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Review: Skunk Anansie/Gen and the Degenerates, O2 Academy
There’s an angry, shaven-headed woman stalking the Academy stage and Skunk Anansie aren’t due on for another hour or so. Meet Gen (that’s Genevieve Glynn-Reeves) and the Degenerates – the latest bunch of socially conscious rockers for the identity politics generation to be given a leg-up by Skunk Anansie.
Loud, proud and bisexual, Gen is something of a Skin maxi-me. If her vocals have a tendency to waver off-key amid the chaos, she’s certainly a commanding presence. In the musical boiler room, a brace of hairy guitarists deliver the required heft.
is needed now More than ever
The Degenerates do songs about “kicking out abusers from the alternative scene” and, inevitably, being bisexual, which receive warm, reflexive applause from this supportive, multi-subcultural crowd. “You’re fit!” bellows one over-excited fella down the front. There’s definitely something interesting here, but the first improvement they could make would be to turn up those bloody guitars to give their sound the crunch it needs.
Your correspondent is unqualified to comment on fashion, but for this tour Skin OBE appears to have a large, inverted, inflatable black octopus attached to her noggin, its erect tentacles wobbling about as she cavorts across the stage. It’s a striking effect, but not one she can sustain for long, so the hydra headgear is jettisoned after a couple of songs.
Appropriately enough for these febrile times, Skunk Anansie open with the raucous, evergreen Yes It’s Fucking Political. At its climax, Skin seduces a theremin lasciviously, even playing it with her tongue. You don’t get that sort of thing with Hawkwind.
For those of us whose favourite Skunk Anansie is hard-rockin’ Skunk Anansie, the opening songs are a real treat. During And Here I Stand, Ace gets to live out his Tony Iommi powerchord fantasies, while Cass and hard-hitting drummer Mark Richardson prove themselves the equal of any heavy rock rhythm section out there. Of the newer material served up later, the riff-driven This Means War – delivered with a venomous intro namechecking Farage (remember him?) and Johnson – gets the strongest audience response. They can swing too, as Cass demonstrates with the funky disco-esque intro to Twisted (Everyday Hurts) – Skunk Anansie’s I Was Made For Lovin’ You, if you will.
This oft-postponed show was originally to form part of the band’s 25th anniversary tour, but you-know-what intervened. So this is now, Skin tells us with a smirk, their 28-and-a-halfth anniversary tour. After such a protracted absence, the task facing Skunk Anansie is to remind us why we loved them so much in the first place, which means there’s plenty of crowd-pleasing stuff from Paranoid & Sunburnt and Stoosh.
The core members are all in their fifties now, but it’s striking that they continue to play with the same energy they brought to their shows at the Bierkeller back in the 1990s, the key difference being that Skin now has much greater control of her voice. In this she’s bolstered by a touring keyboard player, whose role has been beefed up to that of co-vocalist on several songs. Then, of course, there’s the fired-up audience, who holler along with gusto to those singalongs Brazen (Weep) and Hedonism (Just Because You Feel Good). (She loves her parentheses does Skin.)
Anyone who’s read her autobiography will now be enlightened about Skin’s somewhat difficult relationship with her strict, deeply religious Jamaican mum. It’s a subject that comes up several times tonight, during the intros to Can’t Take You Anywhere and God Loves Only You (about the tendency of believers to despise those who bat for another deity), as well as the welcome revival of 100 Ways to Be a Good Girl – that early song charting forlorn attempts to win parental approval. One can only imagine how ma might feel if she knew her daughter was now belting her way through AC/DC’s Highway to Hell every night during the encore.
All pix by Phil Riley
Read more: Metal & Prog Picks: April 2022
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