Every Song I Love is a series where I attempt to write about every song that I love, or die trying. Sometimes I’ll explain why I love them, sometimes I’ll tell the stories behind how I fell in love with them, sometimes I’ll do both. Most importantly, I hope you love them too.

I’ve been to many, many gigs in my lifetime. Maybe 500, probably not as many as a thousand. It’s hard to say for sure (I’ve not being keeping count), but I do know it all started exactly thirty years ago, 24th January 1996. I had, in fact, seen live music before in various forms. There was a free festival in Roundhay Park the previous summer, featuring the greats of Britpop (Well, one great in Pulp, a middleweight in Sleeper, and then Menswear, Marion, Sleeper and Salad). The prior year there was a Radio 1 roadshow, featuring Stiltstkin and Reel 2 Reel, which stretched the definition of both live and music. Even earlier was the annual West Indian carnival just down the road from our house with various live bands, although the specifics were lost on a single digit aged child such as myself

24/1/96 was my first proper gig though, on an evening, in an actual gig venue, with a ticket I’d bought myself (although I still had to be driven there by my Mum, still being 18 months away from being legally allowed to taking my driving test and, well, 23 years away from actually passing my driving test). The band: Skunk Anansie. The venue: Leeds Irish Centre, a vaguely odd place. It was and remains a social club a little out of the city centre, home to bingo, birthday parties, wedding receptions, tribute bands, and just occasionally a ‘real’ gig, presumably when none of the other main gig venues in Leeds are available. At that time I didn’t care or even know that it wasn’t considered one of the better venues in the city. All that mattered to me was that finally, aged 15 and having become a music obsessive the last couple years, I was finally going to a real show.

I don’t remember much about the bands (the internet tells me that The Longpigs supported, a band I would go on to quite like, but I have no recollection of watching them at all) or the songs that they played. What I do remember is the experience. The anticipation of waiting for the band to come on, the smells of sweat and beer. Being pushed and jostled around by a mass of people as I got closer to the front of the crowd, in a way that would have stressed me greatly in any other circumstance but made sense here. The little rituals (cliches?) of live music, the cheering for an encore, singing along to the best known songs, the members of the band being introduced by the singer and playing a little mini solo, being told that we’re the best crowd on the tour. Most of all the sheer volume of the music in that small, packed room. All things I have gone on to experience hundreds of times since, but were new to me then.

Why Skunk Anansie though, out of all bands? I wouldn’t have claimed them to be my very favourite band, even at that time. Most of my time was spent listening to US grunge and alt rock bands like Nirvana, Hole, and Smashing Pumpkins, as well as plenty of Britpop. Skunk Anansie were neither of these things. I first became aware of them listening to the Evening Session on Radio 1, the source of most of the new music I heard at that time. I could be misremembering, but I seem to think there was some kind of competition, where songs were played by three new bands, with listeners voting for their favourite. This would then be pressed up as a promotional single you could write in for a copy of. If this memory is correct, I remember nothing of the other bands in the competition, but I’ll never forget ‘Little Baby Swastikkka’, which sounded like nothing else I’d ever heard before.

It was heavy, but not like the stadium rock bands I’d been into before Nirvana changed my life. It was political, but not posturing. It was raw and manic, propulsive and strange. There was an air of menace, but not in the way that some bands try to be ‘scary’, more reflecting society’s menace back at us. This was rare in the era of Britpop and Cool Britannia, boosterism and laddishness. I didn’t totally understand all the ways this band were different, I didn’t even know their name (I thought they were Skunker Nancy, having not seen it written down), but I knew they were most exciting band I’d heard in a long time.

As time passed, I found out more about them. There were further singles like Selling Jesus and I Can Dream, which captured some of the same energy as Little Baby Swastikka, if a little more polished and radio friendly. There was the breakthrough hit Weak, later covered by Rod Stewart of all people. There was an extremely memorable Top of the Pops appearance with Bjork, on a remix of her track Army as Me, the closest they came to that initial shock of first hearing them, and probably the first time many people were exposed to the band.

There were plenty of interviews in NME and Melody Maker and Kerrang, with the focus on charismatic frontwoman Skin, a black, queer woman in an extremely white, hetero male music scene. “We’re Clitpop nor Britpop” she memorably claimed in one interview, accompanied by a photoshoot with a swastika pianted on her head. I was, if not shocked, then certainly awed and probably confused (given my lack of sexual experience and knowledge, I’m not even sure I new what a clit was). It certainly stood out from much of the rest of the content of those papers at that time.

Skunk Anansie also had a reputation as an excellent live band, both from media reports and friends who’d seen them supporting Therapy? previously, so when they came round to Leeds again and I was finally old enough to be allowed out to proper gigs without an adult, they seemed like a good choice for my first band to see.

As I said, I remember little about the show, but they must have been good as I went to see them again the next time they played Leeds. This time a few of my friends and I skived off school, bought as much cheap alcohol as we could from the nearest supermarket, and hung around outside the back of the venue in the afternoon while the band soundchecked. After a while we just started screeching “Skunk Anansie” until Skin came out to chat to us. She was kind and funny, and generous of her time, signing autographs and forgiving our drunken teenagerness, although in retrospect it was probably just the easiest way to get us to go away.

The band and I drifted apart gradually after that. I enjoyed the first and second albums, the third not quite so much, as my tastes in music changed. I saw them live one more time, headlining Glastonbury, the final band to play the famous Pyramid Stage in the last century. After that they were not a band I listened to a great deal, but I always respected them, a band determined to do their own thing, never fashonable, but never trying to be. Pioneering and unique in all sorts of important ways.

Thirty years on they can still pull in big crowds, co-headlining some massive shows with Garbage this summer (coincidentally Garbage were the second gig I went to, just a few weeks later, so I am tempted to attend one of these shows for old times sake). They may end up a footnote in music history, as they were not part of a particular trend or a scene. However, they have made a lot of people extremely happy over more than 30 years, and as I age I increasingly have a lot of respect for any artist who can do that, regardless of what I think of their records.

And of course, I will always remember that shock of hearing Little Baby Swastikkka on the radio for the first time. After 30+ years of music fandom, I can still find songs I love, but that ‘shock of the new’ is nowadays a rare and precious thing. And whilst I have experienced many live shows, and hopefully have many more to come, it will never be quite like that first time, when every aspect the of the experience was thrilling and new. So thank you to Skunk Anansie, for being the first, for starting me on a live music journey which has bought me some of the best moments of my life, for roping me in young.