary – he’d slashed his wife five times.”
(One of the last to come in has an officer either side of him. “He must’ve been about nine-foot tall,” says Connor, whose eyes are drawn to him through the performance. “He didn’t clap once,” he says.)
When the hall is full, David introduces them, and Richard and Connor take to the stage. “Thanks for coming along to see us,” says Richard, “You’ll be thinking, ‘Who the hell are these guys…’”
The Skids were Scotland’s biggest punk band. Their founding member and creative force, Stuart Adamson, was a precocious talent who was inspired by the attitude and energy of the new wave but could play guitar like his heroes Nils Lofgren and Bill Nelson.
Just as bands from London and the Midlands incorporated the influences of Caribbean music into their sound – ska, reggae and dub – Adamson picked up on the music around him. Drone strings and down-tuning combined to make the music of the Skids uniquely Scottish, without being twee or corny. Combined with Richard Jobson’s esoteric lyrics, their music was fresh and urgent, with unusual, impenetrable verses and huge anthemic choruses.
They got in the charts – Into The Valley went top 10 – and appeared on Top Of The Pops several times. And then, after three albums, Stuart Adamson left, formed Big Country, and went on to even greater commercial heights.
Richard Jobson made poetry albums, and had another band for a while, The Armoury Show – with another legendary Scottish guitarist, John McGeoch – but when that didn’t work out, he moved on to TV presenting, modelling, movie directing and more. As a result, for a while, the Skids were almost forgotten. Adamson took his own life in 2001, and Jobson thought of the Skids as something he’d done as a kid. No-one was around to talk up their legacy.
And then, in 2006, U2 and Green Day covered the Skids song The Saints Are Coming to raise money for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. It went to no.1 in 12 countries (including Ireland, Canada and Italy. In the UK, it went to no.2, kept off the no.1 spot by Westlife). But it did more than raise awareness and a whole load of money for charity – it reignited Jobson’s interest in the Skids.
It wasn’t cynical, or a cash-in: They played only a few gigs in 2007. But a decade later, they were touring and writing new material. These days, it’s Jobson’s main project: a celebration of the music he made with Stuart Adamson, and a platform for his writing and art.
His current band, with Connor and Nick (two young guys from his home town of Dunfermline ) and Peter Brychmore (of The Membranes, The Nightingales and more), do double-duty as The Armory Show (now spelled without the ‘u’, as Richard originally intended, after an exhibition in 1913 that was the first modernist art show).
They’ve worked hard. Jobson (who was younger than most of his peers back in the punk days) looks good and weaves around the stage like a boxer. Between songs, he tells jokey anecdotes in which he is frequently the butt of the joke.
At Glasgow Barrowlands, later that night, the Skids face an audience who know every word, every guitar lick. For them, seeing the Skids in this iconic Scottish venue is a huge moment of celebration and catharsis. Jobson repeatedly pays tribute to Stuart Adamson – as does Connor in his astonishing recreation of Adamson’s guitar playing – and they are joined on stage for a couple of songs by Kirsten Adamson, Stuart’s daughter, playing one of his Yamaha SG guitars.
It’s a triumph: a funny, emotional punk rock party.
But in Barlinnie, the atmosphere is different. The prisoners sit quietly. They are intimidating. This is not the Skids’ regular audience.
Instead of going for the hits, they begin with a song called Fields, the Skids’ first single after the departure of Stuart Adamson. It’s a brave choice: a strident folk song about people working the land, battling the elements and refusing to give up. Richard introduces it with a story about how he would pick potatoes to earn some money in the summer holidays when he was a kid. The guys in this room are too young to have done this – machinery does it now – but they can relate.
He talks about his first appearance on Top Of The Pops. “A lot of you are probably not even old enough to know what that is,” he says. “Who’s heard of Top Of The Pops?” There’s a cheer: most of them. He tells the story about losing his virginity to a member of Legs & Co. It gets a huge cheer.
He suffered from epilepsy as a young man, he tells them, so he felt that he might die young. As a result, he threw himself into life, determined to get the most from it. “By the way,” he says, “if you want to ask me anything, just shout out.”
“Did ye ever huv a seizure oanstage?” shouts someone immediately.
“I did,” says Jobson. “But there was this punk dance called the Dying Fly, where you’d lie on your back, shaking, so people thought I was just doing that.”
Big laughs. Another shout: “Did you ever meet Sid Vicious?”
“I did meet Sid,” says Richard, and he tells a story about how he and a mate stole a motorbike and drove it from Edinburgh to London. (“Hey, wait a minute,” he says, aware of his surroundings: “Can I still get nicked for this?”) When they got there, they went to Malcolm McLaren’s shop, Let It Rock, and Sid worked behind the counter.
“He was a nice guy,” says Richard. “Not at all like the image people have of him.”
Another shout: “You goat any new music oot?”
He explains that the Skids have released three albums since they reformed and are playing at the Barrowlands that night.
This news gets a round of applause.
They play Circus Games, Hurry On Boys, A Woman In Winter, Working For The Yankee Dollar (which, played on an acoustic, with its call-and-response vocals sounds like Rawhide), The Saints Are Coming and Into The Valley, and between all the songs, Richard tells the stories behind these songs about doomed men and victimised women, about war, about his schoolmates joining the army and getting sent to Belfast at the height of The Troubles – songs about death, desperation and loneliness – and you realise: this audience gets it.
Jobson is fond of describing Stuart Adamson as “a man of the people” – a guy with down-to-earth ambitions, who wanted to write about the lives of ordinary folk in a social-realist kind of way. Jobson, on the other hand, was much drawn to the left-field, the avant-garde, and the pretentious.
But here he is, this guy who did poetry albums, who modelled for Comme des Garçons, married a TV star and directed movies – who was ridiculed over the years, told to stay in his lane, know his place – and standing in Barlinnie connecting with some of Scotland’s most desperate men.
For the final song, Connor leaves the stage – to a standing ovation – for Jobson to sing And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda acapella.
“This is a really long song,” he says, “and I sometimes forget the words to bits of it, but I’m gonna give it my best shot.” The cynical inmates of Barlinnie are so onside by this point, that even this gets an encouraging round of applause.
The song – which the Skids covered before the more famous version by the Pogues – details an Australian soldier’s experience in Gallipoli in the First World War, and was written by Scottish-born Australian folk singer Eric Bogle in 1971 as a commentary on Australia’s part in the Vietnam War. In the song, the soldier wakes in a hospital to find that he’s lost his legs in an explosion.
“Never knew there were worse things than dying,” he says.
Richard Jobson sings it solo, as the sunlight streams in through the church windows. It brings the house down.
As the applause dies down and the prisoners are guided out of the building and back to their cells, that nine-foot giant edges towards Connor and Richard.
“Ho!” he says, pointing at them. “That was good!”
He pauses. “Naw,” he says. “It was better than good – it was-” he searches for the words in that massive skull of his- “It was GOOD-good!”
The Skids have just announced a UK tour with Theatre Of Hate. Visit skidsofficial.com for dates. Scott Rowley’s book, Stay Alive: The Life & Death of Stuart Adamson, is onsale now. The photography and video in this feature is courtesy of the Barbed Wireless media team, a prisoner work party responsible for running the prison radio and TV station.
