The Skids front-runner finds new found relevance to their music as the band reunite for Fifer Festival.

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Punk rocker turned film director Richard Jobson is preparing to reunite with The Skids as his home county comes together to celebrate his career in the creative industries.

The Fifer Festival, a five day event beginning on March 2, will feature Jobson’s work as a film director, poet, TV presenter and of course, the venture that made his name, The Skids.

The gig, which is already a sell-out, proved to the slightly hesitant Jobson that demand for the punk, lyrically driven music was still present today.

Speaking of this realisation, he said: “When I was invited to Abbey Road studios where U2 and Greenday did a cover version of The Saints are Coming, I was sitting in the company of the two biggest rock and roll bands in the world and they were doing a cover version of a song I wrote in my bedroom in Dunfermline when I was 17, I suddenly thought ‘these songs aren’t dead yet’.

“So I think that is another reason to visit them again, they feel pertinent again, feel like they have got a relevance right at this moment and time when there is so many quite serious things going on out there.”

Songs such as The Saints Are Coming, Working for the Yankee Dollar and Into The Valley were based on the experiences Jobson observed as a young teenager when those of a similar age to him began joining up to the army to face the front-line of war.

After establishing himself as a reputable director within the film world with productions such as 16 Years of Alcohol and New Town Killers, Jobson returns to the issue of young soldiers in his next film Into the Valley.

“I want to tell the story of what it is like to be a young Scottish guy just now who can’t get a job in difficult times and then something comes along, a choice - join the British Army.

“These kids want to have a bit of dignity, a sense that they are not just another statistics so they do join up and within 16 weeks they are in Helmand Province which is just a hell hole, it is a terrible situation they find themselves in.

He added: “It is not an easy story but is something I feel really passionate about.”

It seems passion is something this Fife icon has in abundance after having just accomplished a film recently aired at the Glasgow Film Festival with Emma Thompson about sex trafficking called The Journey…it seems there is just no stopping this multi-talented Scot!

“I have had an amazing life,” he said. “It has been an amazing journey and I feel as enthusiastic about life now when I am 50 this year than when I was 16 with the Skids and strapped on that guitar.”