YES IT'S F★★KING POLITICAL

London in the early summer of 2019 feels like the beginning of the end of the world. The ice caps are melting. The seas are choking in plastic. The far Right is on the rise, as are hate crimes, and, in the week that Skin and Ace from Skunk Anansie settle into a bustling hotel bar just off London’s Regent Street – a thoroughfare where the homeless have pitched their tents in the heart of the capital’s consumer hub – huge Chinook helicopters are hovering noisily overhead during US president Donald Trump’s state visit. There is, it seems, still plenty for Skunk Anansie to rage against.

It’s 25 years since the band jumped boot-first into the public consciousness, and they’re about to embark on a tour to mark the occasion. A seething and unique combination of punk attitude, rock riffs, soulful vocals, searing political commentary and kinetic live shows set them apart from their peers from the start, when their Radio 1 debut, the anti-facist Little Baby Swastikkka set out their stall with a steely defiance. It’s a song as pertinent today as it was a quarter of a century ago.

“Those early Skunk Anansie songs, you could write them now,” says frontwoman Skin. “It feels like everybody’s getting really populist and racist and sexist and homophobic again. At the same time, the politics of the left wing have never been more finite. We’re sitting there arguing about which pronouns to use, while the right wing are organising themselves getting ready to fucking slaughter us. So if you think about a lot of those early Skunk Anansie songs like you could be writing those songs about those issues now. At a point I was thinking things had moved on, and now I think no, actually, we need to continue to write those songs. Right now it’s one of those moments in time where artists have to get off their arse.”