Into the Valley
"Into the Valley" is a song by Scottish punk rock band Skids, released in 1979 as the second single from their debut album Scared to Dance. It is their best known song, appearing on a number of punk rock and Scottish music compilation albums. It reached number 10 on the UK Singles Chart for the week ending 24 March 1979. It was written by Richard Jobson and Stuart Adamson.
Background
The song's lyrics are notoriously unintelligible owing to Jobson's diction. This has been sent up in a television advertisement for Maxell audio cassettes which features printed "translations" of the words. The chorus, often misquoted, is actually "Ahoy! Ahoy! Land, sea and sky".In an interview for Uncut magazine from July 2017, Jobson has said that the lyrics were originally from a poem he wrote aged 16, inspired by Alfred Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade. He reframed his earlier words to reflect his concerns about the recruitment of Scottish youths into the army and more specifically about a friend who had been killed whilst on a tour of duty in Northern Ireland.