Luke Bainbridge
The Observer, Sunday 9 April 2006
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'I love the name the Streets, because it leaves so much to the imagination,' Mike Skinner says of his professional tag. The rapper and MC is back playing with the public's imagination on the eve of tomorrow's release of The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living, his third album. The lead single, 'When You Wasn't Famous', details 27-year-old Skinner's relationship with an unnamed pop starlet, claiming to have taken crack cocaine with her the night before she performed on Saturday morning kids' TV programme CD:UK. There's been fevered speculation about the identity of the popette, but Skinner's not telling.
It seems an odd way to get people talking about his latest album, but followers of Skinner's career have long expected the unexpected.'If you think about rap and hear the name "the Streets", you think of the Wu-Tang Clan in New York or something,' he said.
But Skinner has never hidden the fact that he comes from the suburbs. He was born in Barnet, north London and moved to West Heath, Birmingham at the age of five. 'You think I'm ghetto? Stop dreaming,' he mocked on his debut album.
Whereas most rap and garage music is predominantly built on macho posturing, sexism and tales of violence and glamorous excess, Skinner's lyrics are much more self-deprecating.
His tales of urban decay may be full of heavy drinking, drug taking, fighting and sex, but the protagonist usually comes off worse. Dumped by his girlfriend; dumped on the floor of a kebab shop by a right hook; or simply down in the dumps, wallowing in the depths of drug comedown.
Skinner started rapping at the age of seven. 'My brother had these Run-DMC tapes and I used to record the intros from the songs on to another tape and then record them over and over again, so it kind of looped. And then I would rap over it and record that back on to another tape recorder.'
He suffered from epilepsy as a teenager, a condition now successfully stabilised by medication. All the while, he honed his rapping skills in his bedroom with a group of like-minded friends. After school, he worked at Burger King while sending off his tapes and trying to set up a record label. At the age of 19, against the advice of friends and family, Skinner followed a girlfriend to Australia. The relationship soon ran aground, but Skinner spent a year eking out a living in the underbelly of Sydney.
Strangely, that year on the other side of the world seemed to give him a new take on the very British music he loved and he returned from Australia with a new-found confidence and sense of urgency. Back in Britain, things began to click into place as Skinner moved to south London and his tape was picked up by A&R man Nick Worthington.
'It's normally easy to categorise something when you hear it for the first time,' Worthington explained later. What was immediately clear to Worthington when he played the demo tape Skinner sent to the record shop he used to run on Holloway Road in north London was that 'this was more than just a one-off thing'.
The song was an early version of what developed into 'Has It Come to This?', the Streets' debut single, which was released on Worthington's UK garage label, Lock On, in late summer 2001. Skinner had perfected a stripped-down approach to his music and lyrics, in which an immense amount of attention to detail was paid to create something that seems thrown together and spontaneous.
'I think that if it becomes too tidy,' he said, 'the words don't really stick in your mind when you hear them; the smoothness of the rhythm makes you lose concentration.'
The subsequent album, Original Pirate Material, was one of the most original releases Britain had heard for a decade, a brilliantly accurate and often depressing image of what it felt like to be young, British and male at the dawn of the new millennium.
The Observer, Sunday 9 April 2006
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
'I love the name the Streets, because it leaves so much to the imagination,' Mike Skinner says of his professional tag. The rapper and MC is back playing with the public's imagination on the eve of tomorrow's release of The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living, his third album. The lead single, 'When You Wasn't Famous', details 27-year-old Skinner's relationship with an unnamed pop starlet, claiming to have taken crack cocaine with her the night before she performed on Saturday morning kids' TV programme CD:UK. There's been fevered speculation about the identity of the popette, but Skinner's not telling.
It seems an odd way to get people talking about his latest album, but followers of Skinner's career have long expected the unexpected.'If you think about rap and hear the name "the Streets", you think of the Wu-Tang Clan in New York or something,' he said.
But Skinner has never hidden the fact that he comes from the suburbs. He was born in Barnet, north London and moved to West Heath, Birmingham at the age of five. 'You think I'm ghetto? Stop dreaming,' he mocked on his debut album.
Whereas most rap and garage music is predominantly built on macho posturing, sexism and tales of violence and glamorous excess, Skinner's lyrics are much more self-deprecating.
His tales of urban decay may be full of heavy drinking, drug taking, fighting and sex, but the protagonist usually comes off worse. Dumped by his girlfriend; dumped on the floor of a kebab shop by a right hook; or simply down in the dumps, wallowing in the depths of drug comedown.
Skinner started rapping at the age of seven. 'My brother had these Run-DMC tapes and I used to record the intros from the songs on to another tape and then record them over and over again, so it kind of looped. And then I would rap over it and record that back on to another tape recorder.'
He suffered from epilepsy as a teenager, a condition now successfully stabilised by medication. All the while, he honed his rapping skills in his bedroom with a group of like-minded friends. After school, he worked at Burger King while sending off his tapes and trying to set up a record label. At the age of 19, against the advice of friends and family, Skinner followed a girlfriend to Australia. The relationship soon ran aground, but Skinner spent a year eking out a living in the underbelly of Sydney.
Strangely, that year on the other side of the world seemed to give him a new take on the very British music he loved and he returned from Australia with a new-found confidence and sense of urgency. Back in Britain, things began to click into place as Skinner moved to south London and his tape was picked up by A&R man Nick Worthington.
'It's normally easy to categorise something when you hear it for the first time,' Worthington explained later. What was immediately clear to Worthington when he played the demo tape Skinner sent to the record shop he used to run on Holloway Road in north London was that 'this was more than just a one-off thing'.
The song was an early version of what developed into 'Has It Come to This?', the Streets' debut single, which was released on Worthington's UK garage label, Lock On, in late summer 2001. Skinner had perfected a stripped-down approach to his music and lyrics, in which an immense amount of attention to detail was paid to create something that seems thrown together and spontaneous.
'I think that if it becomes too tidy,' he said, 'the words don't really stick in your mind when you hear them; the smoothness of the rhythm makes you lose concentration.'
The subsequent album, Original Pirate Material, was one of the most original releases Britain had heard for a decade, a brilliantly accurate and often depressing image of what it felt like to be young, British and male at the dawn of the new millennium.
