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".Īs 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.
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. I haven't really got anything more to do." "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. "Some been amazingly received and some of it hasn't been, and I've run out of new avenues. I've been doing it for 10 years and I've always tried to do something different with each album," he says. He tells us what he's got planned for the next few days. Mike Skinner managed to sneak into the Guardian offices over the weekend and seize control of the music site. 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."
Henceforth, however, following the release of the new album next month and subsequent live dates, the Streets will be no more. 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. 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. The experience of fame and its bloody aftermath then produced two albums that traced Skinner's own moral – even spiritual – development.
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. 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.
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. I t'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.