Skin's Personal Best

SKIN: I chose “Little Baby Swastikkka” because this song really defined the sound of early Skunk Anansie for me. There’s very little about this song that’s regular. There’s a little repetition in there, but it’s just a weird song that somehow really works.

It’s especially important to us because it was the very first song that anyone ever heard from Skunk. Jo Whiley and Steve Lamacq played it on their Evening Session show on Radio 1 one night, along with a few other songs, and asked their audience to vote for which track should be pressed up as a single. All the bands were unsigned, including us at that point, and “Little Baby Swastikkka” won. It was so successful that they had to print 2000 copies.

I’m using this almost comical baby voice on it because the song was inspired by a small swastika I had seen on a wall that looked like a four-year-old’s first try at drawing. It’s about the indoctrination of children into the kind of Nazi thinking that we are seeing now in certain places. Things haven’t really changed.

BEST FIT: It's weird that we're having this conversation the day after Elon Musk did his Hitler salute thing at Trump's inauguration.

Yeah. I watched it. I really try to avoid watching those guys, because it's not good for my blood pressure, but he did it twice, with the whole banging of the chest and that. He knew what he was doing. He knows who he's dog whistling to, and that's the world that we're in now. We have open fascism coming from someone who's in an American government. How did we get here?

Back in the ‘90s, people engaging in all the racial friction of that time were kind of ignorant of a lot of things, but people these days are inciting violence with full knowledge of what they are doing. But they don’t care because they feel so involved in the movement. They feel like America is with them. They feel like Germany is with them. They feel like France is with them. That’s a big difference from when I wrote the song. But they still go for the kids’ minds first, and that’s what “Little Baby Swastikkka” is really about.

Do you remember getting any backlash about the song at the time?

No, but I’m sure some Nazis were butt hurt about it. But, you know, that’s not a bad thing.

Do you have any stories about re-recording the song for Skunk Anansie’s debut album Paranoid & Sunburnt? I remember reading that you had to sort of trash the studio a bit to feel comfortable there.

Yeah, it was weird because we didn’t know how to perform without an audience. We were recording at a beautiful studio in a place called Great Linford Manor, but there was just no vibe to it. There was no audience, no reaction, and we had no idea how to record. So what we ended up doing was to make the studio look like a war zone, to create an atmosphere that could be conducive to practice, to writing, and to great performances.

I did my vocals in some kind of little hut and scribbled out all my feelings on the inside of it, trying to sort of fabricate the reaction of a live audience – and it actually worked. I kind of got into it, although it was pretty nerve wracking. I had a bit of a mental breakdown halfway through, but then I built myself back up. Sometimes you have to break yourself down to come back stronger, you know?

In the press release for “An Artist is an Artist”, the writer made a connection between the confrontational nature of that song and “Little Baby Swastikkka”. What’s your take on that?

Well, I think there's always going to be a volcanic side to me. I'm always going to be anti-Nazi. I'm always going to be a little bit incendiary. Whether I like it or not.