FEATURE:
Still Streets Ahead
PHOTO CREDIT: Vicky Grout for GQ
The Glorious Mike Skinner at Forty-Five: An Essential Playlist
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ON 27th November…
PHOTO CREDIT: Ben Cannon
it will be the forty-fifth birthday of Mike Skinner. With his alias The Streets, the Birmingham-born genius has released some of the most inventive and inspirational music of this century. The Streets’ debut album, Original Pirate Material, was released in 2002. The follow-up, A Grand Don’t Come for Free, turns twenty next year. I am going to get too an essential playlist feature The Streets’ hits and those deep cuts worth hearing. Their (The Street is sort of a collective, though Skinner is the voice and songwriter) sixth studio album, The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light, was released in October. I want to drop in some section from a GQ interview from last month. Mike Skinner was looking back at his career – though it is something so many people seem compelled to make him do. As GQ say, Skinner was marking the first Streets album in twelve years, a sold-out tour, and a long-held film debut that has the same name as the new album. Mike Skinner is very much back. As GQ said in their sub-header, Skinner is grappling “with the usual things: fatherhood, mental health and how to define his legacy without ‘doing a Beckham’”:
“There are plenty of acts from the 2000s still touring and releasing music, but few defined an era in Britain like The Streets. It’s easy to forget how revolutionary Original Pirate Radio, an album Skinner made in his childhood bedroom in a ‘studio’ made out of bed sheets in 2002, was. At the time, rap music in the UK was still mostly imported or mimicked from America. Then suddenly there was a kid from Birmingham spitting with a straight face about the minutiae of nightlife in Britain, of chips thrown in kebab shops and dragging your broken heart home from a nightclub with ecstasy still tingling in your toes. The first time my friends and I heard “Turn The Page” – the stirring, swaggering string-led call-to-arms that might still be the best opening track on a debut album ever – we were speechless. How did a 22-year-old member of ‘the Barratt class’ (as he described himself at the time), with no success behind him yet, write a song that sounded so confident? Skinner squirms a little.
“I went to my sister's house. And we watched Gladiator. And erm, I just started imagining what that would be like... I mean, it's just that simple, really. It's a bit Hans Zimmer, and the beat is a bit like a garage beat, and then, [the lyrics are] you know, ‘we're sort of fighting the good fight’ or something… We can't not open our gigs with that song. I've tried moving it, but you can't. It has to come first.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Vicky Grout for GQ
Boy In Da Corner, the starting pistol for mainstream grime, was still 12 months away; after that, British rap music exploded in the charts. Pioneers like Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and Kano were joined by more radio-friendly acts like Tinie Tempah and Lethal Bizzle in painting a largely London-centric picture of British life. And there alongside them, still doing his garage thing, was Skinner. In 2004 his second album, A Grand Don’t Come For Free, produced his first megahit. “Dry Your Eyes Mate”, a song about a breakup that doesn’t mention the word ‘love’ once, went straight to number one. It was the start of Skinner’s jaded-with-fame era.
“We were in France in the countryside, I think it was a day off on tour,” he remembers. “And a big group of us walked into this village to buy an ice cream. And I just remember thinking: I'm number one in the charts. And it was amazing, because it's what all musicians want, really - well, musicians of my generation anyway. Being on Top of the Pops and having a number one. But then in the same thought, it was, Fuck, I've still got all these demons inside me telling me that I'm useless. And you suddenly realise: this isn't gonna save me.”
The Streets’ third album, The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living, was a wry, scatty reflection on precisely this dilemma that he still regards with pride as his most honest. Listeners didn’t quite agree – it was a commercial flop compared to Grand… – but still produced arguably the second most cherished song in Skinner’s catalogue, “Never Went to Church”, which brought the same moving clarity as “Dry Your Eyes” to the experience of losing a parent.
He doesn’t consider himself famous anymore – at least not compared to when he was on the side of every bus in London advertising Reebok – but people who do know who he is tend to be devoted fans.
“It’s incredibly moving,” he says of those conversations. “But at the same time, when it happens over and over again, you can't maintain seriousness. There becomes a lightness to it. Because I think if you were moved as much as you should be moved, you would go a bit mad.”
“[But] I'm used to it. And I think it's much better it be like that. There are a lot of famous people that, deep down, don't feel like they deserve it. You know, there's a lot of impostor syndrome. I get impostor syndrome, too. But it's a good problem to have.”
Now 44, Skinner is settled with a wife and two children. As is perhaps fitting for a 14 and a 12-year-old, they aren’t particularly impressed by their father’s career.
“Thankfully, they couldn't give a shit,” he says. “My daughter was very excited when we went to see Fred Again recently. We ended up on the stage with Fred Again [with whom Skinner has collaborated], and she and her friend absolutely loved that. But it was difficult to explain to Fred Again that they didn't want me in the photo.”
Other than that, he’s grappling with the same things as any other parent in 2023.
“I worry about my son, I don't worry about my daughter. That's one thing,” he says when I ask him about how he thinks masculinity has changed since he was releasing songs with titles like “Fit But You Know It”.
“I think ultimately, sadly, when you're a guy, you have to find something that gives you respect in society. You can’t look at something like #MeToo and think that's not positive. It's just made being a man a tiny bit more complicated. But I think that's okay. We just have to teach our sons that.”
Mental health is another topic he’s touched on many times in his lyrics that is the subject of a very different conversation now.
“I think when you become chronically depressed, it's a bit of a surprise to discover that you can't get yourself out of this. And that's really the conversation we're having - that sometimes, you can't get yourself out of these cycles. Sometimes you need to go to a psychiatrist and have therapy, or go on to drugs that enable you to distance yourself from the cycle.
“But when I'm talking to my children, I want to build resilience, as well. And it be really complicated to separate [those things]. What is a chronic mental health illness, and what is the avoidance of resilience? I don't think we're ever gonna really get to the bottom of that. But it's definitely good that we're not just saying you have to be resilient.”
As we wrap up, talk turns to the David Beckham documentary that topped the Netflix charts recently. He finds it fascinating, this reappraisal that is underway of celebrity culture in the ‘90s and ‘00s when he, briefly, had to flee to New York to escape the tabloid press. But this thing of looking back, particularly on his own career, doesn’t interest him.
“I've been signing loads of albums lately. I did about 700 the other day, and they all came with these messages that I had to write. It was quite interesting to see what people want you to put next to your autograph. Probably half of them were stuff from Original Pirate Material or A Grand Don’t Come For Free. And then the other half was quite weird and interesting, and sort of a little bit dark.
“It's great to know that you mean something. But in a similar way to when I got a number one record, it's also a bit heavy. It’s like Beckham… I don't want to be cleaning my oven at home, thinking about the goals I was scoring when I was 25. That's not a place I want to end up. I think when you're older, you start to really look back, don't you? But I'm still looking forward. I'm so grateful that I still get to do my job. But whatever that job means to anyone else, I don't really care”.
As the incomparable and down to earth innovator Mike Skinner is forty-five on 27th November, I have assembled some prime Streets cuts and mixed them together with some of their songs that you may not be that familiar with. Twenty-one years after the debut, The Streets are still an indispensable and crucial part of the music landscape. And for that reason, we have to offer our sincere thanks and appreciation to…
THE one Mike Skinner.