“Skid Row Children”
by Sky Sunlight Saxon and The Original Seeds
1987 song
"Skid Row Children" is the final song on the 1987 album Takes & Glories, an unholy Sky Saxon project that used decades-old songs plus new stuff to create a compilation like no other. "Skid Row Children" consists of a copy of the backing track (only) of "Paradise", a beautiful tune Sky had recorded the year before with SS-20. His original vocals removed, Sky free-forms new words, without much of a melody, over the top.
After the song starts on a promising note – the first couple of seconds are distorted as if the studio tape had a wrinkle or something in it – come Sky’s latest thoughts. His new lyrics concern girls selling matchsticks on street corners in London. Sort of; the rest of it is a maze of phrases that are hard to detangle from one another. There is some social commentary going on under the surface but it’s all too vague to be anything but odd. It seems to be about homeless children.
Sky’s druggy and arrythmic babbling, completely independent of the music he must have been hearing in his headphones when he recorded this, presages his astonishing version of "My Little Red Book" from his 2005 CD Transparency. "Skid Row Children" ends its album on the perfect note: the song’s reason for existing is unclear and the execution is suspect, but it has heart in its own directionless way.
