Waiting for the Floods

The Armoury Show includes: John McGeoch, John Doyle, Evan Charles.
Scottish singer, writer, actor and would-be renaissance man Richard Jobson paid dearly for his artistic pretensions. He got the blame when his band, the Skids, spurned punk for poetic indulgence, and he looked even worse when ex-Skids guitarist Stuart Adamson found mainstream success with the soaring stadium rock of his new band, Big Country. Meanwhile, the spoken-word musings of Jobson's post- Skids solo career baffled at least as many fans as they attracted. But on the lone outing he recorded with the Armoury Show, Jobson's grandiosity finally found the proper setting. Joined by former Magazine members John McGeoch (guitar) and John Doyle (drums), as well as Skids bassist Russell Webb, Jobson created an album that, though it went largely unnoticed, outdid Big Country - and nearly every other "big-guitar" band of the time, save U2 - in anthemic power. While McGeoch doesn't offer an instantly identifiable guitar sound here, like the Edge's echoed riffs or the bagpipe chime of Adamson and Big Country's Bruce Watson, his versatile playing features a little of both, plus some of his own ideas, like the snaky, metallic riff to "Castles In Spain". And as the rhythm section booms away in the background, Jobson summons some of his best, most impassioned singing ever, using a Roger Daltrey-esque bellow to turn potentially pretentious efforts like "Kyrie" and the title track into rousing fist-wavers that could have delivered his romantic vision straight to the arenas. Unfortunately, it didn't come to that, andJobson's finest moment passed into the history books, with only a couple of 1987 singles as a postscript. But it should be remembered that on Waiting for the Floods, he finally made the big statement he'd always promised. ~ Dan LeRoy