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Observer Music Monthly

Dead cert

The bookies, the pub, the late-night garage... Mike Skinner still plays at being Jack the lad but The Streets' new album reveals startling depths and secures his place in the ranks of the great British songwriters. Ben Thompson talks to him about addiction, celebrity and how his latest career gamble has paid off spectacularly

Sunday April 25, 2004
The Observer


'I love the name "The Streets",' muses 24 year-old Mike Skinner - at once the mercurial creative-director, canny CEO and flaky spokesmodel of that thriving entertainment brand - 'because it leaves so much to the imagination. But I suppose it did make a lot of people think I was trying to be something I wasn't.'

Whether it's the White Stripes proclaiming themselves direct descendants of the Delta bluesmen, Brian Wilson climbing inside the mind of a muscle-bound surfer or Afrika Bambaata and his fellow New York hip hop pioneers laying claim to Kraftwerk's teutonic electro legacy, people trying to be things they're not have traditionally ruled the school in rock 'n' roll's upper creative echelons. But for the performer who came to prominence by imposing a hilariously stringent suburban reality check on UK garage's materialistic fantasy world, honesty has always been the best policy.

Why else would Skinner have dropped the line 'You think I'm ghetto? Stop dreaming' into his first single? Why would he have been so specific about the fact that while 'not born with a silver spoon in his mouth', he has 'never lived in a block of flats' either? 'Because if you think about rap, and you hear the words "the Streets", continues the Bambi-eyed and suede-headed Skinner, 'it probably makes you think of the Wu-Tang Clan in New York or something. Whereas I suppose what my music is all about is saying life's not like that for most people.'

'It's normally easy to categorise something when you hear it for the first time,' insists the Streets' A&R man Nick Worthington. But all that was clear about the tape Skinner sent to the record shop Worthington used to run on Holloway Road in north London was that 'this was more than just a one-off thing'. The song was the irresistible call-to-arms to PlayStation-addled bottom-feeders everywhere which would become the Streets' 'Has It Come To This?', released via Worthington's UK garage imprint, Locked On, in late summer 2001.

The debut album which followed - 2002's Brit- and Mercury-nominated Original Pirate Material - was a superbly fresh and witty distillation of what it felt like to be young and British at the start of a new century. This record also performed a unique balancing act, somehow managing to be both the next step forward for the great domestic pop songwriting tradition which stretched back from Massive Attack's Blue Lines to Madness and the Specials, to the Kinks and the Who, and a disc with the power to unite the disparate tribes of UK dance music - the ravers, hip-hop heads, garagistas - in the volatile camaraderie of the late-night kebab queue.

So what were we to expect from the second album? Maybe that selling more than a million records, hitting the US Top 30 and successfully exporting his Brit-geezer gospel to places as far afield as Brazil and Japan would go to his head, and he'd swan off to America to make a record with the Neptunes. Or that he'd do an Eminem, and make a follow-up record about how strange it is for a person to become famous by giving vent to their feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Or maybe even (oh we of little faith!) that his determination to keep his rough edges would drive him on down the loud and lairy road signposted by Original Pirate Material's final single 'Don't Mug Yourself', until he found himself in a lagered-up cul-de-sac. After all, on his solitary Top of The Pops performance - fresh from being pipped to the 2002 Mercury Prize by the more coffee table-friendly Ms Dynamite - Skinner came on like Paul Gascoigne with a grudge.

But we were wrong on all counts. Original Pirate Material taught us to expect the unexpected from Skinner. And that is exactly what he's delivered. The second album, A Grand Don't Come For Free, is not a concept album. It's not a home-made West End musical. It's not the new Quadrophenia. It's not club culture's answer to James Joyce's Ulysses and/or The Office Christmas Special. It's all of these, and a lot more besides.

This is a record with a story, where each song stands alone to tell a tale of its own, then links up with all the others to keep the flow going. And the integrity of that homespun narrative places an obligation on anybody writing about it to avoid giving too much away. Not for the sake of any one particular Sixth Sense-style plot-twist but because listening to the album all the way through for the first time, without knowing exactly what's going to happen, is too special a pleasure to be compromised with a surfeit of prior knowledge.

If you've heard the single, 'Fit But You Know It', though, you've already experienced a riotously representative sample of the delights in store. While Skinner modestly insists that this triumphantly in-your-face celebration of package-holiday mating rituals 'gets boring really quickly', to me it seems destined to cause carnage on Europe's dancefloors for many moons to come. And if the purpose of a first single is to get everyone talking, this has certainly done the trick.

With everyone from the Sun's Bizarre column (which, with unusual perspicacity, devoted a whole page to proclaiming the song 'the anthem of the summer') to Radio 1's Chris Moyles (who doesn't like it, but Skinner allegedly calling him 'a knob-head' probably didn't help) caught up in the heated debate, a characteristically inspired promo video has upped the ante even further. As a suitably furtive-looking Skinner struts down the road, flicking through his holiday photos, only for this lager-tinged selection of 15-rated Kodak moments to burst into vivid - and intensely amusing - 3D life, it's almost as if he's anticipating the passionate but contrary responses this record has already inspired.

Sitting opposite Skinner in his Stockwell local (not the sort of spit and sawdust joint you might imagine, but one of those mellow, middle-of-the-range places with armchairs out the back), the question of why he should want to forsake Original Pirate Material's celebrated club-toilet-sink realism for a single linear narrative he describes as 'truthful, but fictional', becomes too pressing to ignore any longer.

'What it was,' Skinner replies affably, nursing an abstemious lunchtime Coke (he's not forsaken the party lifestyle which seems so integral to his muse, he's just feeling the effects of an epic bout of over-indulgence two weeks before), 'is that I didn't want to lie in the way that rappers lie.'

That's a pretty contentious statement, especially coming from someone who spent the best part of his West Midlands adolescence trying to make music which sounded like Run DMC or Snoop Doggy Dogg.

Skinner grins, in the engagingly lop-sided manner which makes you hope no US record industry tooth-Nazi (or Hollywood agent impressed by his undoubted screen presence) will ever persuade him to get his teeth capped. A doughty conversationalist, his speaking voice a felicitous blend of London twang and Brummie burr, he's never one to make a bold claim without a well-developed argument to back it up.

'Hip hop,' he explains, 'draws on different principles to other music. It's not purely sonic pleasure: it's conflict and action and story. It's the old way of making records - which is rhythm and noise - combined with a little bit of The A-Team, and that's exactly what I love about it ... The problem is, it tends to hit a brick wall with the second album. When you listen to 50 Cent, you're hearing a guy who you imagine goes around getting shot, and he doesn't, really - well, he did, but now he's doing pretty much the same as I am: being interviewed, collecting awards, going to parties. And the big question is, how to hang on to that excitement you had before becoming successful, without pretending you're still doing things you're actually not?'

Skinner's solution was to write himself into a story. 'I see the character on the album as being me,' he explains, 'with my opinions, and reacting the way I would react, just in a fictional situation. Apart from that, there's nothing all that different about it - the songs are just songs, the beats are just beats.'

Skinner claims that at least part of his motivation in taking his semi-celebrity self out of the lyrical picture was to 'stop his life becoming EastEnders', but it may already be too late for that.

He grew up in Birmingham in a family of Londoners. The youngest by far of four siblings (his dad, who is now 75, carried an unexploded bomb into a police station in the Blitz and lived to tell the tale), at the age of 19, Mike ignored the advice of everyone he knew and followed a girlfriend to Australia. He hung around Down Under for almost a year after she dumped him - scratching a living among the human navel-fluff of Sidney's scuzzy underbelly and developing a new perspective on the music he'd always loved - before coming back home, moving to London and creating a new kind of English hip hop.

When he started to sell a lot of records, everyone thought Skinner would go off the rails. Yet he seemed to go to ground in the aftermath of his early success - at one point earning himself the unlikely sobriquet 'The Howard Hughes of UK garage'. And this when everyone expected him to use George Best as a role model!

'To be honest,' he laughs, 'I did go a bit George Best for a while ... I just didn't do it where everyone else tends to do it. You see papers and magazines full of celebrities falling out of bars pissed, and you think "oh, that's terrible - all the photographers taking pictures of them", but then you realise if they didn't want that to happen they wouldn't have gone to the bars where all the photographers hang out ... I fall out of this bar fucking every week and no one knows about it.'

There's nothing neurotic about his devotion to his roots - his determination to protect the privacy of his girlfriend or his nieces. Indeed, his next album will be a more external affair - 'kind of the world as I see it' - also addressing the impact of his success. 'I'm not going to base my whole career on audio books,' he insists, wrily.

For the moment, though, keeping the music spontaneous is his priority. 'I spend an enormous amount of time taking things out,' Skinner admits, nodding a cheery welcome to a newly arrived Antipodean bar-keep, 'so as to arrive at something that feels like it happened really quickly. What you find with a lot of rappers is they work out their flow - the rhythm to their words - and the better they get, the more tidy the flow becomes, until everything has to fit in, the same way it would with a poem. But I tend to think that if it all gets too tidy, the words don't really stick in your mind when you hear them - the smoothness of the rhythm makes you lose concentration.'

The way Skinner describes his creative process, he sounds like a conscientious painter and decorator sanding a wooden surface to roughen it up a bit before applying an undercoat. But, while he would probably be uneasy about stepping across the craft/art divide, the combination of broad strokes and subtle touches in his lyrics is equally reminiscent of a more elaborate form of brush-wielding. Just as a Francis Bacon painting doesn't have to be an explicit self-portrait to reveal something about the man behind it, so A Grand Don't Come For Free - like any really good story - tells us a great deal about its author.

'It's very rare for someone to put themselves on the line the way Mike does on this album,' insists Nick Worthington. 'If you think of a song like "Dry Your Eyes", he's dealing very directly with things which other people would protect themselves from by taking a more conventional approach.'

It's true this song ('the one which'll get us on regional radio,' Skinner asserts optimistically) is probably the most fearlessly maudlin wallow in lovelorn sincerity since Paul Weller penned 'Nothing can ever tempt me from she'. But when Skinner asserts that writing the album meant 'admitting a lot of things about myself that aren't good', he was also referring to songs such as 'Not Addicted'. This is an uncomfortably accurate depiction of the pleasures and perils of gambling told through the eyes of a perennial optimist who, doesn't 'know the first thing about football'.

'I don't think I've got a problem with gambling,' says Skinner, 'but I think some people would say I have.' Readers are invited to judge for themselves on the basis of the following anecdote. 'I had this particularly funny week,' Skinner remembers fondly, 'where there wasn't really any football on, so I started betting on the Sri Lankan three-dayer or something, and I got absolutely stuffed. I was betting in all directions.' Skinner favours the especially risky form of gambling known as spread betting where your losses or wins can multiply very swiftly. 'Then I realised that the reason the prices were so good was that the game was about to end ... The truth is,' he concludes, not all that repentantly, 'is that I know even less about cricket than I do about football.'

None of this will break the mould in terms of Skinner's artful-dodger-about-town persona. But one revelation on the album does shed fascinating new light on this ebullient and charismatic personality.

When the main character talks about 'needing that medication for his epilepsy', it seems like an obvious reversal of audience expectations concerning Skinner's oft-avowed fondness for chemical stimulus, but it turns out that he does actually suffer from this much misunderstood condition. It started when he was seven and was 'pretty bad' by his early teens, he explains, though by managing his hectic lifestyle ('I'll still do drugs all night, but I'll be in bed before midday - 24 hours is enough: after that I'm being stupid') he hasn't had a fit in four years.

'Tiredness is actually what sets me off,' Skinner notes, matter-of-factly. 'Tiredness and TVs. That's why my house is all flat-screens - because they're a different technology and they don't flash.' Beyond the ensuing debate about whether flat-screen TVs should be available on the NHS, it's fascinating how many of pop's greatest and most original lyricists - Jarvis Cocker, Neil Young and Johnny Rotten among them - have been set apart from their peers at an early age by severe childhood illness.

'I think it is one of the reasons why I'm so focused,' Skinner nods, 'as it forced me to be less social throughout the period when my mates didn't know what they were doing. Music is kind of like my best friend - it's probably the reason I didn't go mad when I was a teenager, and it's probably been the one constant since things have kicked off.'

Meeting Skinner for a second time, a couple of weeks later - as he puts his backing band through their paces for upcoming live dates - he seems somewhat heartier. He's lost a bit of weight (Skinner 'always porks out' towards the end of making an album, apparently) and, clutching a bottle of water in his snappy designer sportswear, might almost be at the gym. The Southwark studio foyer is alive with the erudite chatter of Blazin' Squad. ('They're doing all right, aren't they?' Mike asserts benignly. 'For a pop act.')

With a whole new generation of young UK MCs already lining up behind him - from Bow roughneck Dizzee Rascal (who sometimes calls Mike 'Frank Skinner' by mistake, in subconscious tribute to his Midlands antecedents) to Wembley teenager Lady Sovereign - by rights, Skinner should be feeling the pressure. In fact, he has nothing but good things to say about any of his potential rivals. Dizzee Rascal returns the compliment: 'We may come from different places, but Mike's just trying to tell the truth about his life in the same way that I am.'

It would be easy to come up with some slightly bogus theory about the instinctive empathy which is the key element in the Streets' lyrical armoury. For instance, you might argue that the very factors which have kept Skinner at a distance from his peers throughout his life - the epilepsy, the older parents, being part of the cockney diaspora - are the same things that have allowed his work to get so close to the truth of what it is to be a human being.

But such a neat biographical explanation does nothing to explain the way his records manage to reorganise the building blocks of the past 15 years of dance music history (acid's random bleeps, the euphoric piano sound of Italian house, jungle's spiralling sub-bass, trance's psychotropic drum surge and UK garage's salacious string stabs) into bold and unexpected new shapes, just as the Beatles did with American R'n'B. Nor can it tell you how A Grand Don't Come For Free also somehow taps into a proud British underground rock tradition of which Skinner himself seems entirely - if not blissfully - unaware.

Yet while he has no memory of ever hearing a record by Arab Strap, the Fall or Robert Wyatt (all of whose work seems to echo though his new album, on occasion), he does testify to one unexpected formative influence: Jimi Hendrix. 'Not so much every detail of his music,' Skinner enthuses, 'as the man he was, and the fact that he became so good because of practice. I just figured that if I practised as much as Jimi Hendrix at something that was more appropriate to my generation, then one day I'd be as good as him.'

Skinner essays a self-deprecating shake of the head, eyes flashing in the reflection from a CCTV screen on which a member of Blazin' Squad can dimly be discerned, going innocently about his business. 'Obviously,' he smiles. 'I've got a few years to go yet.'

· 'A Grand Don't Come For Free' (679) is released 10 May
by scummy | 2007-04-17 17:45

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