Skunk Anansie: “There’s a difference between being comfortable and being boring.”

For nearly three decades, Skin has been the magnetic force behind the unmistakable sound of British rockers Skunk Anansie a band that not only defined an era in British rock but has continued to evolve in the face of changing times.

However, before the band headed into the latest chapter of their story, Skin and Skunk Anansie experienced uncertainty around their future. From facing personal losses to questioning their place in an oversaturated market, the band found themselves at a crossroads, navigating the uncertainty of their future while striving to maintain authenticity to their work.

For Skin, the process of making The Painful Truth was as much about rediscovering the reasons why they play music as it was about redefining their sound. The result is a record that is both undeniably Skunk Anansie but also one that pushes the boundaries and expectations of the quartet as a band and as people.

In our latest Cover Story, V13 sat down with vocalist Skin to talk about reigniting the fire in a band that has been together for three decades, what they learned throughout the experience of writing a new record and the journey of discovery they went on to find The Painful Truth…

Reading between the lines with the record and going back to the last tour you did, it felt like this was a record that may not have ever seen the light of day. It even felt like there was uncertainty about whether the band would continue. Is that the case?

“I’m going to be honest. Yeah. We lost our manager; she retired. She had to look after her mom. Her mom was one of our biggest supporters, and sadly, she passed. There’s been a lot of that in the last four or five years. I think that it’s good for a band to question their worth. It’s good for a band that has been around for a long time to question what they have to add to music. What do they have to add as people, as musicians and as a band to an already saturated market? Also, you’ve got to ask yourself, why am I doing this?

What’s the point of me? Why am I doing this? I think the only way you can find answers to all those questions is to jump off a cliff. Jump off a cliff into the abyss and see what happens. Just got to be brave. I think we’ve made albums when we didn’t feel so brave, and we’ve made albums where we’ve been braver. In this album, an insecurity and discomfort was going all the way through because we were doing something new and working in a completely different way. At the same time, there’s something exhilarating about that. It gets a little bit addictive.

So, when ‘An Artist Is An Artist’ was the first one that we did that, we said this is the benchmark for the rest of the album and what the rest of the album was to sound like. It felt fresh. It felt modern. There’s a lot of flavour to it. There’s a lot of content in terms of what subject matter is and how we’re saying it, and it resonates with us. When you’re making music, you can like something, but that’s not enough. You hope that other people like it too, and you don’t know until you put it out there. Is anyone else going to like it? I don’t know. My concern was is this was going to be too different for them because it, as you know, is a very different sounding record.

We’ve never made a record like this, so there’s a lot of insecurities, a lot of fear. I think what the overriding thing is, it’s good to be brave and there’s a lot of braveness around that and being in touch with what we want to do and how we want to do it and whether we like something rather than trying to follow something else, we were like, No, this is us. and that’s what we stick to. It ended up that we achieved our goal of doing.”

There’s a lot of new stuff on the new record that surprised me, but there’s a lot of stuff on there that has that Skunk Anansie attitude. Going back to what I said earlier though, you said it felt like you got comfortable by the end of the last tour as a band…

“We’ve been around as a band for 30 years. There’s a comfort which has to be there because we’re older and we have to feel secure, but you can get comfortable in your own space. I think that’s what we didn’t want to do. The only way to be fresh and to be modern and to be relevant is to try a bunch of new shit and that’s what we did on this album.

There’s a difference between being comfortable and being boring. I think that we should never be boring. I think you also have to get comfortable with vitriol. You have to get comfortable with people’s negativity. You do have to realise that it has to be water off a duck’s back because people dunno what they’re talking about half the time. If you suck in all of that negativity, then you won’t be able to. You’ll just have anxiety, and you won’t be able to get up in the morning, so there’s also that, and that comes with maturity. This was an uncomfortable but exhilarating album to make.”

V13 Cover Story – Issue 91 – Skunk Anansie

In terms of the title, The Painful Truth and the situations you’ve been through in your personal lives, it feels like a lot of honesty and soul searching went into writing the record. How did you approach that?

“It’s what you feel, and then finding a way to sum it up in the chorus. I think that I was That’s not good enough. That’s not good enough. I pushed myself to write great lyrics and to sum things up, and to be consistent with that on every song. I wanted that when I played it to people them to go, oh, that’s good. That was my benchmark. The boys would then say what they liked, so there was a definite standard that we had. When you’re talking about a subject, you’ve got to do two things.

You’ve got to get over how you feel about the subject that you are talking about so that someone can understand you, and then you’ve got to sum it up in a chorus that makes everyone go, Oh, that’s good. That’s my life. That’s what I’m going through. When you hear the title of The Painful Truth, the first thing that people will hopefully ask themselves is ‘What’s my painful truth? What do I not tell people because it’s too painful, but I’m going to tell it to myself?’ I think that hopefully people will just ask that question themselves.”

“There’s a difference between being comfortable and being boring. I think that we should never be boring. I think you also have to get comfortable with vitriol. You have to get comfortable with people’s negativity.”

You’ve talked about being uncomfortable and going from having conversations with each other as friends and bandmates to writing them down as songs. How did that progress?

“We talk a lot when we go to this place in Devon, which is literally in the middle of nowhere. We do clay pigeon shooting there because there is nothing else. The farmer is fun, and we have this chef, and she’s amazing. She just cooks great meals. Very simple, fantastic tasting food like a proper Sunday lunch, and we just talk a lot amongst ourselves, everyone’s catching up with what happened and whatever. Then someone will say something, and then we’ve got a song in there, or it will be my interpretation of what they’re going through.

Some songs you write, and they become true. ‘Animal’ was a song that was one of the first things we wrote in Cass’s studio in his backyard. It was something that we liked and but it ended up being completely different, apart from one section, from some songs that undulate for a long time. Some songs I just have a lot of them in my head, then suddenly two things click together.

When you’re sitting there with you just have to be honest about what you are going through. No one’s going to say anything to anyone else outside of the circle of the four of us. We’ll just talk about what hurt us and what didn’t hurt us, and what we feel about things, and that’s how I get inspired to write the lyrics. What everybody’s feeling, not just what I feel.”

Does that change your relationships with each other, sitting down and being honest with each other, especially given that you’ve known each other for years as friends and bandmates?

“Yeah, and life changes as well. People are asking me now, ‘What’s it like to be a mother?’ I’ve got a 3-year-old. Mark has a 10-month-old. Things… how you live your life… it changes, and we are not the same people. We are the same people, but we’re not the same people that started this band, so you do have to look at yourselves in terms of ‘How am I physically going to do this? How am I financially going to do this?’ Because bands we are our little worlds and no one supports us.

We have to put the stuff out there for people to support us, but we’ve always been very honest with each other. If the guys don’t like a song, they’re not going to like sitting there and record it. If they do, they’re not going to put their heart into it because they don’t like it. There’s no point trying to force people into a box that they don’t want to be in, but at the same time, I think it was important that they weren’t comfortable. For instance, Dave (Sitek, Producer) took their instruments away from them, and it made them look at playing different ways and doing different things, and that was genius.”

Where did that come from?

“It doesn’t matter which guitar you play. What matters is the sound and the way you are playing it. If you can translate emotion into your fingers, which is what guitarists do, then you can do that on any guitar. Also, it suits us because it meant that we didn’t have to carry guitars into America. It’s just about putting yourself out of your comfort zone and having the guitar, then you’re going to play this same sound with this guitar, which, if you’ve never played on before, you’re going to do things differently.”

Skunk Anansie ‘The Painful Truth’ album artwork

What was that like for the rest of the band?

“They hated it. I think they hated it because they like their instruments, but then they got it when the stuff was great. When they started doing great things, they understood that it worked and it was working.”

Would you say Dave was instrumental in shaping the sound of this record?

“Hundred per cent. We wanted that producer. He’s a songwriter. We wanted a producer who was going to develop the songs. We had rough sketches of the songs, and I did the demos in my studio, and then we wanted a producer who was going to deconstruct them and rebuild them. That’s what we wanted. So, yes, he was very instrumental in changing the sound and us developing new ideas, and we just did a hell of a lot of experimentation.

Hours of trying different things. He’s got all this wicked, crazy dubstep dub, not dubstep dub, instruments, and they were fun. Some of the things were good so when you play guitar into something, it comes out sounding like a fucking alien but it’s cool. The wonderful thing is it still sounds like a band. It still sounds like a guitar album.”

Was there anything where you thought, fuck, we hadn’t even thought of that?

“I would never put sax on anything. I fucking hate sax. We had sax on one thing. We had this dub echo thing that I just fucked around with and made weird noises. We did a lot of that. There was some production gear that Mark was using for drums in that Mark mastered, and he was doing drums and grooves on that. It was like there was a freedom in just going to somebody else’s studio and messing around with somebody else’s gear.”

I’d read that, when you approached him you didn’t expect him to take you on but he turned around to be a huge fan of the band. What was his vision of the band and where you should go with this record?

“The same band. He saw us as a legendary band, and he was quite excited. If you look at his discography, he doesn’t do bands. He doesn’t want to do bands because he thinks it’s too many people in the studio. We did two sessions only. We only did three weeks at separate occasions where we were all there. One of those weeks the band were in the hotel and it was just me and him because it’s a lot.

He had bad experiences working with bands. Like you get a guitarist who just wants to rule everything. He didn’t have really good experiences, and he tends not to do whole albums as well. I don’t know if we’re the first band apart from TV on the Radio, the only other band that he did the whole album. He did the whole album because otherwise the songs wouldn’t sound the same.”

“Things… how you live your life… it changes and we are not the same people. We are the same people, but we’re not the same people that started this band…”

Has it changed the way you approach writing songs as a person and as a band?

“What changed between the last album and this album was one of the things that annoyed me when we were writing is that we’d write a structure of a song and I’d have some lyrics, but we would leave the song at that bit, at that part where the song’s written structurally, all the parts are in there and there’s some lines, the words in the chorus, but the verses I’ve written and I have to go away and write those songs.

I realised that I hate doing that because to go in and write, go home and a week later bring the song and try and write the lyrics, it’s difficult because you’ve lost that burst of energy and excitement that you had when you first wrote the song. So, one of the main things I changed was that it’s not a song until all the lyrics are written. A finished song is music and words, and melodies finished. So if we were working on something and two hours pass and I haven’t thought of a chorus lyric or whatever, we just stop and move and do something else.

We stopped having a hundred different ideas for one album. We had about 20 songs this time, and they were all finished. Yes, it means that you have finished songs that you’re not going to use, but I’d rather have a finished song that was written in the moment than work out and try to get that vibe back and try to write that song afterwards. That was the main way that we changed. We only went to David with finished songs.”

When you heard the result, what was your first impression of what you created?

“I thought, Wow, that’s short. It’s 38 minutes long, and I got management to check how long legally a record was required to be because, when you make an album, you sign to a record label, there are certain requirements. It has to be a certain length. It has to be separate songs. It has to be minimum of a certain amount of songs and all this shit. I discovered it was 35 minutes.

My overriding feeling listening to the album was that it was a wild ride. That’s 10 great songs. It could have been 12 great songs, but there were two songs where I asked Why are we putting those two songs on the album? Let’s do 10 great songs. They’re all different. They all have something to say. Fell in Love is very different to the rest of the album. Loss is another song that’s very different to the album, but they all seem to work. It’s a cliche to say, but it’s a journey.”

You’ve talked in the past about imposter syndrome and anxiety. By David giving you freedom to experiment, did you feel like you’d ditched those shackles and you could just be you?

“I think most artists have imposter syndrome, and it never really goes away. The way I can describe it is that I find a lot of stuff within music very easy. I realise that some people find certain things very difficult, and it’s a lot harder, and I think when things come easy or sound easy, you feel like you almost don’t deserve them. So I think that there’s an impostor syndrome that goes all the way through your career, but the thing is ‘Oh, I don’t deserve to be here…’ Yes, you do.”

Was there anything on this record that you found challenging?

“We went through a lot of different versions until we got the right one, the version that we liked. Then it was just that nagging feeling of it’s not there yet, so then just basically just scrapped everything and started again. The four of us are in the studio, all playing at once. Thinking up a groove because all the studio things we’re doing something about it didn’t work.

Then one of them was cool, but did that make it a good song? ‘Animal’ was the longest one to make. We started writing that before COVID. I always thought that that song wasn’t going to go anywhere, and I wasn’t putting it down as something that we were going to get to, suddenly it all came together.”

Why do you think it fitted in with the rest of the record, considering it was an idea that started over five years ago?

“Doing it in the studio with Dave, everything had a cohesive sound. We played Dave the song and he thought it was really good. I was like, Oh, you think so?. I think that because it’d been around for so long, it began to smell like old fish or something. Some songs you just go off of them just because they’ve been around a long time, not because they’re not good.

That one had just been around forever, and we’d done it in so many different ways as a band that I just didn’t think it was going to get anywhere.”

“I think that there’s an imposter syndrome that goes all the way through your career, but the thing is ‘Oh, I don’t deserve to be here…’ Yes, you do.”

Do you think having Dave in and his different approach changed the way you looked at some songs?

“Singing songs through Dave’s eyes made me think ‘Oh yeah, you’re right that could be like this, or that could be like that,’ and then just trying it out. We had the verses, and we really liked the verses, and then we had the verse chord, the chorus chord. All of a sudden, you, everyone gets excited, and you’ve got a song.”

Fans have already started to hear the singles, but what do you think will surprise them most about the record?

“I think ‘Fell In Love With a Girl’ would be the very different song. That’s almost… It’s such a summer song to me. It’s quite different, actually, the original version I did in my studio, it’s so different. It’s a song that we recorded and finished with another producer, and then, with Dave, that was one of the ones that we were dancing around the studio, but thinking I’m not sure everybody’s going to get this track. It’s so far away from Skunk Anansie, it’s almost like an old soul tune or something, but I love it.”

When you announced your recent tour dates said you looked forward to playing live again. It got the fire back in your bellies. Yeah. Was there a point where you felt that happened? Was there a switch moment where it felt reignited?

“When the single came out. I didn’t know what to expect, and it’s quite nerve-wracking. Although everyone who had heard the track before then had loved it, you never know if people are lying to you because they don’t want to say something in your face. They don’t want to say it’s terrible to your face. You never really know if people have been honest, and then just seeing their reaction to that single, I’m thinking, ‘Ah, people genuinely like this song. They are genuinely excited about this song. So that’s fucking good, isn’t it?’”

Could you sum up what you’ve learned about yourself as a person and as a band through the whole process of writing and recording The Painful Truth?

“That is not a quick answer. I think we’ve learned to be open and to honour everybody’s impressions and thoughts about a song, and to just be even more open than we were before, because I think we’re a pretty open band. One of the things learned is that you never know till you try if something’s going to work until you just do that thing. I think this album has got that… now there’s no holding back.”