“This was my world”: The artists that shaped Skin
There’s a moment on The Painful Truth where it feels like Skin sums up the contemporary sociopolitical rage felt by women perfectly: “An artist is an artist when an artist is an artist”, she sings, “And she don’t stop being an artist ’cause she’s old”. The frustration burns faster than the speed at which she sings, satisfying the urge to grab the shoulders of the industry and shake and shake until the sexism falls away.
It’s also a strange concept because, especially in the music industry, women typically only gain labels and titles like “legend” or earn an ounce of respectability when they reach a certain age. Look at Stevie Nicks: she’s more than a legend now, but when she was younger, she was scrutinised for every reason you could probably think of, most of them relating to her voice and appearance. So why is it also harder for women to maintain popularity when they first start to age?
Maybe it’s all about desirability. No, it is about desirability, and also the prerogative of some when it comes to them wanting “sex symbols” to be frozen in time, like a strange puppet that never changes, never retaliates, and only exists to look pretty. Except, they also have to stay interesting, which contradicts the staying the same thing, so really, they have to do it all at once while doing nothing at all. Get it? No? Neither does Debbie Harry, nor any other rock outlier who’s had to navigate the same train of thought before deciding it was all rubbish.
Skin also knows this better than anybody, but she’s also been the kind of truthseeker that does what most of us do when trying to validate alienation, and found the best in people to be their weirdness. Or, at least, what might be accused of being weird, when it just challenges the majoritarian need to disregard others for simply existing outside of a box. A lonely, boring, scuffed-at-the-edges box, probably washed up at sea, discarded ages ago with no real use anymore except to look ugly and be imposing.
Luckily, the moment Skin first discovered the wonderment and box-less glory of others was also the moment she found a window into another world. Armed with kryptonite, or what was otherwise known as Top of the Pops, Skin found where the secrets lie. “Top Of The Pops was this window to another world,” she told Louder, “I never missed it. I remember Boy George when he came on, and everyone was shocked because he had a dress on.”
She continued: “I remember Shalamar with the breakdancing, and Prince singing ‘Little Red Corvette’, and this was my world. And the whole ska thing—The Beat, The Selecter, all those bands, I loved that. When I was a bit older, I started listening to The Cure, and then I heard Led Zeppelin, and it was all over.”
In this world, it wasn’t like any of them had to explicitly say much to be defiant; they just were, but only because of what others had decided wasn’t “normal”. Whether Boy George’s dress or Prince’s flamboyance, this was a ship that picked you up or left you behind, and Skin knew the power of the movement enough to let it shape her: her music, the way she looked, and even what she wore.
Even now, beneath the surface of every track from The Painful Truth, it’s all there, shining in beautiful technicolour, pushing away whoever decided it was a woman’s downfall to show a singular wrinkle. Like that was a testament to how washed up they were becoming, and not at all symptomatic of someone who absorbed the greats and had then become one herself. As Skin put it, “We’ve been here for a while, but that doesn’t mean anything: it is and will always be about making good music, no matter what.”
