Mike Skinner is not crowd-surfing tonight. Thanks to his appearances in moshpits during last year’s adoringly received reunion tour, Streets fans have come to half expect the communion of artist and punter as part of a night out with this revenant everyman bard.
Those 2018 gigs sold out in seconds, marking the first time in seven years that the Streets’ back catalogue had been aired live. Skinner retired the Streets in 2011 after five albums that successfully parlayed UK garage to Oasis fans (and everyone else), earning much adulation, a No 1 – Dry Your Eyes, from 2004’s A Grand Don’t Come for Free – and the counterweight of occupational hazards. There was excess, the depression following the death of his father, a diagnosis of ME and the sense of Skinner having said all he could on the subjects of geezers, excitement and the great knottiness of everyday existence.
Egged on repeatedly by the crowd, the apologetic Skinner points time and again to his upper arm and stays firmly on stage while circular moshpits swirl around. A few nights ago, during a three-night residency in his home town of Birmingham, he did surf, dislocating his shoulder.
There’s video online of Skinner in the hospital afterwards, sucking on gas and air for the pain, having his bone popped back into the joint. He’s not risking that again.
The gig doesn’t suffer unduly. The 40-year-old is happy to put his body on the line in other ways, swapping a mug of tea for a fan’s double pint of lager and messily necking it in one. Backed by a band, guest vocalists and MCs – Kevin Mark Trail, from the Original Pirate Material era, and Swindon MC Grim Sickers among them – he climbs up on a monitor and clasps the sweaty fingers of the front row. In his funny, highly Skinneresque 2013 short film, Spoiler Alert, he plays an anxious type so paranoid about dying he avoids stepping on cracks and builds a death-predicting computer. The machine reckons 2024 and balks at Skinner touching germs: it wouldn’t approve of this exchange of sweat and dander.
The old songs spool out, reaffirming once again everything that is great about the Streets. “Brace yourself, ’cause this goes deep,” runs a line from Turn the Page, pointing up Skinner’s ability to grapple with existential dread as well as the cinematic, blow-by-blow accounts of everyday lairiness.
“Let’s push things forward,” urges the song of the same name. Skinner can be credited with pouring lots of accelerant on pop in his time. In his absence, Caribbean-derived UK bass music became the de facto sound of British youth. It would probably have happened without him, but against a backdrop of reinvigorated grime and dancehall-influenced pop, the Streets’ garage bangers sound remarkably of a piece with the present.
His old tunes are full of examples of what not to do (drink brandy on top of two bags of mushrooms, as per Too Much Brandy), and the kind of life advice that people in the comments sections of YouTube videos repeatedly credit as having caught them as they eyed some abyss. (That advice extends to “put on your mittens for these sub-zero conditions” – sage counsel for going abroad in Yorkshire tonight.) The many tear-jerkers deal with finality, with death and the end of love, with a stoicism pregnant with feeling.
But we know all this. Why are we here? Popular demand, for one. Last year’s tour begat this sequel, which then added more dates once the initial run sold out. In the past, Skinner had joked that he might reinvigorate the Streets if he were 40 and broke. He insists he isn’t broke.
Last year’s comeback was explained at the time as less of a trip to the nostalgia cashpoint and more of a profile-raising exercise. He was trying to get a new film financed; another film, talked up around 2011 and set in a hospital, was reportedly abandoned because of the cost. Skinner presumably wanted the people with deep pockets to be reminded of his cultural clout. “The reason I finished the Streets was to make a film, and the reason I started the Streets up again was to make a film,” he said. The Streets’ second album, A Grand Don’t Come for Free, was a movie played out in audio, and everyone thought then that films were where this gifted cinephile would go next. Seven years passed in a blur of extracurricular activities.
As Skinner revealed to Mary Anne Hobbs on 6 Music a couple of weeks ago, a completed album and its partner film, The Darker the Shadow, the Brighter the Light, will hopefully come out together in 2020. The album is done, the film is being filmed, and the songs are the commentary to the plot.
In the lead-up to the 2018 tour, a trickle of new Mike Skinner songs became a steady flow. Some were actually credited to the artist name “the Darker the Shadow, the Brighter the Light”; some were unrelated to the project.
These new songs are largely confined to the encore, where, understandably, Skinner’s own excitement peaks. They really are very good. Your Wave God’s Wave God is a fusion of then and now, Skinner’s lad-savant verses sitting limpidly over a trap beat, the whole track delivered with grime aggression. “What is the use of this happiness?” the song wonders, “’cause it don’t buy any money.”
Call Me in the Morning also fuses old and new, referencing the Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black while swimming in Auto-Tune. The circle pit then swirls anew for Open the Till, which features a yellable chorus and more gnomic Skinnerisms. “You make ends meet,” he notes, “then they move the ends.”
It’s not that Skinner is bored by his back catalogue – it’s just that his mind ranges far beyond it. An inveterate plot machine, he even needs to give his gigs a narrative. “You, I need to persuade you,” he repeatedly points to some girl down the front. “Are you on Instagram Live?” he demands again and again of the myriad fans filming on cameraphones. He treats the gig as an opportunity repeatedly to plug the after-party, where he will be DJing.
With what could be a surfeit of candour, Skinner has described DJing as more creative than playing his own songs, because, to paraphrase, of the “stress” and “creativity” of not knowing what he’ll be doing in three minutes’ time.
Will the Darker the Shadow, the Brighter the Light finally give Skinner the mature second act his talent deserves? It’s hard to say: Plan B, to name another cinematically inclined vintage MC, made the transition to film, but without the validation of a huge box office. His return to music last year failed to recapture the mass appeal he had around the time of 2010’s The Defamation of Strickland Banks.
One thing is certain: however much the fans desire it, doing tour after tour risks defining the Streets as a nostalgia act with a little new-project window dressing to move the narrative along. It’s a familiar pattern for old bands eking out second lives. Has it come to this?
