According to singer Skin, social media is a « plague and shame »

Skin, did you actually try to find tickets for the big Oasis comeback tour?

No, what should I do?

The band came up at about the same time as Skunk Ansansie. Could have been that she drives nostalgia into the stadium?

I’m afraid, nostalgic feelings are not necessarily my great strength (laughs). If I think about it now, I could imagine that it can be exciting for young people to see Oasis live. After all, they weren’t there at the time. But for the fans of the past, it is nothing more than a indulgence in memories and thus adhering to a Hey-I-Bin-Wieder-18 feeling. I do not know. It’s just not my thing.

Doesn’t the music industry live more and more from nostalgia and the longing for earlier times?

Sure, there is something about it. I still think that’s stupid. Or let’s say: unsatisfactory. Also for the artists themselves. Isn’t it nicer if you can at least present new music? Only the old hits down, it has to be terribly tiring. In any case, Skunk Ansansie has never been a band that leaned back and rested on her laurels. We see what is and what comes, not what is in the past.

They too have been there for a long time. « The Painful Truth » is the ninth album of her band. Do you find it easy to get enthusiastic about new songs again and again?

These shots are very fertile when it comes to fresh ideas. We are happy to be inspired by other music, we walk through the world with open ears. We cannot imagine being unreautively and unproductive.

« An Artist is an artist » is the first song on her record.

Even. Here we stand, we can’t help it. We don’t let ourselves be stopped. Skunk Ansansie are a force that is still to be expected and at any time (laughs).

Albeit at rather irregular intervals. There are a whopping nine years between their previous album and « The Painful Truth ».

We have collected and bundled our energy and leave them off the stack on these ten songs (laughs). Otherwise we have spent the time to gain life experiences. Many involuntary, such as a paralyzing pandemic and health problems of some of us (both bassist Cass and drummer Mark Richardson are currently suffering from cancer). But also some very beautiful ones, like the birth of our daughter three years ago. The little one makes my partner and me very happy.

In addition to private happiness, as in « Fell in Love With A Girl », they also address serious topics on the album. « Cheers », for example, is an euphoric flipping to the end of the world.

The song is very cynical and very sarcastic. He is about the agony that we do to our planet. And with it also the weakest and most in need of protection in our society, because the fewer remedies you have, the harder hit you, floods and heat records. In addition, the song is an attack on all right -wing Christian conservatives. I despise these people who, in the name of their faith, propagate inhumanities like a ban on abortion. Whoever will save us, I am sure that God will have nothing to do with it.

Is Skunk Ansansie more political than ever?

No, I don’t think so. We were always very clear in our statements. And that empathy continues to us as selfishness is not a political question for me, but a purely human. Only this is relatively new to all the grapes called social media. When our previous album came out of 2016, there was no tictok yet, and when we started, the internet was still tiny. We still had something like a private life earlier, the youth no longer know that. Today you expose yourself 24 hours a day, and even if you don’t do it yourself, someone will post any private photos of you. It is a plague and a shame.

They live with their family primarily in New York. Do you still come with you about the madness of US politics?

No. Sometimes I can’t anymore. I don’t watch every morning what Trump has done again. The man and the majority of his government are indifferent to people, he doesn’t care how people are doing, even those who chose him. He is a vengeful, disgusting weight with more unimaginable power. A terrible mix. Even his racism alone makes me crazy. And on the other hand Putin. What have we done that the world is ruled by inhuman egomaniacs?

Where will that end?

No idea. Not in a happy ending, I’m afraid. So much positive has happened in recent years, we only think of same-sex marriage, the #metoo movement, overall our societies have become more feminist and fairer. But the USA is suffocating everything. Teaching, research, progress, human rights, the environment. I also do not think that you should spend all your money on tanks and drones and soldiers, so that you would then have nothing left to help poorer countries. Damn it, they break everything we have laboriously built up.

So no hope?

Yes, absolutely!

Who saves us?

We can only succeed as a solidarity community. We humans have to take care of people who need our help. We have to stand together, don’t leave anyone behind and tear their script out of their hands to the democracy hatred their script, which society wants to destroy from the inside. Especially in times when a lot is shifting to the right and direction of fascism, we have to remain upright and do not give a step back.