Skunk Anansie’s Skin by Geroge Frangoudes ©
Skin – whose real name is Deborah Ann Dyer – is the lead vocalist of the British rock band Skunk Anansie, which also features bassist Cass, guitarist Ace and drummer Mark Richardson.
They made the soundtrack of a generation ever since the late 1990s through an uninterrupted flow of powerful lyrics, iconic music videos and hits like Hedonism (Just Because You Feel Good), You’ll Follow Me Down and Secretly.
With a career spanning over three decades and more than 5 million records sold, Skunk Anansie became the next big thing especially in Italy right from the beginning: their 1999 album Post Orgasmic Chill was a three-time certified Platinum in the country with over 300,000 copies sold, their 2010 record Wonderlustre debuted at number one in the national album chart, and Skin also acted as a judge in the Italian edition of The X Factor in 2015.
Not only is Deborah – who was awarded an OBE by the British Monarchy and nominated the first-ever Chancellor of the Leeds Arts University – a talented singer and songwriter; she’s also a skilled electronic music DJ, a fashion icon and an advocate for the many social, cultural and political causes she supports.
Skin has been an activist all her life; she travelled to West Africa with Amnesty International in the 1990s, she publicly campaigned against genital mutilation, she worked in music therapy for disabled children, she was involved in The Baobab Foundation and The Medical Foundation that work with asylum seekers, child soldiers and torture victims, she met Nelson Mandela and performed live on stage with Luciano Pavarotti in 2000 in front of the Dalai Lama to support Tibet – and she has so much to say about it all.
Skunk Anansie’s Skin in 2011 by Razzmatazz Alterna 2 ©
Deborah, what achievements are you most proud of?
I guess what I’m more proud of is the fact that I managed to carve a career out of music, and I’m still doing it. I’m still doing it, so my definition of success really is the fact that my band is still successful. As an artist as well, I still get to spend all day doing music or talking about music, and I get to kind of run my own life. And that really is a thing of success because it’s a very difficult thing to do, especially when you’re a band from the 1990s. You know, having long longevity and being able to still do music full-time is a very successful thing, so that’s kind of my success definition.
Which one of your songs are you most attached to?
Oh gosh, I love a lot of them! But it changes, you know. I would say that today is Charlie Big Potato.
How do you feel when you hear one of your songs playing on the radio?
It is always an exciting thing. Always exciting. It never gets old.
Do you think a band could potentially never split? What does it take to stick together?
I think you have to be really good friends in the first place. Personality is everything. It’s all about finding your people, being in a band and loving each other and genuinely being friends. I think a lot of bands break up because they don’t really like each other, and they grow apart. They grow apart musically, and they grow apart as friends, and they’re not into each other’s lives and families, whereas I’m saying that we’re gonna be in each other’s lives whether we are in a band or not. And then yeah, the secret is really to continue to make new music that’s good. That’s the secret to always be looking at what you are doing to be fresh-looking from what you have done before.
In 2015, you joined the judging panel of the Italian version of The X Factor alongside Mika. How was the experience?
Oh my God, that was stressful! Trying to be charming on TV and all this. Mika is one of the friendliest guys on the planet, and the team was lovely, and they really looked after me. It was a really fun thing to do, but at the same time, it was stressful.
In 2000, you took part in Luciano Pavarotti at the Pavarotti & Friends for Cambodia and Tibet concert. Are there any memories from the event you would like to share, and do you think there will ever be a follow-up project regarding music for Tibet?
I don’t think so. I don’t know if they’re continuing to work in that way, and I don’t know what’s happening with that, but I think what we did back in the day was a wonderful thing to do. It was really lovely. Pavarotti’s wife, Nicoletta, invited me to their house in Modena, Italy, and Luciano Pavarotti cooked pasta con le vongole, pasta with clams, and he gave me some singing lessons. He taught me some tricks about breathing, about where to hold my voice. And then he cooked, and then he also introduced me to balsamic vinegar. Before that, I thought that vinegar was something you would put on salads, and then I found out that this 60-year-old was putting balsamic vinegar on strawberries, and we all tasted it, and it was an eye-opener. It opened my eyes to Italian cuisine. You know, I still have a bottle of balsamic vinegar in my house now.
What do you think of the current state of music?
I’m just very inspired by what’s going on musically at the moment [in 2021]; there’s so much wonderful new music, but there’s actually not enough time to listen to it all! At the same time, I think that’s because people had a lot of time during Covid, the quality is really, really, really high. And I’m talking about the quality of music and the quality of the artwork and the quality of the lyrics. I think that we’re living in a bit of a kind of musical boom right now, and I do think part of it is just because people have lived through Covid and took their time to just wait to be able to release music – whereas before you had all this rushing, you would go down by events. So yeah, I mean, I think that artistic music is really booming now, and there’s a lot of incredible music around. But I think that what’s really sad is not having that backed up and supported by governments. In the UK, I think the music industry really suffered in terms of music venues during and after Covid, in terms of people being able to go to gigs, and being able to go back to life in general. I feel that the British government did incredibly badly, almost as badly as it could have done, looking at Covid. And I think that we’ve lost a lot of music venues, we’ve lost a lot of awesome record shops during that time. We’ve lost a lot, so I think it’s going to take us a minute to build things back up again. But the music is there, you know, the music is there.
What are your views on Brexit?
Brexit is a disaster. Brexit is a fucking disaster. Right now [in 2021], we are beginning to see the effects of what we have created. I was speaking to my Italian tutor yesterday, and he’s leaving. He’s been in the UK for over 10 years, and he’s leaving because he can’t do the kind of work that he used to do and wants to do because there aren’t enough people coming in here. He can teach English too, but there are not enough Italians coming into the country, all of his students that were here and he was teaching to have all gone back to Italy, to Germany, to Spain and to other countries to try to make a living. And his boyfriend is the same, and that’s what happens: a lot of people are leaving the UK, especially migrants. But you know, people have this negativity around the words “migrants” and “immigrants”, but they’re just people from all classes, all different people who used to come to England bringing their incredible talents and work experience, and also their desire to work and to make money, but now they’re not coming to England anymore. And so if you now look at the statistics, there are not enough people to fill the jobs that a lot of industries have. What did they fucking think was going to happen? What the fuck did they think was going to happen?! Of course, because we all know that a lot of English people don’t want to do those jobs. And the thing is, I’m not just talking about picking fruit – which is a stupid example everybody likes to be talking about – I’m talking about doctors. And scientists. And surgeons. I mean, all the way through for all the classes, as I said, people wanting to teach other people languages. I’m talking about high-quality chefs – you know, you have to train for a long time to be able to be a good chef. I’m talking about the high-quality staff working in restaurants, hospitality, and the creative industries, now having to default on their weeks. It’s ridiculous. And I think Brexit was the worst thing to happen to England, and now you’ve seen that there are just jobs that English people do not want to do because they don’t want to work. All my Italian friends feel the same; they’re all leaving. Italians love coming in, and they want to be with their friends, but now they’re leaving because of the negativity and racism they’re having to experience living in this country because of the stupid English.
How was it to grow up in the London district of Brixton in the 1970s and 1980s??
I think Brixton is one of the most exciting places in London. Brixton has always been somewhere that has attracted lots of different cultures and lots of different people from all over the planet because of the Brixton Market. Brixton is a fantastic place to live. I think what’s really sad though, is that a lot of marketing people realised that in the 1990s, after all the Brixton riots [the 1981 Brixton riot, or Brixton uprising, was a series of clashes between mainly black youths and the Metropolitan Police in Brixton, London], they were like “Hold on, this place is great! Let’s try to chase it for ourselves”. Now, in the last 15 years, there was gentrification of Brixton, because when we were growing up there, and we were all black people, there was no infrastructure that was being invested in: they weren’t investing in houses, they weren’t investing in shops, they weren’t investing in anything, and Margaret Thatcher wasn’t interested in Brixton either.
Has it changed today?
The wonderful thing about Brixton was that it kept its diversity, but the sad thing now is that this diversity is kind of almost being wrestled away by marketing people and by the white wealthy class who are like “We want this for ourselves, we want their houses, we want the culture, we want the kind of diversity” – this is on the edge, but in reality, they really just want the property, and they are like “We want to put our shops in there because we don’t want to buy food at the Brixton Market”, so they don’t want that too. And it’s really sad to see what’s happened to Brixton, to see how people who have lived there for generations are being pushed out, and their houses have been taken and sold to people who don’t really care about all of that and just want a nice house that wouldn’t cost too much money in a nice area. Generally speaking, gentrification is horrible. I mean, the thing is that it is always going to happen, and you are always going to have people moving in and out, and that’s all wonderful. But once this only happens at the expense of the people who have lived there for centuries, or the people who have lived there for decades, then you know, it’s just the mentality of like “Yeah, we like what you have, but we want it for ourselves and we don’t want you to have it, so we’re going to make it impossible for you to buy houses here, and we’re going to make it impossible for you to run your own businesses here, and we’re going to make it easier for us and our friends to have businesses there”. I think some of the Brixton diversity is still there, but we’re really having to fight hard to keep it like that; it’s always a fight.
Secretly- music video by Skunk Anansie, 1999