Wills & The Willing Skin: Love Don’t Hate Featuring Reshmin Chowdhury, Gareth Ainsworth & Petr Cech

In July 2005 as rehearsals began for Wills & The Willing’s 29-day residency at the Edinburgh festival, Anthony Walker aged 18 was brutally murdered with an axe at a bus stop in Liverpool, whilst waiting to catch a bus home. The motivation for such a heinous crime was nothing more than the colour of his skin. Echoing memories of the Stephen Lawrence murder this new tragedy had reignited the shame that I felt as a man growing up on the estates of South London where racism was tolerated as part of everyday life. I felt compelled to write ‘Skin’. This was a song not written in hope but in the true belief that if there is integrity on the ink , the pen will remain mightier than the sword and by committing my words to paper, I was challenging myself to become a voice for change and an advocate for this cause. If only one person changed the way they thought and moved away from a path of racial hatred, then I would have achieved something but of course my real hope was that a pebble might create a ripple and a r