33½ minutes with...Skin

Skunk Anansie singer Deborah 'Skin' Dyer OBE, born in Brixton, London in 1967, was the first black British artist to headline Glastonbury in 1999. Skin once described her band's dynamic music as 'clit-rock', but she can't be confined to a single sound, as her two solo albums demonstrated in 2003 and again in 2006.

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With Skunk Anansie - Skin plus Martin 'Ace' Kent (guitar), Cass Lewis (bass) and Mark Richardson (drums) - she has released six albums, with a seventh, The Painful Truth, out now.

Hello, Skin. How come it's been nine years since you released an album?

Five years ago, we started to build this album and then Covid hit, so that kind of derailed everything that we were doing, and then our manager retired. She'd been our manager since the very beginning of my career, two years before Skunk Anansie, so that was quite a big thing to adjust to. But if the new album had come out five years ago, it wouldn't be this good - all of those things meant that we really did some introspection and analysis of who we are and what we were doing with our lives, and what we wanted to do in the next 10 years.

Where does the new Skunk Anansie record stand in comparison to your old stuff?

I think the 90s albums are very much of the 90s, and I love those records, and I also really love Wonderlustre [2010]. But I think this record stands alone. It feels like it's Skunk Anansie, but we were very conscious of redeveloping ourselves and finding a new sound within the world of Skunk Anansie.

So I would say this is absolutely my favourite album. I'm sure there's a bunch of fans that want us to make the first album over and over again, but you have to be very strong about what you want to do as an artist and stick to that.

What did your fans think of your appearance on The Masked Singer in 2020?