Skindred Reveals The Surprising Way They Build Their Setlists

Welsh ragga-metal party-starters Skindred are preparing to bring the boom back down under this September, returning to Australia for their biggest local headline tour to date.

The five-date run will see Benji Webbe and co. tear through Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, armed with material from across their genre-mashing catalogue and latest album You Got This. Ahead of their return, we caught up with Webbe to find out which Skindred songs are currently hitting hardest onstage – and how streaming stats, soundsystem culture, costume changes and some strategically deployed end-of-set bangers all go into building the wonderfully chaotic beast that is a Skindred live show.

Benji Webbe’s Favourite Songs To Play Live & How A Skindred Set Gets Made

Benji: “At the moment, I’m really enjoying playing Can I Get A. That’s so much fun. And it’s the engagement of the crowd with that one. When we wrote these latest songs in the studio, I realised that so many of these songs are very, very live-orientated. When we’re playing songs like Can I Get A, You Got This and This Is The Sound from the new album, all three of those songs are ones I love playing right now. They just feel great live.

Another song of ours which I really enjoy is Set Fazers, that’s really cool to play with a crowd as well. A new song of ours, which we haven’t played yet, but we are talking about playing it live, it’s called Big Em Up from the new album. And Nobody is a big crowd-pleaser, definitely a crowd-favourite as well. And GIMME THAT BOOM? Forget about it, oh my god that is so fun live.

What we do with the set list, because we’re in a world driven by the internet, we look for our top streamers, and we pick the set based on the top streamers. And I’m cool with that because they’re obviously songs that people want to hear. That’s how our set is driven at the moment. Obviously if we release a single, then we’re going to drive that home. But at the moment, we pick the set like that and it saves a lot of arguments (laughs).

The difference with us, we aren’t just a rock band. We sort of do this thing where I’m like an MC in a rave, we take the crowd on a journey and we basically do the Skindred radio thing, so we can play other people’s songs too and just fuck with the crowd like that. That’s something I really enjoy about the live shows. And people love it as well, they have a good laugh.

I think that the set we’re currently playing at the moment is a really good balance. And basically it’s bottom loaded, we put all of the songs that are the most popular ones on streaming at the moment at the end of the set. We’ve got three bangers at the end, and I’ve got four costume changes! We of course have songs that we love playing throughout, but the end of the set is all bangers, it’s ridiculous! I do feel sorry for the audience at the end of the set. But it’s what we do!

We played Cardiff Castle recently, and for me being a Welsh man that’s the Holy Grail. We played there on a Saturday night, and it just went off. The set from beginning to end was incredible. And our set is a journey as well because we don’t just play the records. I look at Skindred like a sound system where we can have pull-up, rewind, come again, all that stuff. And we just take you on a journey. Some bands just get out there and play the songs. We feel the songs, that’s the difference.

For our Australian fans, bring your dancing shoes, baby!”