FEATURE:
Empty Cans
Ahead of The Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come for Free Turning Twenty, Will It Get a Vinyl Reissue?
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AN album that…
IN THIS PHOTO: Mike Skinner (a.k.a. The Streets)/PHOTO CREDIT: Edd Westmacott
reached number one in the U.K. upon its release, The Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come for Free turns twenty on 17th May. Its first single, Fit But You Know It, is twenty on 26th April. I wanted to look at some reviews for the album, but also ask whether there will be an anniversary edition reissued to vinyl. One of the most acclaimed and spectacular albums of the early-'00s, it is a Rap opera/concept album that follows a protagonist's relationship with a girl named Simone. This goes alongside the mysterious loss of £1,000 from his home. It is an intriguing story and arc that has a wonderful and dramatic end. At the moment, you can get the album on vinyl, though it can be quite expensive. I wonder whether Mike Skinner (the man behind The Streets) might be planning to reissue the album. One of the most extraordinary aspects of A Grand Don’t Come for Free is how it differed from U.S. Hip-Hop of the time. A more slick and polished sound, the songs often featured quite fascinating and glamorous characters. The Streets, on A Grand Don’t Come for Free, had these rather ordinary and relatable characters. With quite simple and D.I.Y. production – Skinner explained how he worked on his own and didn’t have expensive kit or engineers -, it is a working-class and British album that still resonates to this day. I have said before how there should be a short film around the album. It has not really been visualised or brought to life yet. Twenty years after its release, there is something ageless and oddly timely about the album. I hope that it comes to vinyl and there are options maybe of a cassette and new CD release. DIY looked back on A Grand Don’t Come for Free in 2017:
“As he writes in his book The Story of The Streets, Skinner says that “the reason I decided to write ‘A Grand Don’t Come For Free’ as episodes from a single unfolding narrative was because I’d got so into my songwriting manuals and books by Hollywood screen-writing gurus – not just Robert McKee by Syd Field and John Truby as well – and I wanted to try and put what I’d learnt from them into practice.”
Clearly, he’d learned from the best, because what Skinner packs into less than the time it takes to finish an episode of Making a Murderer is astonishing – the nightclub scene in ‘Blinded By The Lights’ that captures the sense of dread and despair we’ve all had before; the dodgy ‘Fit But You Know It’ holiday saga we’ve all actually hopefully well avoided. For every well-written sketch about weed and not knowing a thing about football, there are real gut-punching moments about affairs, break-ups and getting kicked out of the house.
Has any British artist since even dared to attempt the rap opera?
Lyrics and plot are all well and good, but none of this would’ve mattered if it didn’t stand up musically. Luckily for Skinner, he smashed it out of the park. Where ‘Original Pirate Material’ asserted him as one of UK garage’s most iconic figures, ‘A Grand Don’t Come For Free’ – and excuse the pun, here – pushed things forward. Skinner’s delivery is awkward and charming, only furthering his characterisation, and the sounds scattered throughout are wild visions of a thoroughly British pop landscape – the chugging indie guitars of ‘Fit But You Know It’, the slow-motion euphoria of ‘Blinded By The Lights’ and beautiful balladry – yeah, it’s beautiful, alright? - of ‘Dry Your Eyes’ tapped into a sound that was grin-inducingly fun and very of its time.
‘A Grand Don’t Come For Free’ exists solely in its own space – has any British artist since then even dared to attempt the rap opera? – and in doing so rightfully earns its place alongside any of the best film scores, soap operas (yes, it topples Neighbours) and indeed, concept albums. There’s not enough fresh storytelling being told in new music these days – everything’s all very doom and gloom right now as we all know – so why not revisit an incredibly fun, emotional yet uplifting fable about a silly git who lost his football winnings? Let’s just hope Dan and Simone have bucked their ideas up in the ensuing years”.
I want to come to some reviews. Pitchfork rated it highly in their review. I think that a concept album can be quite risky and backfire. A truly great one has this filmic quality that stays long in the mind. The masterful A Grand Don’t Come for Free is one of the best ever released:
“Whether it's a reaction against the MP3's pending usurpation of the album format or just simple coincidence, the concept record is enjoying a small comeback at the moment. But perhaps careful not to echo the supposed sins of bloat and misbegotten puffery that characterized the psychedelic and progressive rock eras, many of the artists responsible for the best recent concept records-- Sufjan Stevens' Greetings from Michigan, the Magnetic Fields' i, and The Fiery Furnaces' upcoming Blueberry Boat-- share a willful intimacy that borders on the quaint.
On A Grand Don't Come for Free-- the follow-up to his internationally acclaimed debut, Original Pirate Material-- Mike Skinner audaciously weaves an 11-track narrative over an often bare and inert musical backdrop, one that acts more like a film score than the foundation of a pop record. The plot is pretty bare-bones: boy loses money, boy meets girl, boy loses girl. But by focusing as much on the minutiae of life as on its grand gestures, the impact of Skinner's album-- essentially a musical update of "The Parable of the Lost Coin" peppered with Seinfeld's quotidian anxiety and, eventually, a philosophical examination of Skinner's lifestyle and personal relationships-- transcends its seemingly simple tale.
Cynics and/or detractors could sneer that Skinner's sonics are too slight and that his flow is too rigid-- particularly when compared to "other" hip-hop artists-- without being entirely off the mark: Skinner's awkward, sometimes offbeat delivery is even more charmingly/frustratingly clumsy here than it was on Original Pirate Material, and the record's beats and melodies are subservient to its story. But while those perceived weaknesses may make A Grand a non-starter for those who disliked Skinner's debut, trying to place his square peg into the round holes of either hip-hop or grime/eski seems a mistake. After all, this is a record that starts with its protagonist trying to return a DVD and ends with him chastising himself for improperly washing his jeans. In between, he spends time at an Ibiza burger stand, smokes spliffs on his girlfriend's couch, grumbles about a broken TV, sorts out his epilepsy pills, philosophizes about the nature of friendship, and grumbles about the failures of mobile technology. Clearly, Skinner is on a singular place on the pop landscape.
Echoing his ability to compensate for his own musical weaknesses, Skinner manages to turn his character's personal shortcomings into A Grand's strengths: Communication failures, both technological and human, allow Skinner to deftly examine body language and small gestures. His character's lack of prospects and disconnect with work and family highlight the importance of friendship (especially, perhaps, to young urban adults). His crippling self-doubt (at the record's start, any hiccup in his day is proof that he should just spend it in bed) and need for approval from others makes his solipsistic epiphany all the more heart-wrenching. The album's ultimate contradiction may be that while Skinner's life is seemingly driftless, his understandable attempt to tether it to another human being-- any other human being-- often causes him more harm than good.
Considering that Skinner showed such a gift for post-laddish humor on Original Pirate Material, the most surprising aspect of A Grand may be that, here, he's at his best when he's at his most sentimental. His love and/or relationship songs overflow with melancholy and the inability to express emotion at crucial moments. In short, they're pretty truthful and sometimes painfully familiar. Along with the drug haze of "Blinded by the Lights", A Grand's best moments are a pair of tracks that bookend the story's main boy/girl relationship: The first-date track "Could Well Be In" ("I looked at my watch and realized right then that for three hours we been in conversation/ Before she put her phone down, she switched to silent and we carried on chatting for more than that again") and the dissolution of that same relationship on "Dry Your Eyes", a tongue-tied, heart-in-throat ballet of non-verbal expression.
That Skinner is able to coax so much from a cliché-heavy, 50-minute examination of solipsism and self-pity is a tribute to his ability to reflect and illuminate life's detail. By stressing his paranoia and doubts ("It's hard enough to remember my opinions, never mind the reasons for them," he blubbers as he loses a domestic dispute), he deftly avoids the melodrama of today's network reality TV. Instead, his approach echoes the faux reality of The Office (which shares a non-ending ending with A Grand) and the me-first neediness of its "star" David Brent (whose final-episode self-actualization echoes Skinner's). Like The Office, Skinner's anthropological humanism typically focuses on either the mundane or disappointing-- and, let's face it, life is most often one or the other--- but he does so with such endearing intimacy and bare honesty that it's easy to give yourself over to the album's narrative on first listen and, perhaps just as importantly, to want to revisit it over and over again”.
I am going to round up in a minute. Secret Meeting dove into the wonderful A Grand Don’t Come for Free. Anyone who has not heard this album really needs to check it out. Following The Streets’ 2002 debut, Original Pirate Material, Mike Skinner released another masterpiece:
“After disbanding in 2011, it felt like the right time for Mike Skinner to put The Streets to bed. Their later albums, despite the odd good song, paled in comparison to the first two records. This week in a rainy Berlin, The Streets made a triumphant return to stage, playing a set lifted heavily from those first two albums. Original Pirate Material is now rightfully considered a modern British classic. A genre-warping guide to the life of working-class young people in early 2000s Britain, it read like a manifesto to the disenfranchised youth of the day. Its follow-up looked at the same world, but where Original Pirate Material gave provided the overview, this record took an in-depth look at one of its stories. That record was A Grand Don’t Come For Free.
It follows our narrator as he tries to recover the eponymous ‘grand’, mysteriously missing from his house, while tracking his star crossed relationship with Simone. A concept album in the truest sense, this ambitious project flexed both Skinner’s storytelling ability, as well as his knack for creating interesting beats to provide the backdrop.
It Was Supposed To Be So Easy sets the scene as our narrator spends the day trying to get his life in order, but he seems to fail at every step. After returning home, he finds that not only has his TV broken, but the £1000 he left there had gone missing. Layered over a rich, horn-laden beat, it creates a cinematic introduction for the story we are about to hear transpire.
Documenting the start of his relationship with Simone, Could Well Be In is a first person account as our narrator’s date unfolds – sometimes second guessing himself or letting his neuroses get the better of him. The visually rich lyrics make it hard not to picture the scene as he “Looks at the ashtray, then looked back up/Spinning it away on the tabletop”. While its refrained hook offers an opportunity to empathise with Skinner as he questions whether his date is interested- “I saw this thing on ITV the other week, said, that if she played with her hair, she’s probably keen/She’s playing with her hair, well regularly, so I reckon I could well be in.” Singing in the vernacular may not be a choice for Skinner, but it certainly helps you connect with this character more acutely.
Not Addicted finds him tying to recover his grand by gambling on football. After several wins, he needs to get to the bookmakers in time to throw all his winnings on one final all-or-nothing bet. He doesn’t make it and his frustration starts to spill over before seeing that, fortuitously, his prediction was wrong and he dodged a bullet. Obviously nowadays, with online and in-play betting, he would have put the bet on and lost it all. Despite the dated detail, there is a universal truth to the way it describes a vice slowly creeping in and taking over.
Set in a nightclub, Blinded By The Lights tells the tale of Skinner taking ecstasy while waiting for Simone. He is stood up but, before he can dwell on it, the pills kick in and his state of euphoria takes over. Usually songs about drugs either have to be written metaphorically or carry an air of tedium. Here though, Skinner is very matter-of-fact about using the substance use. He doesn’t sugarcoat it or try any sort of grandstanding – instead offering an minute by minute account of his experience. As is often the case throughout the record, his ability to paint vivid pictures with his words is on full display, backed only by beats and minimal synths that ebb and flow metronomically.
Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way adds emphasis to the romantic side of this concept album. He focuses on the epiphany that spending time in Simone’s house is better than hanging out with his mates. But things start to decline in Get Out of My House. After a row, Simone (voiced by C-Mone) kicks him out in this satirical look at petty arguments between couples.
Lead single Fit But You Know It is probably The Streets’ most recognisable song. The Parklife-evoking beat underpins this tale of Skinner contemplating trying to pull a girl in a kebab shop queue while on a lads’ holiday, before deciding that while she is ‘fit,’ she knows it- emphasised through her aloof manner. This, the album’s answer to Don’t Mug Yourself on Original Pirate Material, saw The Streets crossover into the mainstream, reaching number four in the UK Singles Chart (when that was a detail that was still relevant).
Such a Twat’s guilt is metaphorically backed by heavy horns, with the beat adding to the ludicrous drama. What Is He Thinking?, in true soap opera style, feels like the dark soundtrack that was written for the ‘boss’ level on a 90’s video game, as Skinner’s tension continues to build towards breaking point.
Dry Your Eyes moves the narrative on, with the narrator trying to cope with the betrayal of Simone, as well as with his own conflicting guilt. The lush strings that kick off the song make way for a two-chord acoustic guitar part, before returning to lift the chorus. Evocative, emotional words make your heart break for this flawed character as his world falls apart- ‘Dry your eyes, mate. I know it’s hard to take but her mind has been made up. There’s plenty more fish in the sea’ – as it plays on the empty cliches that friends offer in the hope that they’ll be of comfort after a loss. This is an incredibly mature and accomplished piece of songwriting- one which gave Skinner his first number one single.
Empty Cans is a bittersweet tale that utilises two parallel story arcs, with both a bitter and happy ending to the story. In the former, our narrator gets in a fight with the TV repairman over the his fee, and in the latter he reconciles with his mates and finds the £1000 that had fallen down the back of the TV. As the soundtrack changes during the second half, you can visualise the light flooding in as the weight disperses from his shoulders and he’s right back where he started.
Bringing down the curtain on this tale of love, loss, friends and British nightlife also feels bittersweet for other reasons. There is only so long you can successfully write about these subjects without it feeling contrived. Sellout tours and platinum albums mean that your problems change. Skinner was acutely aware of this and his subsequent records focused on issues that he now faced. At this point though, it felt like a moment had passed. He no longer connected with his audience in the same way because they had fewer shared experiences. It is to Skinner’s credit that he didn’t try carry on writing in a way that would have felt contrived given his success. Arctic Monkeys are another act who had to change their lyrical content once they became successful as they became disconnected from the social commentary of their first LP. They, however, were able to develop their sound also and find a new audience, whereas Skinner could not.
Let none of this take away from the fact that he created two albums that perfectly captured the zeitgeist of a period which saw huge changes in the world. The internet’s effects on the music industry were just starting to be felt as technology took over our lives. Since the birth of the iPod around this time, we have continually fallen deeper into a dystopian lifestyle, where technology is deciding the outcome of elections and always to hand. Music in this period was starting to come to grips with this new world. Few captured this transition like The Streets. Original Pirate Material may rightfully be considered a classic album, but A Grand Don’t Come For Free is sinfully overlooked by many, despite being every bit as good”.
I do hope, before the twentieth anniversary on 17th May, that there is a reissue or some sort of celebration of A Grand Don’t Come for Free. One of those albums that should be handed down through the generations, let’s hope there are plans for The Streets’ second studio album. Revived and going to this day – last year’s The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light is among the best -, I do hope Mike Skinner marks two decades of a wonderful album. A Grand Don’t Come for Free…
STILL holds currency.