REVENGE OF THE SKUNKS

What did Hot Press say about us then the bastards! demands Skin.
My back s up against the wall. The door shut tight. Just a complementary bottle of Tequila, and four Skunk Anansies deep beneath the Leeds Town & Country.
I breathe deep, and quote from the review, phrases like flash-bastard fretwork , poodle-headed plank-spankers , piss-weak polemics . . .
Cass leans forward, dreads tumbling around his face, smiling with sinister menace. Let s go and knife im Now! Yeah!
Then we get to specifics. We re talking Stoosh, the second Skunk Anansie album. The first Paranoid And Sunburnt had a certain rough ClitRock charm, and certified gold, it shifted 200,000 UK units alone. Stoosh by comparison, according to Peter Murphy s Hot Press review, is nothing more magical than four musos licking their chops in an overpriced recording studio . . .
Oh, I see excuse me! protests Cass, coming as close as it s possible to get to vocalising italics. We re supposed to stay in the gutter where we come from. I get it!
So they can write Oh, nobody buys the album cos it s she , because the critics say it s not cool, adds Mark.
. . . Yeah, we re only really credible when we re suffering, when Look, you can see every one of their ribs. Look at that!
I feel it s safe to exhale round about the time the guffaws begin.
Actually, I quite like Stoosh. It s not perfect. But by nature Skunk Anansie are spiky, combative, unpredictable and adventurous. With those kind of plusses I can take a little imperfection. The soundcheck comes at a playful if it ain t hurting, it ain t working volume. Between the walls of noise guitarist Ace plaintively quips, Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps please in twisted tribute to the time-lost Splodgenessabounds. History said Henry Ford, is Punk (almost).
They prowl through most of tonight s scheduled set, then throw in some extras. From the storming Aggro-Rock of Yes, It s Fucking Political through the last Top Twenty hit, All I Want , to the current one Twisted (Everyday Hurts) . There s also the twiddly delicacy of Infidelity , with the seductive absurdity of a holographically simulated String Quartet hovering somewhere in Cyberspace above us, and Headonism which they don t actually do live yet, ( We re just warming that one up. Just practising. Getting it ready ). Quizzed elsewhere about its hidden lyrical meaning Cass attributes it to oral sex as in head on is mmmm! . Political! You could say that, that is to serious political analysis what Paul Gascoigne is to marriage guidance (more of which later), but call it divine inspiration, strategic sound-balancing, or just plain luck, but here at Leeds butts get righteously kicked and knickers get well-twisted.
Skin s a charismatic and unlikely sex symbol. She contorts each song into a documentary of her life and hormones, as though she s assumed the curious responsibility of living through the extremes of our time, to record exactly how they ache. Amiable bassist Cass, in yellow-on-black Piranha T-shirt and drummer Mark in baseball cap and facial metal, give her crazed kookerama a metallic and richly narcotic undertow. And occasionally such theorems of insolence and electricity can achieve brilliance together.
Theirs is an Indie Houdini genre-straddling sound. For example, on the ITV Chart Show their videos figure confusingly in the upper regions of both the Rock and the Indie Top Tens. That s because we re on an Indie label (One Little Indian), but we re a rock band, explains Cass patiently, so that forces us into both situations.
But we write pop songs, adds Skin brightly. So we get on Top Of The Pops too. Hooray! But that could be our saving grace. Because once you fit within a category then it s very easy to dismiss that category, isn t it? That happens with any category, from Heavy Metal to Britpop.
The pop star thing or the rock thing or whatever you want to call it just comes along with it. My expectations of being in a band were just to travel a lot, and have fun. Be very strong about what we wanted to say. As a band. And individually to have complete freedom. To say what you want to say without having someone telling you what to do. And that s exactly what we re doing. Of course, whatever you do, whatever you enjoy there s always a downside to it, y know. But for us the downsides are minimal.
Ace: It s as good as you want it to be.
Mark: And the good far outweighs the bad.
Cass: But whatever way you look at it, it s a charmed existence. People don t always see it as hard work. But it is a lot of hard work. Not that we re averse to hard work. We like hard work.
You ve got plenty of time to rest when you re 65, says Mark in a quavery old man voice.
Stoosh is an album of sonic sleaze that enters and inhabits madness, overloaded with toad-licking weirdness to the point of collapsing under the strain. But Skunk Anansie are a band who remember Splodgenessabounds. Like Henry Ford, punk is their history. And there s a strong vein of agit-prop punk-by-numbers mischievousness underlying it all. Fitting, therefore, that they should tour Australia supporting the reanimated Sex Pistols.
The Pistols tour? It was pretty good actually, admits Cass. We were touring with a band three-quarters cool, and one-quarter cunt.
Which Pistol is the Neurotic Outsider?
Use your imagination. Haw-haw!
But was the Pistols resurrection worthwhile? And did you get to hang out with the three loveable spike-heads?
Well, a few of them. Just y know, very light. Nothing too deep. And for me, it s just all part of the music industry. If you re gonna pay to see a gig, there s a whole lot of shite out there. So you may as well pay your money to see the Pistols. The truth of the matter is, twenty years on, you listen to the band and they still sound fresh. Either they were way ahead of their time, or the world s stood still for the past twenty years.
Probably the latter, mutters Ace beneath the peak of his baseball cap.
But they re still kicking. They re still a good band. And y know, for all their shortcomings, Johnny Lydon is extremely clever, and very funny what can you do? Cass, easy and relaxed, loosens up further. Australia, on the other hand, is a lovely place. Apart from Adelaide. If you were going to give the world an enema, you d insert it in Adelaide. Haw-haw, haw-haw.
Stoosh ends in loops of manic laughter.
If men come from Mars (as novelist John Gray claims they do), and women come from Venus, then Skin probably comes from Saturn, via Brixton.
Cocooned here in the Virtual Reality oddness of this hall we can construct whatever illusion we want. She s cat-walk skinny. Pectorally challenged. Allegedly bi-sexual. And she wears tight leather trousers. She has a woollen hat pulled so low that the focus is not so much the confrontationally polished smoothness of her cranium, as the finely defined features of her face. In fact, she s deceptively attractive up close.
She talks tight, fast and unexpectedly low.
Track one is a four-way band composition called Yes, It s Fucking Political . A noses-front, soak-up-the-pressure, then-apply-the-killer-instinct howl of snot and visceral volume. Peter Murphy complains of its gratuitous over-use of the F-word , but then excuse me the song is dealing with the infinitely greater obscenities of political injustice. So what s the big deal about a few strategic expletives? And for a moment, listening here, now, its power is so liberating that it s almost like the new millennium has arrived three years early.
Ivan, the Skunk s no-nonsense tour manager is on the mobile. Chumbawamba are on the other end. They re on the same record label, and they want eight complementary passes for the gig. He can only spare four. Tonight, the first date on the new tour, is already sold out. They haggle.
In the Leeds drizzle outside the Club a cluster of band-stalkers yell loudly over the PA fade for Skin. She can t resist stalking across the hall s vast emptiness to talk to them, clasp hands and sign the various things they thrust at her. There s an Amnesty International stand here too. She pauses to read the neat stacks of atrocity leaflets and signs posters of the band in support of their cause.
Of course it s fucking political. Everything s political. But Stoosh is a more varied album than perhaps you d expect, from Glorious Pop Song (which is), through the Bow-Wow-Wow percussion break of Milk Is My Sugar to Infidelity with its string arrangements by Marty (Pellow) McCarrick of Therapy? (who, incidentally, do a fine Vicar In A Tutu on the current The Smiths Is Dead compilation). There s more to Skunk Anansie than just full-on stuff.
It would probably get a bit linear after a while doing it just that way, explains Cass.
We ve always done Charity in the set anyway, which is kinda quite full-on, but it s a quite mellow, slow thing too, adds Skin.
That s our real ace, grins Cass. The potential of Skunk Anansie.
We do get lots and lots of negative response because of the politics in our music, and because of that first song on the album ( Yes, It s Fucking Political ), says Skin. But I wouldn t say that, as a band, we re that political. There are many many more bands around who are more overtly political than we are. But they don t have a front-person that looks like me. Some people have a problem getting around that.
Cass: They assume that the make-up of the band has more of a political inclination than it has. D y know? Even if we re not singing something political, or even if we re not saying anything political. It s just the way that the band s made up. It has political ramifications.
Skin: But we re just four people who are on the same vibe. Into music. We didn t set out to look like . . . oh, we ve got to have a black person and a white person and . . .
Cass: Yeah, yeah, do you know anyone with a Mohican? We need a Mohican in the band!
I mean, if we d operated from that angle we d have a Chinese person in the band too. We would.
Or we d call ourselves Chessboard. Alternating black and white, y know, haw-haw haw-haw.
But let s get to specifics, there s something here I can t get a line on. There s a song on Stoosh called She s My Heroine ( for her lies, she s calling/she s crawling, smashed you in the face/up against the wall/still your secret s safe ). Is that about anyone I should know?
It s about a situation. A personal situation. Skin comes over suddenly reticent. There s nothing political in the song whatever. It s like on the first album there were lots of songs that are not political. It s just a song about a person who . . . y know, who you crave for. That craving can also destroy.
It s about Wonderwoman, in it? suggests Ace.
That s the double-edged sword song, adds Cass mysteriously. The one that says She s my heroine because she s my saviour or she s my downfall . That s the mark of a good song anyway, because it has that ambiguity to it. It can relate to a million-or-one different kinds of situations. It doesn t have to be read as happening in the same situation that it was written about. You can take it out of context and it still makes sense. Genius I think they call it!
I persevere. But is it a particular person?
Yes, from Ace. But we re not gonna tell you who.
Well . . . OK, concedes Cass grudgingly. It s about Virginia Bottomley, OK?
I attempt to ape the spirit of the jest in the interests of interview-continuity. So do Virginia Bottomley s policies influence any of the other tracks Pickin On Me , for example, the semi-acoustic school bully song which Skin wrote with Len Arran? There s various current affairs angles on that about disruptive pupils, Conservative party moral panics, and the possible reintroduction of corporal punishment to discipline unruly youth.
No. We won t talk about Virginia Bottomley, sulks Skin.
It was a joke! stresses Cass, and now you re killin it. Are you Swedish?
So Skin, were you a disruptive pupil?
I was for a couple of years. I wasn t a bully or anything, just the person who disrupted the class. But that didn t really last a long amount of time. I just did that and then I kind-of knuckled down to my studies and forgot about all that rubbish. The song is about a boy I was at school with who was the kind of person who got pleasure out of treating all the other little kids badly. I had lots of fights with him, taking up other people s causes. And it was just like looking ahead ten years from that; he s going to be a politician, or a policeman, or he ll join the army or something. It s that kind of mentality. And it s just about where that kind of mentality comes from.
It s a theme that in some ways shocks back to the very first Skunk Anansie controversy, when Radio One picked up on My Little Swastika , about the way racists indoctrinate children ( who put the little baby Swastika on the wall?/it s not very high/couldn t be more than four years old ).
The other context is that if you see other kids picking on someone and you don t help them out, when that person gets you in their power they re going to be beating on you next, Skin reflects. It happens all the time they picked on people with Clause 28, so later on we had the Criminal Justice Act, right? We had all this information about Clause 28 how it was picking on Gay Minority groups, but lots of people didn t get behind that situation. So then they thought they could just pick on youth in general. And the Criminal Justice Act came along. It s like yeah, they re able to pick on you now because earlier you didn t support someone else. But if you just stand on stage and shout that kind of clichi at people, it doesn t work. We won t do that. Because we don t like that being done to us. We won t listen. It s just like chanting Black And White Unite it s like, yeah, but what does that actually mean? How are you going to achieve it . . .?
It s more real to say blacks and whites come together, suggests Mark, putting the letch into intellectual. Haw-haw haw-haw.
Rock n roll is the nation s favourite blood-sport....
Skunk Anansie do more than most to unsettle its complacency. The first album includes funk-metal assaults like Blood And Guts ( it takes blood and guts to be this cool/but I m still just a clichi), Intellectualise My Blackness and Nigga Rage , which Skin aims at the Anglo-Saxon Old Boys Network whose worst nightmare is an intellectual nigger. To those who accuse Skunk Anansie of being to serious political analysis what Paul Gascoigne is to marriage guidance, it s this kind of material that says Yes, It s Fucking Political . And in this light, do journalistic attacks like the Hot Press accusations of Stratocaster circle-jerks and irritating ads for Anadin-Extra have an effect?
Erm, no, not really, says Skin. When we did this album we were very kind-of happy about it. We think it s a brilliant album know. But we knew that after a while people were going to discredit it, because that s what happened with our first album. It s like, yeah, yeah, it s really a great record , but then after a while everyone kinda goes ah, but it s not that great . But then it eventually reaches a yet further stage of oh shit, it s really great after all .
That s one of the reasons why we can t take the press too seriously. Because if you believe, or if you let them run your life, or if you think you re as bad as the press sometimes say you are, you won t last very long. The press are very fickle. And it s like, we just go in and out of fashion. When we did our first album we tried to make it sound the best we could at the time. But we made lots and lots of mistakes, so it cost more. This album was actually cheaper to make, which just goes to show that what looks and sounds expensive can be deceiving, and we just love it a lot. I mean, you just learn how to get better sounds in the right way. We know more what we re doing now.
The truth of the matter, adds Cass, is you don t want to sound like greenhorn novices, or sound like you re at the beginning stage of your career all your life. That s rubbish. Because then you won t progress. Also, you re being dishonest really. It s that kind-of make it sound shit so the critics will like it thing, isn t it? It s good if people don t expect us to do the same album over again. Because we haven t. Perhaps it s that that s riled some other people up the wrong way. But tough . . . we prefer to do it that way.
You can definitely look at Skunk Anansie as a band that are kinda shaking things up quite a bit. We invoke very strong reactions. We re not a band that just plods along selling a few records here and a few records there, always nice and happy and smiley. We definitely aim to shake things up a bit, and we re definitely a band that s gonna be more in your face . . .
I go for one more shot. Track ten, Milk Is My Sugar they shall convert me/my favourite sin/meat, make it snappy/snap back and thigh/good work for Pellow! Whatever the hell is that about?
What s it about? muss Cass agreeably. It s about breakfast. What did you think it was about?
There s a very fine left-wing poet called Adrian Mitchell who wrote a powerful pacifist poem called Peace Is My Milk .
And you thought there was a tenuous connection? Naw. Haw-haw haw-haw.
Way off, guffaws Ace.
It s filthy, leers Mark. It s a filthy song that one. Disgusting. Dirty. Sleazy. Filthy.
Why disgusting, dirty, sleazy and filthy ? protests Cass in mock outrage. It s about sex. It s about SEX. I don t see the connection of sex with disgusting, dirty, sleazy and filthy .
Lee, from the record company, decides to join in the debate. It s saying things about him, though, isn t it?
Ah, so it s a subconscious thing, I get it, nods Cass knowledgeably. So what you re saying is that to you, sex is disgusting, dirty, sleazy and filthy?
Yes. If you do it properly. Yeah.
The interview fades out in endless loops of manic laughter. n
Skunk Anansie play the SFX on Saturday 30th November.