Mike Skinner - The Story of the Streets

About the Book

This book is going to try and get as close as possible to the full story of what informed the noise of The Streets. Obviously thats

something I should be fairly well-qualified to know about, and Im going to be as honest as the publishers lawyers will allow.

With the 2001 release of The Streets debut single Has It Come To This? the landscape of British popular music changed forever.

No longer did homegrown rappers have to anxiously defer to transatlantic influences. Mike Skinners witty, self-deprecating sagas

of late-night kebab shops and skunk-fuelled Playstation sessions showed how much you could achieve simply by speaking in your

own voice.

In this thoroughly modern memoir, the man the Guardian once dubbed half Dostoevsky ... half Samuel Pepys tells a freewheeling,

funny and fearlessly honest tale of Birmingham and London, ecstasy and epilepsy, Twitter-fear and Spectrum joysticks, spread

betting and growing up. He writes of his musical inspirations, role models and rivals, the craft of songwriting and reflects on the

successes and failures of the decade-long journey of The Streets.

Contents

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

Introduction

I: The Inciting Event: Original Pirate Material

Im not a very good rapper

There was something about taking stuff apart and putting it back together

I always wanted to do music it was either that or death

I dont think they thought the music industry had any kind of commercial future

Now there was an imbalance of achievement

II: Climax: A Grand Dont Come For Free

Essentially, they were hipsters

I took their favourable reaction as evidence of my own powerlessness

Effectively, what we did was slap my personality on top of his database

For me it was the musical equivalent of the moment in Being John Malkovich when John Malkovich goes through

the portal into his own brain

I worked at Granada Services, Frankley

III: Crisis: The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living

We bought Mum and Dad a place in Barnet

I know plenty of people who smoked brown and were fine I suppose Im one of them

I was fully living the dream

The final amount as far as Warners were concerned was probably nearer a million

With anti-heroes film noir-type people you think of them as being bad guys, but theyre always better than

their surroundings

IV: Progressive Complications: Everything Is Borrowed

I was never anything more than an outpatient

Tim ideally wants to be managing Bruce Springsteen or The Beatles

Product placement is just an extension of a visual metaphor

The donk of diminishing returns

Chris and Gwyneth were the exception that proved the rule

V: Resolution: Computers And Blues

If they stick with me till album number five, they know they can get a Greatest Hits out of it

Then The Streets was going to come to an end

I hope Im not going to sound like Alanis Morissette if I describe this as ironic

You dont really have to stay in touch, because theyre going to be there anyway

The cliff-hanger at the end of the first one was that Trevor Eve dies, although it turns out hes not really dead

Picture Section

Index

Copyright

Introduction

A song is a moment in time, but the time it takes to write that song might be many moments when opposing emotions are felt. Ive

talked about this a lot while taking cocaine on tour buses, but its just as much of a bugbear for me when Im not under the influence.

If theres one illusion Id like this book to lay to rest, its the idea that a particular song or rap or whatever expresses one

emotion and therefore the person who made it was necessarily feeling nothing but that emotion throughout its making. I dont know

why setting everyone straight on this point has become so important to me over the years. Maybe Ill find out by the end of the last

chapter.

Im here to tell you that its just a load of numbers in a machine

People tend to think that because a piece of music inspires them to feel a particular way, that emotion must somehow be

inherent in it. Empirically, that is not the case.

All of us would appreciate that its not possible for a digital file resting on the internet to have a soul, yet in the end that is kind

of what it boils down to. Im here to tell you that its just a load of numbers in a machine, but some of those numbers work better

than others. And I have no doubt that Richard Dawkins would agree with me that its in the exact nature of those equations that the

true mystery lies.

Because so many more people experience music as consumers than as creators, these two very different processes making

music, and listening to it tend to get transposed, as if theyre mirror images of each other. Obviously theres an emotional element

that goes into the song on the part of the person or people who write and perform it, and theres an emotion that comes out in terms

of the reaction it inspires in the listener. But where the listening experience is basically one thing, what youre putting into a song

when youre writing it is a lot more diffuse and all over the shop.

There might be an emotion that gives you the original idea, but you make all sorts of decisions for all kinds of reasons along

the way in terms of how to flesh that idea out. Some of those decisions maybe most, or even all, of them will end up being

mistakes, but those mistakes might end up being the things about the song that people like best. So you shouldnt try not to make

them.

A story works the same way as a song in that regard. There can be many reasons why a story got to be the way it was, but

once the storys written, thats it.

I dont know much about Mark Rothko, but I know what I like

When I consider a subject about which I am not knowledgeable say, modern art I realize that my ignorance of certain

artists probably means that the incredible authenticity they may have just goes over my head. I dont know much about Mark

Rothko, but I know what I like. And I also know where the vast majority of my modest allotment of Rothko knowledge came from:

a TV programme called The Power Of Art , presented by that cat who helped out with the royal wedding coverage, Simon Schama. It

was a really good show. He took one work of art a week, and went into the story of it.

By the story, I mean the melting pot of all aspects of humanity surrounding that piece of art the story of the artist, the story

of the individual work, the historical context, the art movement it was a part of The longer my own personal University of Life

thesis goes on, the more I realize that what you do or dont think about all of those things totally informs how you receive the art.

I used to think music was just sound, but now I know there is a lot of story in it as well. To take an obvious example, if

youve got four eighteen-year-olds playing fairly ordinary rock n roll, finding out whether they happen to be football hooligans

from Portsmouth or mountaineering buddies from public school will certainly inform how you receive the noise they make.

Im going to be as honest as the publishers lawyers will allow

This book is going to try and get as close as possible to the full story of what informed the noise of The Streets. Obviously