"I get back from tour and suddenly it doesn't seem like much fun to be off my face at quarter to 11am… The rock'n'roll cliché walks in then smacked me, carelessly racking out prang just to handle the fear, I do a line but then panic…" – Mike Skinner, 2006
"I like living up here, I like being around old people. I don't like being with young people. It's too… stressful" – Mike Skinner, 2008
GEEZER walks into a Café Rouge in Highgate, London's sleepily affluent, top-of-the-hill borough. Nice watch, di
amond ear-studs, boxfresh iPhone. Good upper-arm muscle definition; the easy gait of a runner (the jogging kind, not the dealing kind). Smart black leather jacket, zipped up neat-style. Autumn's blowing in the wind so he'll have a proper lunch: "Chicken'n'mash, please." Coffee? "Yeah, decaf." That new Keane single? "Love it…"
In a few weeks Mike Skinner – who has released records as the Streets for seven years now – turns 30. He looks it: a bit healthily chunkier than the rodenty little bloke who banged out the UK garage classic Original Pirate Material from his Brixton bedroom. And the man recently profiled on The South Bank Show sounds it: he talks of the books he's reading, his love of the Discovery Channel, the timeless craft of the best country songs ('By The Time I Get To Phoenix' a particular favourite). And he's making music that mirrors his age too. The fourth Streets album, Everything Is Borrowed, is a richly textured, reflective and, yes, musical collection of songs. They look love, death, planetary peril and the importance of family squarely in the eye – then skewer them with a wicked, turns-on-a-sixpence rhyme.
In that sense, Skinner hasn't changed – his lyrical dexterity is as impressive as it was round the time of 2002's Original Pirate Material and 2004's conceptual follow-up A Grand Don't Come For Free, when the boy from London-via-Birmingham went from being described as 'the British Eminem' to a poet, essayist and chronicler in the tradition of (it sez here) Dostoevsky and Pepys. Not bad for songs about kebab shop aggro, fines for returning a DVD late, and the trauma of no mobile phone signal when there's a tasty bird needing called.
But the Mike Skinner who wrote the aforementioned lyrics about snorting prang (cocaine) – from 'Prangin' Out', on his last album The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living – is now the Mike Skinner who likes living in Highgate 'cause it's largely free of loitering hoodies and full of gentle pensioners. What's happened to the poet laureate of inner-city Britain? Innit?
"I think my focus went like that," says Skinner, narrowing the palms of his hands to a point. "Now it's like that," he adds, holding his arms wide above his head. "I'm always trying to move into space if I can. Lyrical space, and subject-matter space."
He knows that with Original Pirate Material "one of my big advantages was just being new". This is true. Plenty of British bands had chronicled their lives and times, from the Kinks through to the Specials to Blur. Few had done it with the forensic eye for detail, and the wit, of Skinner. If you were young and raving/watching telly/eating fast food at the turn of the millennium, Mike Skinner knew exactly what your life was like. "But being new smoothes over all the imperfections," he continues. "You win the war by just standing out. And whoever wins the war changes history… Well, not changes history. But people forget all of the bad things if you win the war."
This is one of many instances when a valid point gets lost in overly verbose pontificating by Skinner. During our easy-flowing conversation the Streets often become the Cul-De-Sac. It's like he's belatedly become a bit philosophical and is still sorting out all the abstract ideas crowding into a brain that was previously more concerned with kitchen-sink drama. And that's no bad thing. Like all good artists, he's evolving, and is still a work-in-progress.
What he means, I think, is that he's aware that the Streets' sound became overly identifiable. Not just in his own music but in the socially-alert lyrics of Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen and Kate Nash. And certainly, on The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living, the specifics of Skinner's new rock star existence – doing crack with a still-unnamed female pop star, wasting thousands gambling, being punched by his despairing manager – made for fascinating if ultimately rather tedious listening.
Skinner defends his last album to the hilt. "People always say it was my 'fame is hell' album – I hate that phrase the most," he says, his mild-mannered demeanour suddenly getting a little steely. He insists he was simply writing honestly about his life at the time.
None the less, when he sat down to write Everything Is Borrowed, Skinner set himself some ground rules. He wouldn't "reference modern life". This means 'Heaven For The Weather', a knockabout number in which he compares the facilities on offer in Hell and those beyond the Pearly Gates. And it means 'On The Edge Of A Cliff', a soulful tune (with FM-rock guitar licks) that finds the narrator contemplating suicide only to be reminded by a passerby of the importance of the hard work and sacrifices made by previous generations. Generally the air is less celebratory, hedonistic or throwaway, but more real, and more careful. In that sense, once again, Mike Skinner is exactly in tune with the times. Credit-crunch hip hop anyone?
Skinner also resolved to write more "musical" songs rather than relying on rhymes'n'beats. Hence a record chocka with guitar, piano and strings, many of them played (inexpertly but also effectively) by Skinner. A jumping off point for this was the last album's 'Two Nations'. It began life as a contribution to a Biggie Smalls tribute album, based on a P Diddy beat. After Skinner opted to keep the song he replaced the beat with live instruments.
"Actually!" he exclaims, suddenly remembering something. "I recorded that first version illegally in a studio Keane had set up in New York." He snuck in, used the band's kit, "and I remember doing a big line of charlie on the keyboard player's Rhodes, hah hah!"
Mike Skinner, it seems safe to say, has not entirely cleaned up his act. But his partying, he insists, takes a back seat to the music he makes every day in his home studio. And rather than staring at his Reeboks, he now has his eyes firmly on the horizon. He's well into the making of the fifth Streets' album, which he says will be more electronic and influenced by Vangelis's soundtrack to Bladerunner. "It's sounding quite Eighties, but I'm chopping it up so it sounds like it came out of a robot rather than me."
It may also mark the end of the Streets, partly because its release will fulfil the terms of his record company contract. He seems excited by the prospect, not least because he also has movie-making aspirations. He's been broadcasting short films on his Beat Stevie web TV channel – "Wayne's World on racket (cocaine]" is how he describes it. The latest is a 15-minute on-the-road movie documenting Skinner's frantic solo journey from a Danish rock festival to a gig in Wales – he'd managed to miss a lift on his own tour bus. He plans to enter it into the Sundance Film Festival. "Then I want to do maybe an hour-long film, put it on YouTube…"
The crack-smoking, gambling-addicted, argy-bargy Mike Skinner – is he glad that Mike is in the past?
"Yeah. And I'm glad that the chav on A Grand Don't Come For Free is in the past too. 'Cause I couldn't do that again. But I never think about the past, to be honest. I only think about the future." Geezer walks out of a Café Rouge. He has some retro-futuristic beats to make, and a script to write. And some pensioners to hang with.
The Streets play Barrowland, Glasgow, Saturday. Everything Is Borrowed is out now www.the-streets.co.uk
The full article contains 1381 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
