SB Origin Stories: Paul McDougall
We're very excited to have our first fan submitted Skinner Brothers origin story here on Bad Brains!

From the very beginning, during the planning stages, we've always wanted this site to include the community as much as possible. So it gives me great pleasure to announce that we have our very first fan submitted SB origin story! We'd love to make this a regular series, so if you'd like to submit your own, see the details at the bottom of this post.
Paul is a very well loved member of the SB Family FB group, and the story of how he first came across The Skinner Brothers is unusual, to say the least. Not to mention heroic and powerful.
A big thank you to Paul for allowing us to share this with everyone!

My Skinner Brothers origin story
I was driving back up to Edinburgh from Leeds on this day in 2023 as I'd been down to see The Pigeon Detectives.
I witnessed an awful tragedy where a huge lorry overturned and drove off the road, down a hill and ended up upside down with the cabin crushed. I pulled over and ran down the embankment to try and see if I could help. Myself and 3 other men tried to get the driver out but couldn't and after half an hour we realised the lorry was too far gone. The police, ambulance and fire service came and took over and I sat in my car stunned as the realisation came over me that the driver had died.
I drove off on the empty motorway slowly...trying to keep it together.
The Pigeon Detectives playlist had just finished playing on my Spotify.
Spotify is great at giving you music it thinks you will like and the next band that came on was The Skinner Brothers and I hadn't listened to them before. The first song was Death From Above (which considering the tragedy was ironic). That song and every other Skinner Brothers song that followed accompanied me all the way home and to be honest, helped me and I was grateful when I got home as I didn't think I was going to be able to drive home.
Since that day I've listened to them every day, I've seen them live multiple times in multiple cities, met them, bought cds, vinyl and t shirts, kept in touch with them and going to see them again in November for the 5th time!




It's not often something positive comes from tragedy, however I'm glad that The Skinner Brothers came into my life because it's brought me a wealth of new music from them and other bands with a healthy dose of much needed dopamine alongside a community on Facebook that's always positive.
Thank you Zachary Charles Skinner / The Skinner Brothers! 🖤
All credit for this post and the images within belongs to Paul McDougall.
If you have your own story of how you first came across The Skinner Brothers and would like to share it with us, we'd love to hear it! Please take a look at our submissions page and get in contact using the button below.
We don't have a comments system enabled, mostly because we respect your privacy and we also don't want to potentially have to act as moderators on this site. But we'd still love you to talk to us! If you have any feedback on this post that you'd like to send us, or you simply want to say hello, click the button below!
If you appreciate this wonderful band, you can do a lot to help support The Skinner Brothers by buying some tour tickets, merch, or even buying a digital copy of the music on Bandcamp. Every bit of support goes a long way to help ensure we'll have lots more music to look forward to!