“He hit me and he started crying and I remember thinking, ‘Weak as I am, I’ve got no tears for you, I’ve got tears for myself’”: The harrowing moment from a toxic relationship that this singer turned into a 90s rock classic

Skunk Anansie really did come roaring out of the traps in the mid-90s. The rock quartet formed in 1994 and played their first ever show in March of that year. They made such a startling impact that by September the following year, they already had a Top Ten album under their belt in snarling debut Paranoid & Sunburnt. They were only just getting started, though.

Everything went to the next level at the beginning of 1996 as the band released Weak as a single. One of the record’s standout tracks, it embodied one of the big reasons behind the band blowing up so big. Yes, it had a searing, crunching riff, a pummelling groove in its engine room and a diamond of a chorus, the band already masters at balancing barbed rock and ear-worming melodicism.

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But beyond all of that is how much singer Skin put herself and her life into these songs. It was crucial, giving them their emotional spark, and there’s perhaps no song she put herself into more than Weak, in which she turned a harrowing experience from her youth into one of the most defiant, and defining, anthems of the 90s.

The song looks back to a toxic relationship Skin found herself in whilst she was still a teenager. “When I was 16, I was going out with this much older guy, not through choice just because I was a quiet, vulnerable, 16-year-old Christian girl,” the singer told Absolute Radio. “He was one of those guys that would hang out outside the church and pick girls up and pretend to be a Christian boy.”

Her friends, she told The Guardian, would tell her that her boyfriend was controlling and that she had to stick up for herself, and things came to a head when she advised him that she wanted to enter a dance competition.

“My boyfriend said, ‘You’re not going’. I told him, ‘I can do what I want’,” she said. In response, he took her to a remote car park and assaulted her, punching her in the face.

“Then he did it again,” she continued. “I was so shocked and angry, I didn’t even feel the pain. I went into survival mode. Driving home, I jumped out at a traffic lights and ran. But I was standing at a bus stop when he pulled up and dragged me into the car. Nobody said or did a thing. Once we got to his house, he started weeping, saying: “I’ll never do it again.”

Skin recalled thinking to herself at the time, ‘Well, weak as I am, I’ve got no tears for you, I’ve got tears for myself’. It would be a line that she would deliver with superpowered defiance years on from this moment. “This whole idea that I was supposed to feel sorry for him cos he was the one crying cos he hit me,” she raged. “I wasn’t crying at all, I was seething with blinding rage, like, How dare he.”

Years later, as she was doing some work as a rape crisis centre and hearing people sharing their stories, it dawned on her that she’d been in an abusive relationship at a point when she had little idea what one was. It was all poured into what would become Weak.

With that thought she had at the time – “weak as I am, no tears for you” – ringing round her head, it was all poured into what would become Weak. “It’s a song about being vulnerable but strong and brave at the same time,” she said.

Her bandmate Cass Lewis added the track marked a pivotal moment for the singer. “I knew Weak came from a vile experience,” he told The Guardian. “There was another time when Skin was followed home by some random guy, and she was so scared. But then she just turned around and started shouting at the guy. After that, whenever she got frightened, she attacked. That’s how she found her voice on a song like Weak and got to the place where no one can fuck with her.”

Released on January 15, 1996, Weak became a Top 20 hit for Skunk Anansie and remains one of their most enduring songs. Skin had taken one of the most distressing moments of her life and turned it inside-out. “I feel great about that now cos I got a really good song out of that,” she declared in 2023.