Iconic rock band Skunk Anansie have been on tour to celebrate the band’s latest “25LIVE@25” album and mark 25 years in the industry. Written by Ace himself, find out what they have been up to in his second blog instalment…
Since my last blog I left off where we were just arriving for a wonderful day off in the beautiful city of Bern in Switzerland. After such a great day relaxing, we went to play a show in a club which had the temperature of around 40 degrees inside!
The venue was sold out and the crowd was fantastic. The only problem was it was so hot in there that our drummer, Mark Richardson completely overheated and collapsed at the end of the set! He had to be carried off the stage by four roadies as he was so big and then lay on the floor while doctors were called out of the crowd to come and tend to him. They revived him with ice and a little medical attention, thank goodness! He managed to get up and actually sit on the side of the stage while we completed the last two songs with an acoustic guitar playing the big hits ‘Hedonism’ and ‘You’ll Follow Me Down’. As you can imagine all of the drama made the crowd go crazy. It was actually a lot of fun looking back, if not a bit scary to see the big man go down.
After a day of recovery, we moved on to our Italian leg of the tour. This was very exciting because the band is quite huge in Italy with number 1’s and multiplatinum sales. Over a run of four or five dates, doing our own festival dates (with just the support band of All Us in Love) we probably played to around 40,000 people. At one of the shows, Italian designer, Liborio Capizzi turned up with some hand made fantastic outfits for all of the band. We have used him for many years, including such big appearances as The X Factor, national tv and The Football Show in Italy. We looked and felt great when we hit the stage, we also did some filming for our new video at the same time. Our new single, ‘What You Do for Love’ was released this week and managed to make five main play lists, which we were very happy about. It was produced by Cam Blackwood, mixed by Jeremy Wheatley and mastered by John Davis in Metropolis Studios. As mentioned, the new video for it has been made while we have out on the road with added clips from the studio when it was recorded last month. Photographer India Fleming, who has joined us for photos and film clips on this tour, has actually now made the video for us based on her great work so far. It will be released next week, and we are looking forward to it to go out to show what we have been up to on tour for the last few weeks.
Next up for us will be a day off in Lake Como, Italy, and then off for a long drive to Holland to play Parkpop. Holland is an interesting place for us. We have been successful there for many years, so it is very enjoyable and we have many friends there. I also have a connection there with my sponsors who make my amps (Koch) and my pedals (Nexi Industries) and I shall be meeting with them at the show as well to talk about signature models and more support throughout Skunk in general.
Anyway, that’s it for now. I shall leave you with some great photos taken by Luca Pellizzaro, also known as Luca Flea.
I will let you know what happens on the next wave in my next blog.
Cheers,
Ace
