Talk:Into the Valley

Valleyfield
It's my understanding that the song is about young lads (from Dunfermline, I imagine) going to (High) Valleyfield (near Kincardine) for a drink and a fight - Valleyfield being particularly rough, even for babies-on-toast Fife. I can't find much in the way of decent sources to corroborate this (bar this, which I wouldn't cite), and the lyrics are unintelligible gobshite. Worse, we don't seem to have an article either about Valleyfield or its two disjoint parts (High and Low Valleyfield). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 22:13, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

If anything it would be about the young lads from Oakley(another village close by) which has always had a very strong and quite often vicious rivalry with High Valleyfield, rather than Dunfermline. Young lads from Dunfermline wouldn't have dared set foot in Valleyfield during the 70's and 80's. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.177.116.201 (talk) 19:10, 15 October 2009 (UTC)


 * The lyrics are notorious. There was an advert that featured them, with the joke being that no one could understand them. I wish I could corroborate that. I remember it. --MacRusgail 20:12, 24 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Dave Batchelor laid the vocal tracks lower in the mix as a trick/device to encourage the listener to turn it up – no problem there. Possibly you are referring to the Maxell cassette tapes advert from early 1990s  → friedfish 09:38, 25 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the link, I am including it, it's good enough. The song seems to have references to soldiers and war, common enough in Skids songs, but the rest of it is pretty unintelligible. --MacRusgail 15:57, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Jobson interview
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/review.cfm?id=538222007

Jobson says:

"I think the punk establishment respected us because we weren't middle-class art college types, we were the real deal. We came from rough areas. We had 'no future'. My dad was a miner, my mum worked in the docks. If you didn't follow in either of their footsteps, the only other option for a Fifer was the army.

"That's what I wrote 'Into The Valley' about - pals who listened to the recruitment officer telling them they'd become engineers only to find themselves on the Falls Road six weeks later in a cauldron of hate."

"Into the valley/ Betrothed and divine," sang Jobson. Pretentious, tu? "Only the pretensions of youth," he says. "I've always loved words, how they collide with each other." Trisbray 16:19, 7 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Into the valley, betrothed and divine,
 * Realisations no virtue, but who can define,
 * Why soldier's go marching, their masses align,
 * This disease is catching, from victory to stone,
 * Ahoy!, ahoy!, land sea and sky,
 * Ahoy!, ahoy, boy man and soldier,
 * Ahoy!, ahoy!, deceived and then puctured (sic),
 * Ahoy!, ahoy!, long may they die!


 * Unintelligible? - rubbish! - and that's from memory, I haven't listened to the Scared to Dance album since around 1982.