End Of The Streets

Mike Skinner’s the Streets gave British rap a voice of its own and changed the course of pop music. With his fifth, reportedly brilliant, album due out next month, the charismatic 32-year-old talks candidly about music, fame and fatherhood – and why he hopes this record will be his last. After the jump you can find the extremely interesting article that was published in the Guardian today, which explains all.

It’s usual when interviewing a pop star to expect their enthusiastic endorsement of their new record or at least an attempt to spin their own myth. Mike Skinner has never been the most typical of performers but it’s still surprising that he is quite so tough not only on his forthcoming album, Computers and Blues, but also on the Streets itself, the vehicle for his muse for most of the past decade of his life.

In fact, it’s nigh-on certain that Computers and Blues will be the last Streets record, the fifth in a run that bears comparison with any in the British pop canon. If his first, Original Pirate Material, cast this “45th generation Roman” as a bit of a geezer – while also being hailed as the best album of the 00s in a poll in this newspaper – its successor, A Grand Don’t Come for Free, turned him into public property, with a No 1 single in “Dry Your Eyes” that was quickly used to soundtrack serial English sporting defeats.

The experience of fame and its bloody aftermath then produced two albums that traced Skinner’s own moral – even spiritual – development. The cost he paid was a tailing off in commercial as well as critical acclaim but there is little disputing that, without the Streets, the charts today would look skew-whiffedly different – his influence on the confessional pop of the likes of Lily Allen as considerable as it is obvious on a new breed of UK rappers such as Plan B.

Nor can it be said that any of those characters are quite so complex or as interesting as Skinner himself, who in some ways became the very model of the modern recording artist, controlling every aspect of the Streets’ career (“a very 360-degree artist”, as he says); but one also wont to discuss Darwinian evolution or the theories of Nikola Tesla, neither of which are really contemporary pop fare.

Henceforth, however, following the release of the new album next month and subsequent live dates, the Streets will be no more. And as Skinner says at one point in the course of a lengthy and often bewildering encounter: “I’m not going to do any other interviews like this one.”

Why, I ask at the start? “It’s obvious. I’ve been doing it for 10 years and I’ve always tried to do something different with each album,” he says. “Some [of my work has] been amazingly received and some of it hasn’t been, and I’ve run out of new avenues.

“As uninteresting as the Streets is to talk about, the most interesting element of anything is its death, so if you’re going to talk about the Streets, ending the Streets is probably a good thing to talk about,” he continues, ceding the point that there might yet be some purpose to our interview, which is only two minutes old. “But it’s not interesting really. I haven’t really got anything more to do.”

The irony is that Computers and Blues might well lay claim to be at least the equal of his debut: it concerns itself with much the same protagonist, only he is older now and perhaps a little bit wiser, and it brilliantly – it seems to me at least – reconciles everything that’s been so great about the Streets. Lairy first single, “Going Through Hell”, for example, features geezer-ish lines such as “It’s all just lads in the normal ambience – fall or stab and then call an ambulance”, whereas “Roof of Your Car” sees him reminiscing about getting stoned and watching the stars, observing that “between radio stations and tuned-in verse/ are echoes of the creation of the universe”, and imagining that “one day they’re going to make electronic implants for the brain that simulate raving sensations, Wayne”.

As with his other albums, Skinner has written every word, produced every note, even mixed the tracks – and there is still that homegrown quality to the sound (the guitar loop on opening track “Outside Inside” is taken from Apple’s GarageBand program, bundled with every Mac), in the best possible way. But Skinner greets my enthusiasm with a weary shrug. “This album,” he says, “is not really a new direction. It’s all the directions I’ve already been down rehashed into something that’s… quite nice on the ears.

“I signed a five-album deal, so the economics of the Streets really shaped it as much as my inspiration,” he continues. “It would be silly to end the Streets on the fourth album and then make another just to satisfy a deal, or to do six albums and do five of them on Warner and one of them independently. So it’s part of the economics of my business and part of getting to that point.”

It all might make for a rather dispiriting experience, even if the cliche that such honesty is refreshing holds true; but there is also the pleasure of his deadpan wit and digressions that seem off-topic but tend to reveal the workings of his creative process – for example, our discussion of the classic qualities of Pizza Express salad dressing (“That was always going to be massive… there’s no way the people at Pizza Express knew what they were creating when they created that”). He talks slowly, pursuing ideas like they’re paper bags, blowing down the street, only coming to a conclusion once he has grabbed them.

Nonetheless, there is a steady refrain: “I think it would devalue it to say that it was cynical but I know what I’m doing with the Streets – I’ve been doing it for too long”, he says at one point; or, later, “I don’t want to do the Streets anymore. I should have moved on a long time ago.”

The interview takes place in the roof bar of Shoreditch House, an east London members’ club, which Skinner appears never previously to have visited. He arrives, dapper in a black Barbour jacket, clutching an iPad and a Kindle (current reading: Raymond Chandler), days shy of his 32nd birthday and looking little older than he did a decade ago, when garage label Locked On agreed to release his record “Has it Come to This?” under the pseudonym that would come to define him.

Prior to his career as the Streets, there was little that was eventful about Skinner’s life: born in Barnet, in north London, he grew up in the Midlands, going to Bournville school in Birmingham (second most famous alumnus: the actor who played Private Pike in Dad’s Army) and then Sutton Coldfield college, while also holding down a job at Burger King. He has previously described his upbringing as solidly middle class – something he never particularly cared to hide when he started making music, declaring on that first single, “think I’m ghetto? Stop dreaming”.

“Whatever bold claims you might make for Derek B or Mr C or even Massive Attack’s 3D,” the critic Ben Thompson once wrote, evaluating the merits of the subsequent Original Pirate Material, “Mike Skinner was the first to prove that a British rapper could speak directly to a nationwide constituency in a voice entirely his own.”

That meant lyrics about late-night kebab queues, smoking homegrown weed and other such quotidian pastimes. Some listeners – Americans, particularly – could be forgiven their discomfort not so much with this subject matter but with Skinner’s delivery: it seemed as if “the words here are jammed into measures like an overstuffed couch,” as one US reviewer wrote.

This, however, only emphasised his originality, and helped draw in older fans who looked to place him in a lineage of British songwriters that stretches back to the likes of Ray Davies. His inspiration came from US rappers, such as Nas and Raekwon, but he never aped their accents, only their concerns with everyday life. “When I started, there were kids from Brighton and east London pretending to be American,” he says. “That’s hard to believe now.”

Nor was it hip-hop that supplied him with his sound, but rather UK garage, that descendant of house music, with its warped basslines, slippery beats and bling image. The only problem for the teenage Skinner, in his bedroom in Birmingham, was that it was hard to hear that music out in the clubs. “I listened to garage at home or in the car. Everyone did. The clubs didn’t exist in Birmingham, and if they did exist, they were so dangerous that it just wasn’t a do-able night out.

“I always imagined that there’d be someone who would call me out if I talked about something I didn’t know about,” he continues. “And I didn’t know my Moët from my Pérignon. I do now, obviously. Troyes. Have you been to Troyes? That’s nice. Champagne region. Very fizzy in Troyes.”

After moving to London, sleeping for a period in his cousins’ living room, he secured his deal with Locked On. At that point, his ambition was simply to be accepted by his peers, but the album that he ended up making, Original Pirate Material, became a hot favourite for the 2002 Mercury prize (although he lost in the end to Ms Dynamite). This didn’t much impress him.

“I wanted to make a big garage record but no one who listened to garage really listened to me – even Dizzee [Rascal], I wasn’t really on his radar until the record became really big. It was only journalists and indie kids but I tended not to take a lot of notice of them.

“It was weird,” he continues. “It wasn’t until I got to the second album that I really felt like I hit the people that I was aiming to with the first album, and that was just normal people. But actually the only way you can get to normal people is by… being big.”

That second album, A Grand Don’t Come for Free, released in 2004, took up many of Skinner’s earlier concerns, exemplified by the raucous fun that was the first single, “Fit But You Know It” (opening lyric: “See I reckon you’re about an eight or a nine/ maybe even nine-and-a-half in four beers’ time…”); but it was also deftly constructed as a concept album involving the losing of the proverbial £1,000. “I don’t have the drama of murder and violence that rap has, so I’ve always tried to make something dramatic from nothing,” he says, and talks about how he tried to school himself screenwriting around this time – even studying with “this Hollywood guru guy”, Robert McKee. This indeed was the record hailed by professor of English John Sutherland as a narrative masterpiece (one, as Sutherland put it, “constructed around Christ’s parable of the lost pieces of silver. But to make the point is probably to invite a Skinnerian accusation of generating critical wank”).

The question of whether Skinner was the Streets, however, remained a bit fuzzy. “There’s times when I’ve thought it was a character,” he says, “but my best songs are the ones where I’m quite… afraid. I’m almost nervous to say stuff.

“You can’t possibly tell a story about yourself that’s got any measure of truth, really,” he says. “I just don’t think it’s possible. But my best songs are the ones where I’ve said a bit more than I probably felt comfortable with. So I don’t know. Is that honest?”Clearly, A Grand Don’t Come… was fiction but “Dry Your Eyes” – his lachyrmose ballad set to strings, the record that demonstrated his softer side – “that’s me, really”. But far more autobiographical was the album that followed, The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living – that was “totally about me, and I don’t think I’ll ever be that brutal again”.

By now Skinner was famous, and able to live the fantasy. “There was a party in Miami that was absolutely crazy,” he recalls. “Things happened that only happen in music videos. It is really exciting travelling but it never looks like a rap video; most of the time it’s a steamy dressing room underground with a warm beer – and that goes right the way to the top… But this…” He fails to disclose any specific bacchanalian details other than: “I was terrorising [the DJ] Paul Oakenfold. Our relationship’s never recovered but I remember he sent a big spliff, to my dressing room, saying, ‘You want to calm down, mate’.”

The idea persists that Skinner remains quite the bon viveur, but when I ask him today when he last went out, he says, sipping tea, “I’ve not been out… I didn’t really go out before my first album. Once I’d done my first album, I didn’t really want to go out, because it became awkward. Erm… I’ve never gone out. I really mean that. Ever. The going out comes to me… in quite calamitous fashion. I’ve never, ever, said, ‘Right, I’m going out tonight’.”

But the perception of this period is, I persist, that you were out of your tiny mind the whole time, gambling, and taking loads of coke. Would that be fair?

“Yeah,” he replies, then only half- rhetorically: “What would you do in that situation?”

On The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living, it sounded as if Skinner had indeed undergone some form of cocaine psychosis: the record dealt with contemporary fame and its fallout head-on, and the result made for very uneasy listening. Like its predecessor, it went to No 1, propelled on its way by gossip surrounding the identity of the female celebrity in “When You Wasn’t Famous” (sample lyric: “Considering the amount of prang you’ve done, you looked amazing on CD:UK”). But A Grand Don’t Come for Free had sold 3m copies worldwide, whereas this record only did about a fifth of that.

“I don’t look back at it with feelings of happiness,” Skinner says, and at first I think he means this period of his life, or the reaction that the record engendered. But really he means that he considers the record a failure, because he was trying to paint a more nuanced portrait of his experiences. “When people heard The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living they thought I was having a terrible time,” he says. “But it wasn’t like that at all really. I was destroying myself… but all I was really doing was describing that process of self-destruction that is inevitable for anyone in that situation, if it carries on. If everything goes right you end up being Michael Jackson. No one survives that.”

The only time I’ve met Skinner before came, when, as an editor, I set up a meeting between him and the philosopher John Gray, at the time of the release of his next album, Everything is Borrowed. A sharp reading of that record had suggested he might be a fan of Gray’s book Straw Dogs, a work of stringent Darwinism whose message can be parsed as: we’re all just animals, so deal with it. It wasn’t, with the greatest respect, an interview that you could imagine Tinie Tempah, or any of the Streets’s musical heirs, would have wanted to conduct.

In its course, during a discussion about free will and determinism, Skinner reflected that: “I was famous, I guess, for a while, and one of the fascinating things about it for me – and one of the unnerving, scary things – was how my boundaries completely controlled me. I wasn’t as autonomous as I thought.”

Now he says: “What I was trying to get across with that album is that your pendulum of emotions doesn’t change. Before you’re famous, you think that that pendulum of emotions is down to your circumstances. You think: I’m having a good day; I’m having a bad day – something shit’s happened. You put in [to the equation] the incredible amount of money and opportunity with women and free clothes and screaming audiences… but you still have good days and bad days. That was the really interesting record that I was intending on making.

“It’s just important to realise,” he adds, “that it took a lot to write such a… boring album.”

That said, the record still contains one of Skinner’s most personal songs, “Never Went to Church”, which concerns itself with the death of his dad, an event that he later came to recognise also had an effect on his often deranged behaviour at the time. “That song just wrote itself and it was always going to be…” he pauses, then lands on the word, “compelling – because it’s a touching subject. I’ve learnt that whenever anything important happens to me, it will make a good song.”

The title track of the album also addressed a real-life situation: Skinner’s struggle with the boutique record label that he’d set up with his manager, the amiable Ted Mayhem, which they called the Beats. The idea was to “cut away all of the crap” in the industry, to change the way things were done because “we were over the whole record label cycle thing: the release date and the radio campaign.… We just saw it as music, and it was either on YouTube or on an iPod.”

In the end they signed three acts, two of whom, Professor Green and Example, enjoyed top 10 hits last year, but not before Skinner had tired of the enterprise. “Even now people say, ‘What’s the release date of this song?’ And I’m like, well, I just played it to you, why do you need a release date?” he says. “And I think there’s still an element of that which is like… this charade. But then you probably still want to go on iTunes, and you want to do the charade. It’s the same reason why I enjoy watching The X Factor – it’s this idea that everyone’s doing something at the same time.”

By the time of Everything is Borrowed in 2008, the disjunction between the Mike Skinner of the first album and the point at which his head was at now was growing, and even then he was saying that this would be the penultimate Streets album. He decided to set himself a creative challenge: to make a record without any references to modern life (and, for the first time, he only used live instruments).

What emerged was a series of parables for what he saw as a “coming-to-terms album”. Hence, for example, songs such as “Way of the Dodo”, which examined mankind’s future plight (sample lyric: “It’s not Earth that’s in trouble, it’s the people that live on it… Earth’ll be here long after/ We’ve all gone the way of the dodo”) and the title track, with its homespun wisdom: “I came to this world with nothing/ and I leave with nothing but love/ everything else is just borrowed.”

The public’s interest only further waned, the album selling fewer than one-third as many copies as The Hardest Way… The video he shot for “The Escapist” pictured Skinner walking through rural France – inhabiting a scenario very different from the urban grime he’d once so vividly portrayed.

In his mind, the end has been coming in instalments, with the arrival of Computers and Blues somewhat delayed – even the newest songs were finished nine months ago (and the oldest are up to three years old). “I was given six months off because the label didn’t want to release this album until after fourth-quarter album priorities,” he says. I wonder if he resented having to accept his place in the corporate cycle, but surprisingly, he says: “It wasn’t that bad. They did it for my benefit. For my career, or something. It worked out quite nicely.”

It was during this time – in April last year – that his daughter Amelia was born. Afterwards, he and his girlfriend, Claire Le Marquand, went to France in a camper van. “We drove around Provence… going to vineyards… and I put on two stone. Eating brie. Brie before breakfast.” Subsequently he and Claire, who had worked for Warner as head of TV promotions, were married in Antibes. “And that was great.”

It was inevitable that the birth of his child would feature on the new album, and sure enough it’s a subject he addreses on “Blip on a Screen” (sample lyric: “You’re growing thumbs/ I’m going numb/ Tucked into your mum/ Looks like it could be quite fun”). I ask him about the joys of parenthood. “The one thing it’s given me is an incredible routine,” he says. “Even before Amelia was born I was up every morning because Claire had a normal job. So I’ve had a really healthy routine for years [but] one addition to that with Amelia is that the weekend is set in stone.

“I think…” he continues, “there’s an immense beauty in that. It’s like the sun going up and going down. You can get a bearing… you’re locked into that rhythm. When you aren’t locked into the rhythm of the solar system in some way it’s very difficult to get a bearing upon how you’re feeling.”

Does he subscribe to the view that having children provides the meaning of life, I wonder. “Certainly in London – because we’re living more and creating this… leisure thing – people aren’t having kids until they’re 36 now, and it’s strange. It gives you an opportunity to travel, and come to places like this,” he says, glancing almost suspiciously around this members’ club, “but… I think once you have children, it gives you a purpose. And I think a lot of people in their 20s now, they don’t have a purpose – because you’re supposed to have kids when you’re 16.” (By this, I take it he means that’s what biology would tell us – although I can see why Claire worries that some of the things he says can sound a bit right-wing.) “So dragging it out is either a lot of fun, or you’re going to ask yourself what you’re here for, for 15 years.”

In terms of autobiography, one other subject that the new album addresses is the illness ME – in the song “Trying to Kill M.E”. Skinner was laid low at the tail end of 2009, although he says now: “It’s not really that interesting – it wasn’t severe. I’ve kind of still got it now. It’s a feeling I’ve missed a meal. Which is very disconcerting when you’ve been… eating brie all day.

“I’ve never wasted any time, ever,” he says. “Apart from when I was ill and I watched James Bond every day. But I did draw a lot from that, which I’m sure will become apparent.”

The answer to the question “what will follow Computers and Blues?” is, it transpires, a film that he and Ted Mayhem have been writing, and which they intend to make and release – most likely through their website. This will be a “punchy thriller”, set in a hospital. “It doesn’t involve any kebab shops. Or drug binges,” he says with feeling. “The idea is to feel about something like I did at the beginning the Streets, when I didn’t know what was possible. We’re not going to obsess ourselves with screenings and openings. We’ve just got to make something that’s beautiful – that’s tense and interesting all the way through to the end. That’s the core of art, sod everything else.”

In the meantime, while the Streets remains a going concern, he’s been busy online. When his “yuppie flu” (his words) struck, one casualty was his tweeting – Skinner was an early adopter – and the series of podcasts that he would post on his blog. But this activity has resumed in recent weeks, and there has even been a handful of short films in which he’s responded to fans’ questions put to him on Twitter.

He is, however, slightly dismissive of all this when we speak, saying “one of the things I’ve come to lately is that social media isn’t really for content providers, it’s for the people and if you place something on the internet, that’s all your social media done….” His musings on the subject also appear on the new album. On “Puzzled By People” he states “You can’t Google the solution to people’s feelings,” while “OMG” concerns itself with the processes of Facebook etiquette. If nothing else, this is a reminder that when Original Pirate Material came out, Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school – and it’s a measure of the extent to which as pop-time has slowed, the pace of technology has accelerated. It’s in this situation – when anyone can post their own music online, or make a film – that the business of being a pop star could well start to feel a little bit redundant.

So what is he doing on the web with his films and such like? “Just biding my time until February… to try and stop… the voices, you know,” he says. What voices? “Voices telling me to… do something destructive. But they’re voices I think everyone has if they – spiritually – stand in one spot for too long.”

So are you a happy person?

“Er… Not incredibly happy at the moment, I have to be honest. But I’ve been happy this year. And I’ll be happy again, no doubt.”

Ten days after our initial encounter, I see him again for his photoshoot for this interview – his last photoshoot and interview as the Streets, as he insists. Not that there’s any great ceremony, although he does seem a happier bunny, thanks in part to being accompanied by his wife and baby. It sounds trite but fatherhood seems to suit him, even if when I ask how he spends large tracts of the day – changing nappies or smoking spliff and playing Call of Duty (seemingly the subject of one of the new songs on his album) – he simply says: “It’s a kind of slightly Peter Pan existence that I lead. It’s certainly Peter Pan in the day. There’s an element that’s just… fairly normal, really.”

The most obvious damage for most pop stars in retirement would be to their egos, when nobody recognises them any more, but Skinner seems more or less unfazed. “I like people answering our calls, if I want to do something,” he says. “There was a point – when I was… kind of, commercially successful – where it was really quite unbelievable who would answer your call. That’s obviously all kind of faded away. But the coming up to you on the street, it doesn’t ever really help. Although it’s always nice. No one’s ever – touch wood – come up to me and said anything bad. I mean that.

“That’s quite amazing actually,” he adds, as if this realisation has only just come to him, and then adding with great deadpan timing: “I love the introduction into people’s lives. It’s always fascinating. When they’re drunk, not so much.”

Gratifyingly, in the middle of one conversation at Shoreditch House about whether there’s simply too much cultural produce in the world today, and whether Skinner’s doing everyone a favour by contributing less to it, a stranger walks by, bang on cue, and hands him a disc, saying “Hi, is it Mike? Listen to this will you – you can contact me if you like it.”

Skinner likes Robbie Williams’s description of what it’s like to be famous in his book, Feel – that is, it’s a bit like being constantly hit with ping-pong balls. “Which never hurts, but when you’re Robbie Williams, there are a lot of ping pong balls being thrown at you, and it’s incredibly restrictive.”

I ask if he’ll miss touring. “I don’t know,” he says. “I do really enjoy performing. Everyone’s got their job and it’s really nice to have a purpose. It’s much better than any holiday. It’s like a holiday with a purpose. It’s a working holiday.” But he also worries that “whenever you have a day off on tour, it just goes really wrong. Because there’s nothing to do; it’s like 15 people with nothing to do… it just goes wrong. There are repercussions from that.”

Ted Mayhem says there will probably be one big farewell show – once a tour in March and likely festival dates in the summer are over – but nothing’s been carefully choreographed as yet. And indeed, despite all the talk of this being the last Streets album, Skinner has been posting a handful of new tracks that don’t feature on the new album on the-streets.co.uk. These, he has suggested, might form part of a completely separate record to be titled Cyberspace and Reds, which I assume to be a bit of mischief on his part, but when I ask him at the photoshoot he says it might just materialise online. “If I was making another record, I’d just make it and stick it on the internet.” He doesn’t seem overly fussed.

To do so, however, would be a disservice to Computers and Blues, which, after all, not only features tunes seemingly fashioned with festival audiences in mind, such as “Soldiers” (even if Skinner questions the validity of these communal epiphanies in the lyrics), but also the likes of the closing track “Lock the Locks”. While ostensibly the story of an office worker quitting his job, this clearly references the end of the Streets with lyrics such as “the days are over for dozing on my teat” and its winning chorus: “I smoked one too many cigarettes, I heard one too many lies, I’ve gambled on too many bets, I lost it all to this life.”

It’s a lyric that helps locate the Streets’s position not somewhere on the same line between David Brent and Harold Pinter – or Ray Davies and Tinie Tempah, if you prefer – but alongside them within the same cultural universe. Nonetheless Skinner is adamant, saying – again – “the Streets is finished” and “I have no interest in repeating myself. I’ve started to repeat myself with this album. It’s not going to happen, past this point. So… sorry for doing that.”

At the very end of our encounter, I ask him to give himself a mark out of 10. “What, for this album?” No, I say, for the Streets as whole, as if his career could be summed up in such a way. “Well, hopefully, it’s not my career,” he bridles just slightly. “But for the Streets… overall… I’d say it was a seven out of 10.” This, I say, is him being way too hard on himself, not simply honest, to which he says: “I mean, I’ve worked really hard. Ten out of 10 for every effort. No doubt. I’m proud of that. Ten out of 10 for effort! Ha ha!”

But Mike, I tell him, you’ve left your mark on the culture, an indelible mark! And he ends what may well be the final Streets interview with half a smile and a deftly self-deprecating joke.

“I could point you in the direction of probably five people who will forever be effected by my music,” he says. “I’ve got fans with a lot of tattoos, you know.”

Computers and Blues (Atlantic) is out on 7 February