Skunk Anansie: ‘Every black woman with an opinion is an “angry black woman” – that is how they are portrayed’

On a crisp January morning in 1995, Skunk Anansie singer Skin and her three bandmates climbed aboard an NME-branded bus and set off towards their waiting destiny. They were one of four groups selected for the inaugural NME “Brats Bus Tour”. The idea was that they would travel the country, playing gigs and living out their – or at least the NME’s – most outrageous rock’n’roll fantasies. Hotel rooms would be upended, fire extinguishers set off. A sprinkling of Oasis-style fisticuffs wouldn’t go amiss either, it was implied.

“You know you’re being pushed in a situation of being a naughty rock star,” remembers Skin, a quarter century later. “Trashing the place, doing stuff with fire extinguishers. All to create column inches.”

Marion, 60 Ft Dolls and Veruca Salt were their companions on this grand lap of the British indie-circuit. All were whiter than milk bottles during Winter Solstice and, the “aloof” Veruca Salt aside, happy to participate in the NME’s little pantomime. But as a young black woman Skin – born Deborah Anne Dyer – understood that for her the rules were different. Those bands certainly hadn’t grow up in Brixton to Jamaican parents.

The multi-racial band included bassist Richard “Cass” Lewis, who was also black, alongside Skin, guitarist Martin “Ace” Kent and drummer Robbie France (later replaced by Mark Richardson).

“We just knew we were not the kind of band that could get away with it. This group of people does something bad and everyone thinks it’s cool. This other group does something and everything thinks it’s disgusting. You talk about gangs in England. The Krays are ‘cool’. If you talk about black guys, everyone thinks about knife crime.”

“If I broke a window I would be arrested and thrown in prison,” she points out. “It would have been very naive of us to think we’d get the same treatment [as the other musicians on the tour].”

Zany japes ensued and fire extinguishers were indeed set off in corridors. Yet true to their vow, Skunk Anansie stayed clear of mischief. They saved their fireworks for the stage as they performed songs that would form the backbone of their debut album, Paranoid & Sunburnt, which marks its 25th anniversary this week.

One of the highlights of their set was “Selling Jesus”. The track was an onslaught built on an avalanche of grunge guitars. Skin, wiry and fierce, stood at the centre of the maelstrom, warning of the emerging symbiosis in the United States between evangelical Christianity and right-wing politics. “They want your soul and your money your blood and your votes,” she howled. “They're selling Jesus again.”

“Selling Jesus” was released as a single that March. It didn’t gain much traction on radio. The music press seemed flummoxed too. But, on the back of their blitzing live sets, it sold well and marked Skunk Anansie as newcomers to watch. And then, that May, Björk, their label-mate at One Little Indian (now called One Little Independent Records in response to the BLM movement), invited Skin and company to join her on Top of the Pops, for a performance of her latest hit, “Army of Me”.

“Our duet provoked a barrage of complaints,” writes Skin in her moving and gripping new memoir, It Takes Blood and Guts, “Parents [were] phoning the BBC to complain that I had scared their children.”

As a black lesbian with a shaved head, Skin was like nothing British rock had ever seen before. Around this time, reviews began to describe her as “menacing”, “furious” and so forth. The trope of the “angry black woman” had arrived.

“Mel B, Grace Jones… every black woman that has an opinion is an angry black woman,” she says. “Black women are aware from birth that the angry thing is how they are portrayed. They are either portrayed as sexually ravenous or angry and shouting. But I saw those things as not my problem. If someone is being racist or viewing you through stereotypical eyes, it’s because they don’t know how to handle [you]. I’m not carrying your weight for you. My shoulders are light.”

Paranoid & Sunburnt was a pummelling bolt of hard rock. Arriving at the height of Britpop it went off like a depth charge in a lily pond, shifting more than a million units in the process and peaking at eight in the charts. As the song titles – “Intellectualise My Blackness”, “Little Baby Swastikkka”, the aforementioned “Selling Jesus” – underscored, it was also unabashedly political. That was another break from convention at a time when bands were singing about fish and chips and gin and tonics.

“I was born and bred in Brixton,” says Skin. “I literally had riots outside my door where I grew up. My experience was that all of this stuff was happening to us outside my front door in our community and our community was blasted all over the television. ‘Why are you political?’ Because I’m from f***ing Brixton.”

The case can be made that Skunk Anansie – partially named for West African trickster god “Anansi” – have been slightly erased from history. They were the first black-fronted British band to headline Glastonbury. Skin was obliged to remind people of this fact when, ahead of the 2019 festival, Stormzy tweeted: “I am the first black British artist to headline Glastonbury.”

She pointed out his error with a tweet of her own: “Sorry Stormzy but we beat you to it in 1999.” Her tone was playful and Stormzy apologised. Nonetheless there was an attempt to portray the exchange as a “beef” between two successful black British performers.

“There is an element of the press that wants to destroy Stormzy,” says Skin. “Here you have this blacker than black guy, who is doing blacker than black music. And he’s f***ing huge. He’s successful. We do have this thing in England where anyone who is successful, they tear them down. They saw a chance of me being the stick to beat him down. I tweeted the thing and then I didn’t really think about it. It was tongue in cheek. It was positive. Some people in the press would be really happy to have me slag him off.”

Skunk Anansie were regarded in the 1990s as the antithesis of Britpop. The reality was more nuanced. Splash, the King’s Cross venue Ace helped run before he and Skin formed the band in 1994, was, for instance, a regular stomping ground for Oasis and Suede (Oasis played their first London show there). But they also understood Britpop could never accept people like them.

“Britpop was all about the guy in with the stripy T-shirt and the Adidas trainers hanging out at the Good Mixer pub in Camden,” says Ace. “I liked a lot of those bands: Oasis were great. But we were not that. We represented what was really going on in London, which was much more multicultural. With a lot of Britpop bands, you’d look up at the stage and see four white boys with the same haircut and the audience wasn’t like that at all.

“We weren’t part of Britpop at all and were kind of told that actually,” says Skin. “All these bands were being invited to do TV shows. We were very successful. But they never asked us to do those shows. We weren’t part of the scene basically. It was kind of annoying because Britpop was such a big thing and as a new band you wanted to be involved. And then after a couple of years, as it became more and more bloated, we were like, ‘actually it’s good we’re not part of that’.”

Skin, like Ace, enjoyed aspects of Britpop. The love was not always reciprocated, she noted. “You can’t fault Oasis,” says Skin. “I wasn't the biggest Blur fan. They didn’t like us, we didn’t like them. Damon [Albarn] hates me. I don’t know why. The rest of the band I get on with. Whenever I met Damon he would always be like I was something he stepped in.”

But a quarter of a century on, Skunk Anansie are unbowed and, until the pandemic, still selling out venues from Brighton to Budapest. They feel, moreover, that the world has in some ways caught up with their music and its message.

“‘Little Baby Swastikkka’ [about the rise of the far right]… you could have written that yesterday,” says Ace. “Racism has been around so long, it doesn’t date. You could be talking 25, 50 years ago. Or yesterday. It’s the same problem. That’s why we are still relevant.”

It Takes Blood and Guts by Skin and Lucy O’Brien is published today