The Skids official website

Members of the Skids
Mike Baillie - Profile *Photography by Eamonn McGoldrick
	Born: Bands The Skids drummer from late 79 til 81. Ex-Insect Bites, but more importantly ex- Abnormal Load with Stevie Starr and… Speccy Potter.
MIKE'S STORY “When I first heard the Skids rehearse they were in the next room to us, it must’ve been their 1st proper rehearsals, when Pano got hold of them. It was way before the 1st gig which was at the Belleville. I caught the vibe of them then at the Belleville on the Friday night and the next day at the Glen with the police showing up. At the time I was working at the dockyards as an apprentice. I remember Pano and the transition to Sandy Muir – from the record and music shop - and all the new gear.” “I’’d met Richard before the others, on a bus to Hillhead Technical College, he was going to Ballingry but I was hopping off at the college. He was really… the first buzzword I’d use would be energy, I suppose, and focus – he knew what he wanted and he was focussed on it. He just had so much energy and… it’s not drive… but he’s so enthusiastic about what he wanted to achieve, which was something big that nobody could miss. I was just really impressed with that. It was about 1976, I was going to Halbeath Tech as an apprentice. That was really the starting point for me.” “The Skids had had success and cut their first album, but I’d still see them coming back into the town, down at the Castleton and I was impressed with the effort they made fit back in to their hometown. Rusty came along but he was only ever filling in temporarily as drummer, so I approached them and said “if you need to recruit a drummer, here I am”. So it was into the studio the next day – there were a couple of months of rehearsals, and I was still working in the dockyards at the time. “The 1st time I played was at the Music Hall in Aberdeen. I was just watching from the wings and Rusty waved me over, and I played on Charles for the 1st encore. It was the 1st time I’d played on a stage that size… it was very gracious of Rusty to do that. The first time I played a gig was the Christmas gigs – just before Christmas – at the Kinema Ballroom. Then I went into a long period when all I did was a couple of TV shows and Top of the Pops. Then the first time I played again was at the Hammersmith Palais with Simple Minds and the Berlin Blondes.” THE ABSOLUTE GAME “Those demos… things developed so quickly. At the time there were at least 2 people in the frame to take Bill’s place. Cowboys International – I saw them at the Blair Drummond gig with Dr Feelgood and the Boomtown Rats and I thought they were a really unique band. I had immense respect for the bass player, Ken Lockie, but then Russell appeared and the rest, as they say, is history. “We joined up with the rest of the Scottish Mafia in London: John McGeoch, Simple Minds, Fingerprintz – there was a definite Scottish link up going on down there… but we were all about 20 years old – it was a bit of a culture shock. You’d be getting chased down the road by skinheads because you had a Jock accent… then it would be a party at Phil Lynott’s house. I spent 18 months down in London meeting up with John Cooper Clark, Cook and Jones frojm the Pistols, all these people. Safe to say that initially when we got there it was just a mindfuck. There was so much to do… anything going on, you just had to make a phone call and you were there, but inevitably the relentlessness of the people that lived there just became unbearable. Us Scots will just speak to anyone at a bus stop, but down there it’s like “are you gonna stab me or what?”. People just didn’t know what to make of us. “Things like doing TOTP, meeting Elvis Costello and the like were real high points. The Nolans story is just a vicious rumour as far as I’m concerned, there was no danger of any of us doing that - one of us was supposed to have spat on their dressing room door at TOTP. “We inherited the Stranglers’ road crew when we joined Modern Management – Ian Grant and Alan Edwards. When we joined I went up to Finchley, I’d just got some nice new clothes from Johnson’s. There’s all these guys there – the Finchley Boys – and they said “We’re going on maneuvers” – whatever that means – and they’ve got these jeeps and these paramilitary romper suits on and they say “come on” – and we drive off in this convoy, miles away, to this private school in the country. So we get into the grounds and there’s this loch – a pond – above this valley, and one side of it is this retaining wall. And they’ve got these entrenching tools and these fire extinguishers and suddenly I realise what their plan is – they’re going to blow it up and flood the valley below! And their Alsatians are jumping in the water and all hell’s breaking loose and I’m in my brand new Johnson’s clothes… I thought “I’m not going up to Finchley again”! “We did a 6 week session at the Manor which was just an amazing experience, although I didn’t see eye to eye with Mick Glossop – it was almost a wall of sound thing he was going for and I wanted a more natural sound to my drums. Some of the records I was listening to at the time had a great natural sound to them, like The Correct Use Of Soap by Magazine. I just wanted the record to reflect how natural we were as a live band and that didn’t really happen. “Stuart was really very sober at the time, he was probably the healthiest one of the band. He spent most of his time on the phone to Sandra. Some days we would work 8 or 9 hours a day recording or rehearsing. I remember a series of dark dingy rehearsal rooms for hours to perfect the set for touring, until we had it really, really right. It wasn’t what I expected: there were times when I was ready to walk out and say “fuck it all”! But the end result was worth it. It enabled us to play with the power and the energy: we felt like nothing could stop us. The response we got from the performance was worth it we enjoyed the post-gig interaction with the fans. The worst thing of all was that the tour manager had a deal with the hotel chain, and every one of them was identical – I mean in every detail. Touring’s not what people think it is – it can be an endless slog. “We flew to Portugal to play one gig during the tour, in a Bullring near Lisbon, with the Tourists and 999. You’re halfway through hacking your way around Britain on a tour and then you’re in Portugal! It was amazing – we met all the bullfighting people and families – the people welcomed us in, it was just amazing, we were only there for a day. In the evening someone took us into the local pub which was more like someone’s house, and in the morning we went and picked oranges off the trees and had them for breakfast.” “The Venue was the very last gig I played with them. We’d demo’d Blood and Soil at NOMIS, in Shepherd’s Bush I think, in late 80, early 81. That and The Psalm, it was just those 2 . Blood and Soil, we did a lot of work on it: when we wrote it was a 4 person effort, the objective of the band was to arrange these ideas… Stuart and Richard were big enough to recognise that it wasn’t just Jobson/Adamson compositions any more. It was just a question of peoples’ nature. Stuart and I gravitated together and Richard and Russell went their way. Stuart and I would be thinking about home and family. My wife designed Richard’s “RJ” shirt [on the sleeve of Into the Valley] . She made it herself!” “I left before Stuart left. I wanted to be a musician not a pop star. I wanted to play music, not be a pawn in somebody’s game in the music industry. “