Skindred’s Benji Webbe on the moment he realised he wanted to be a rock star

Skindred at Download in 2021 — (Image credit: Katja Ogrin/Getty Images)

It has been a hugely successful year for Welsh ragga-rockers Skindred, who celebrated 25 years as a band with the release of their exhilarating eighth record Smile, which achieved a career-high Number 2 in the UK Album Charts for the quartet. It has been a long road for Benji Webbe’s crew, their diehard fanbase growing and growing with every triumphant live show, and earlier this summer the Skindred singer explained to this writer the moment when he realised he wanted to front a band.

“I must have been about 11, 12, because my brother was in a band and one day he took me to the show, a festival in north Wales,” Webbe said. “My parents died quite young and my brother was only 21 at the time and he was this rasta, ganja-smoking sound system kind of guy but he said to me, ‘come and see what we do’.”

Webbe said that he sat in the van in awe of his brother and his bandmates, who were all 10 years older than him. “We pull up at this festival,” he continued, “I’d never been to a festival or a gig before, my brother and all these guys get out, these guys help them with their gear, these girls say ‘do you want weed or coke or booze?’ and they’re all over my brother and his friends and I’m like, ‘fucking hell!’. I stood by the mixing desk and watched in awe, I couldn’t believe how cool these guys are, they live in my street! They played a set and I had my laminate on, my first laminate and I’ve still got it too, and I went, ‘that was great, I’ve gotta go and tell them’, so I went round the back and there was a little production office and I could see the singer from the band in there and the guy was counting out the money on the table for him, must have been £80 or something but to me at the time it was like ten grand.”

It was at that point, Webbe stated, that the penny dropped. This was the life he wanted to live. “I thought to myself, ‘hang on, you get in the van, you drive with your mates, there’s women everywhere, weed everywhere, people giving you booze, people dance to you, sing your words, and then you come off and they pay you?! Fuck school, I’m doing this!’. And that was it for me. I didn’t know how to do it but that was it, I knew I wanted to play rock’n’roll.”

He chose the right vocation – Webbe is one of British rock’s most entertaining frontmen and next year he'll lead his group onto some of the UK’s biggest stages, with Skindred due to headline Wembley Arena in March.

Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, Champions Journal, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleague Ted Kessler. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he's interviewed some of the world's biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Radiohead, Liam and Noel Gallagher, Florence + The Machine, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more.