Lucy OBrien - Skin: It Takes Blood and Guts

For Lady forever.

To Mum, theres lots of swearing, please read with earplugs.

This is not a woeful tale of past loves lost and won, but a book about the trials and tribulations of how a skinny black girl from Brixton grew up to shake the world of rock. How the fuck did I do that?

As a child I always felt weird inside, like something was out of place. Little did I know that it was me who needed to find her place.

This book is about the fits and starts, wrong turns and giant mistakes, along with the hilarious and magical moments that it took to get to the top of the rock tree.

Please pull up a chair, pour yourself a glass of something nice and enjoy my tales of the truly unexpected.

I first met Skin in 1995, when I was a young music writer sent to Los Angeles by Vox magazine to interview Skunk Anansie on the set of Kathryn Bigelows sci-fi thriller Strange Days. I was excited to meet the band. There had been a lot of interest in the press this young incendiary female lead singer with a quirky punk style. Over four days I got to know her, going from a Rage Against The Machine gig to clubbing at the Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard, to the Strange Days film set, and back home. We stayed in touch, and ever since then she has been a strong and constant friend. As well as being an insightful, inspirational speaker, she is a great listener. I always remember her, at the peak of her solo success in the early 2000s, giving me a lift 60 miles home on the tour bus after a gig in Oxford, and coming in at 3am to eat Marmite on toast. I was a frazzled new mother having a rare night off and, despite her insane schedule, Skin took the time to see me home.

Over twenty-five years I have witnessed her highest points headlining Glastonbury, riding a white stallion into the Teatro La Fenice opera house in Venice, performing an emotional set at Cadogan Hall for the An Acoustic Skunk Anansie: Live in London album and her most challenging times. The soul-searching when Skunk Anansie split for a while, the endless touring and its personal toll on her relationships and despite selling millions of albums, modelling for fashion designers and touring worldwide the long fight to be recognised in her field.

Along with singers like Annie Lennox, Dusty Springfield and Kate Bush, Skin is one of our great British female artists. Skin takes what is happening in her life rage, emotional pain or joy and uses it as fuel for how she creates. That is why she touches people. As her close friend, the dancer/choreographer Richelle Donigan, says, Its not just entertainment. When you are in a concert with Skin, if you allow it, you are being transformed. You walk out a different person from when you walked in. Skin gives everything she lifts you up.

Skin is known not only as a fiercely talented vocalist, but also for her involvement in fashion, her charity work doing music therapy with young asylum seekers and campaigning against female genital mutilation, and as a socially conscious icon at the forefront of LGBTQ+ visibility.

Her importance as a cultural force was recognised at 2018s Women in Music Awards hosted by Music Week, who defined Skin as one of the most iconic and unforgettable stars of her generation, and handed her the Inspirational Artist award. I have written extensively on female artists, publishing biographies of Dusty Springfield and Madonna, and the book She Bop, the definitive history of women in popular music. In my work I have always foregrounded the female voice, asking questions that dont often get asked, letting women speak deeply about their personal experience. Many stories of the 1990s place Britpop at the centre a British music scene that was very white and male but Skins experience was very different, and is an alternative narrative of that decade. Emerging from a poor childhood in a Brixton marred by riots to becoming a huge rock icon, her story is extraordinary. I wanted to help her tell it, and for her to gain the recognition she fully deserves.

This memoir has been co-created from hours of interview time, not just with Skin but also close friends and members of her family.

This is her story.

Lucy OBrien

London, 2020

But I dont want your charity

Twisting me round

I dont want your charity

Keeping me down

Charity

No matter how far I travel, Im always a Brixton girl. I can be drinking mezcal while listening to Bob Marley in Mexico, or eating a pizza in Napoli at 4am, but in my head Im that child back home in Brixton Market, skipping between market stalls catching snippets of big people conversations. Brixton is my barometer always has been, always will be not just for Caribbean delights but also for music, people, politics and, most importantly, attitude. I grew up two minutes from the market; two minutes from mothers pausing to gossip outside the local shops, with one maybe taking a breath to shout at her bored young child for wriggling too much, attempting to escape her vice-like grip. It was loud and buzzing with accents from every country in the world, and music was everywhere.

In a minutes walk through the market, you could hear all types of reggae music, from 60s ska to lovers rock, Ace Cannons bluesy sax, loved by the old-timers, and the latest dancehall hits. There were stalls piled high with precariously balanced fruit, and stallholders selling the best avocados in the world. Massive and sweet with a thin green skin, you could scoff them like apples they were so tasty. Wed slice them up and eat them with bammy flatbread, ackee and saltfish or rice and peas on the side always on the side, people!

Mum would do a lot of her food shopping there, especially for meat, and usually at the same stalls because she was very loyal. She and her friends knew who had the best quality and best price. This information was like a market Bible, except no one wrote it down; you just had to be in the Jamaican wives club to get the lowdown. Then she would cook on Saturday and wed eat it the rest of the week, except for Friday, when she gave herself the day off and we had fish and chips like English folk. My mum had a huge chest freezer in the kitchen for over fifty-five years full of things she had cooked and frozen. A few years ago it finally broke and, when she defrosted it, I asked if shed found a leg of dodo at the bottom! They dont make appliances like they used to, thats fo sure. She eats Jamaican food most days. Even when she comes to my house she brings her own food, not because I cant cook but because she knows I like her cooking better.

Local traders used to spread out along Atlantic Road and Electric Avenue so called because it was the first street in London to be lit by electricity, also made famous by Eddy Grant and opposite, on Brixton Road, was Red Records, a legendary shop that specialised in music of black origin. Brixton Market was always the blood-filled pumping heart of south London, while around the edges it was a little rougher with streets and corners youd avoid, like the alleyway to Brixton Academy, which we called muggers alley.

The top of Railton Road was a no-go area for us, Coldharbour Lane was a maybe, and the high street was safe as long as you didnt act nave. When I was a kid there always seemed to be at least one person with mental health issues screaming full volume outside Brixton tube station, which was completely normal to us. Wed walk past them holding onto the backs of our necks because the rumour in the