Hello and welcome to Happy Place, the show where I, Fern Cotton, discover how my guests get into their groove.

And today we're off to meet the lead singer of one of my favourite bands of the 90s, Skunk and Anfsee. It is of course skin.

I don't carry the weight of other people's races anymore, sexism or homophobia or transfer. I'm not carrying in their weight for them because they can't carry themselves.

And I was so evidently like they're like his giant boulder in front of me. And it's a very simplistic approach to it, but actually it works quite well because I think it's important for me to be comfortable and happy and strong.

And if I'm carrying all this weight, I just get weak and weak and weak and weak because it's impossible for me to carry all of the weight.

Now she mixes her singing with DJing and has written a wonderful book that I just love. It's called It Takes Blood and Guts and it recounts some of the key moments leading to the success of Skunk and Anfsee.

And also her way of dealing with a prejudice she faced as a black queer woman, fronting a rock band. Plus an inspirational moment with Judy Dench that is unmissable.

It's a really lovely chat and I really think that you'll enjoy it. I hope you do. And now here's the show.

Skil, I'm so thrilled to have you on the podcast. I've been such a fan since I was a teenager.

I've been doing this for me. It's just a total joy. How are you? How are you doing today? I'm actually very well.

For my birthday, which was last week, my other half got me a barbecue. So we have just been like barbecuing every day.

I love it. How has this weird year been for you? I mean, normally we would be doing this face to face. This whole series pretty much just going to be, you know, with me remotely and my guest remotely, which is a massive shame as I'd love to sit face to face.

How has it been for you? Haven't been able to tour to play live? How has that affected you?

Some things have been a bit of a silver lining and some things have been really quite kind of weird. I mean, the way that musicians work, you kind of set up to record an album,

tour that album for a year and a half and then do nothing while you kind of record another album and do other things for like another year and a half.

Because you can't tour every year all of the time for the punter. It gets a bit boring. So we're kind of set up to have long periods where we're not doing anything.

But at the same time, there's not doing anything and there's not doing anything.

So there's a few discoveries I've made. Like I really don't like the creative process of being creative on Zoom for me is not as inspirational.

I haven't really been able to write good stuff in collaboration with someone when they're not in the same room. But at the same time, I have had a lot of time, like my partner and I much closer together, which is great.

And then also you do have a lot of reflection time. You know, why am I here? What am I doing? What am I doing? How am I doing it the right way?

I don't think I've stopped for this long in about 30 years. You know, I've always been doing something. So that's been actually quite an eye silver lining. It's weird because I think me, the artist, I'm set up to not do anything for a while.

But I think for people like our crew and other people working in our industry that are very close to us, they literally just go from band to band to band to band. So for a film, I think it's been a lot harder because you know, probably for those wives that haven't seen the wife.

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