Song · Skids
“Into The Valley” by Skids
From the album Scared to Dance (1979)
“Into The Valley” by Skids appears on 1 radio countdown from 1 station in 1979. It was first released in 1979 on the album Scared to Dance. Its best result is #37 on the John Peel's All-Time Festive Fifty (1979). In the combined RockLists rankings it is #6,167 alternative song of all time.
Skids cracked the UK top 10 in March 1979 with "Into the Valley", the second single Virgin took from the Scottish punks' debut album, Scared to Dance, and it has been the song that defines them ever since, turning up on punk and Scottish compilations alike. Stuart Adamson wrote the music, Richard Jobson the words, and David Batchelor produced.
Jobson built the lyric out of a poem he'd written at 16 under the spell of Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade", reshaping it into a song about young Scots being drawn into the army, and about a friend killed while serving in Northern Ireland. Not that many could follow it: Jobson's diction made the words notoriously hard to decipher, a joke a Maxell cassette advert later milked with printed "translations" that got them wrong.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
RockLists rankings
Alternative & Modern Rock
All Rock Formats
All-time and decade countdowns
| Year | # | Station | Countdown | of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1979 | 37 | John Peel (BBC Radio 1) | John Peel's All-Time Festive Fifty (1979) | 50 |
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