It's not just that it's a black person playing white, heavy metal music, or even that it's a black woman playing white, heavy metal music - it's more that it's a "black, bald-headed, bisexual six-foot Amazonian" (her own description) playing white heavy metal music that makes Skin, the singer from British metal band Skunk Anansie, so conspicuous in a genre that is 99 per cent white and male. But don't make the mistake of thinking that Skin is exercising some fatuous form of girl power: this is a woman who writes "Clitorally Speaking" in white paint on her face, and "Nigger Rage" on her bare stomach - which sort of puts Mel C.'s claims to be "Scary" Spice into perspective.
Currently leading the Brit-rock charge of metal music that never goes away, and in global terms is as popular as country music, Skunk Anansie are well aware that if other power rockers like Terrorvision and Offspring can have number one songs (Tequila and Pretty Fly respectively) and crossover album hits, then nothing is stopping them. Coincidentally or not, they have just left their indie record company and signed a deal with the Virgin label, who were impressed by the fact that their last two albums achieved platinum sales in Britain. With their new album, Post Orgasmic Chill, out this week, Skin and Co look like they're the ones most likely to.
Except it's not Skin and Co, and never has been. Skunk Anansie (named after a character in a Jamaican nursery rhyme) is not Skin plus backing band, it's Skin (real name Deborah Dyer), Mark Richardson (drummer), Mark "Ace" Kent (guitarist) and Cass Lewis (bass). They insist on all four doing interviews and only release band photographs, never any solo shots of Skin. "We do know what it's like," says Cass. "Journalists are told to get an interview and a photo of Skin and they can't go back with a group photo and a few words with the drummer." Ace adds "Publicity is publicity, you can't control it. We could all stand there and take a photo together and they can airbrush anybody out of the picture if they want." Good, that's the band out of the way.
Skin, 31, was brought up in Brixton, the daughter of a local Lambeth councillor who remembers her family disapproving of her love of white rock music - "a lot of black people screw up their faces when they hear loud guitars, and I wasn't seen to be black enough," she says. A "shy" teenager, she went to Teeside Polytechnic to study interior design and on completion of her course found herself back in London "being a yuppie".
Abandoning her designer gear, she shaved off her hair, got a job as a bouncer in Brixton's Fridge night-club and decided what she really wanted to do was rock. With their big, crashing metal power chords - albeit always leavened with melodic sensibilities - and politically-driven lyrics in songs like Little Baby Swastika, Intellectualise My Blackness and Yes, It's Fucking Political, the band were quickly signed to One Little Indian, had a bevvy of hit singles and won numerous best rock act awards from Kerrang! magazine.
Once the shock of seeing a black woman sing like someone from Black Sabbath subsided, Skin had to answer numerous "boring" questions about her sexuality. "It is probably the most boring part of Skunk Anansie, questions about who I am shagging," she says. "I think my sexuality was something that people could latch on to, in that I'm a bisexual woman who's the lead singer of an aggressive, sometimes melodic, rock band. I think it was one of the aspects that made people think `Oh well, that will sell a few copies'. But invariably the truth comes out that it's actually quite a boring thing to talk about, and it sounds like a tired, cracked record. So I knew after a while it would all die down, which it has, which is good."
Admittedly a female black bisexual fan base would be pretty narrow - so what sort of people are into the band now? "Oh, we have the heavy metal crowd, the hard rock crowd, the indie crowd, the Goths, the funksters, the hip-hop people, the jung-lists and the style magazine fashion people," says Skin, insouciantly reeling off the different groups of people who buy their albums and turn up at their gigs. And if the record company want you to move a bit more towards the mainstream? "The way we see it is that some of the biggest rock bands on the planet have done pop songs," she says. "Nirvana did pop songs, the Sex Pistols did pop songs, I think Led Zeppelin were one of the few bands who didn't. There's definitely a pop element to Skunk Anansie, which is very natural, but it doesn't take over the whole vibe of what we're doing. "I think we've always kind of run alongside the mainstream as opposed to being completely entrenched in it. We're quite successful, but not a lot of people know it - our image is definitely a lot quieter than our record sales in many ways. The mainstream adopts Skunk Anansie for a while, and then goes back to whatever pop songs are being blasted across the airwaves."
Other bands from their musical background have been accused of "selling out" when they signed to a major record label, but Skin is philosophical about problems with Skunk Anansie's hardcore fans. "You have to make musical moves that you want to do as a band, and you can't really do things for the fans in that way because then you're doing things for your audience instead of actually being true to yourself."
She is similarly uncompromising about the lyrical content of the songs, despite the airplay problems the band has had in the past with songs like Yes, It's Fucking Political. "I don't think you actually write with radio or television or press in mind. I think once you start to have that viewpoint on your music, then you might as well get the accountant or the marketing manager to write your songs for you. You have to take that thinking totally out of the musical process, unless you're a band that just wants to sell lots of records, like a boy band or a girl band."
Talking about selling lots of records, how did it feel to have Rod Stewart cover one of their songs, Weak, on his last album? "That was really weird," says Skin. "The first time I heard it I just laughed non-stop for the whole time. You've written these lyrics which are really personal to you and someone else is singing them with their interpretation. It was quite freaky."
Post Orgasmic Chill by Skunk Anansie is on the Virgin label.
