Frank Skinner is an award-winning comedian, TV host, writer and unlikely pop star, having bagged a UK number one three times courtesy of his Three Lions team-ups with longtime comedy partner David Baddiel and UK indie mainstays The Lightning Seeds. He’s also recently rediscovered his love of rock and heavy metal via of his young son, Alice Cooper and a whirlwind tour of some of the metal greats. We grabbed him for a quick chat to find out more.
Word has it you’ve become a born again metalhead?
“Well, my son, who’s now 12, about three years ago heard Poison by Alice Cooper on the radio. It was an epiphany and he got into Alice big time. When your kid is showing a passion like that, you want to indulge it. So I took him to see Alice at The O2. When you’re with someone who’s just discovering live music for the first time, it’s incredible. After that we did KISS and started doing the rounds – Maiden, Def Leppard and Mötley Crüe, Judas Priest… we bathed in it. I remembered why I loved it the first time round.”
What’s your own background with metal and rock growing up?
“In Birmingham you couldn’t really avoid it! I had one mate who was massively into Deep Purple but they were a bit too proggy for me. Even so, I’d go and see them, Priest, Sabbath…”
How does seeing Priest in the 70s compare to now?
“Priest are inspirational. I’m 67 now and banging around the country doing stand-up comedy, so my great horror would be to become someone who just goes through the motions. Priest still clearly care about the music they make. I got to meet them; Rob Halford and I had an argument about who was a legend! I thought I was borderline at best.”
Weren’t you in a band as a teenager?
“I was! A band called The Prefects, who later became The Nightingales, a cult Birmingham band. Stewart Lee did a documentary about the band and they interviewed me about being in their very early days. I auditioned for them when standing outside Yates’ Wine Lodge in Birmingham and I sang Blitzkrieg Bop all the way through to the end. No music – just me screaming in the street. As I said in the film, I don’t know if I’m their Pete Best or they’re mine. I was in a band called Old English too, which was a bit more metal – we used to do Paranoid and Born To Be Wild. When I met Ozzy for the first time, I said ‘I was in a band that did Paranoid’ and he said, ‘oh, so was I’.”
How did you first meet Ozzy?
“When I got my own chat show, he was one of the people on the list I wanted to interview. I’d seen him talking on Howard Stern and it really, really made me laugh. I often wonder if [our] interview is one of the reasons they got the reality show [The Osbournes] because he was so brilliant. A lot of people thought he was just a monosyllabic musician, but he’s hilarious and has done it all. I actually wrote a sitcom called Heavy Revie where I was playing a heavy metal legend who was going slightly off the boil, so we did the pilot but then I moved over to [TV network] ITV and the series never happened. If it had, it might’ve spoiled The Osbournes because there’d be a pretend version of him on TV at the same time as the real one!”
You apparently had an… interesting run-in with Eric Clapton on one of your shows?
“I asked him if he played air guitar. He said, ‘why would I when I can play real guitar?’ It was like, Eric… you don’t understand. Air guitar isn’t to be dismissed like that – in a world where very few people you meet believe in the unseen, air guitar is the last vestige of belief.”
Are there any bands you’d put in Room 101?
“Probably The Darkness. Queen were borderline for me – they were to rock music what Shawaddywaddy were to 50s rock’n’roll. I don’t like comedy heavy metal – my son won’t even watch Spinal Tap because he’s worried it’ll take the piss out the music too much. I saw Sabbath once in Birmingham just before the millennium, they had cushions on the chairs in this venue and the crowd kept chucking them at the band, who then spent the whole gig chucking them back. It ruined the gig for me. You don’t want Ozzy to laugh during War Pigs – you want him to terrify you!”