This is an inspirational story documenting Mike Skinner’s refusal to compromise his self expression and the development of a highly distinctive sound. The story of the creation of ‘geezer garage’ from Skinner’s background of US rap, house, speed garage and breakbeat is fascinating. One of its best aspects is its honesty. Skinner includes lots of things that others might airbrush out from their story and is willing to recognise that not everything he’s done is brilliant - both musically and in life more generally. A few things he does seem to have done really well are staying true to his creative vision, working insanely hard and making music with an authentic sense of time and place. For someone like me who was born in the 80s, a song like Blinded By The Lights describes the ambience and experience of teenage British clubbing as well as anything else. It’s a truly iconic tune; accurately encapsulating a time and place. Against this idea of The Streets as highly authentic music, some people might say that Skinner is a wannabe cockney. He addresses this in the book, but in my experience almost anywhere in the South of England is aspiring towards a London aesthetic in some way. So this doesn’t make him any less authentic for me, probably it makes him more so, even though he raps more like a Cockney than a Brummie and I associate his music with London more than Birmingham.
Skinner is obviously someone with extremely good self-knowledge. He recognises that he’s more of producer than a rapper, has an extremely good sense of what characterises the environments he’s inhabiting and isn’t afraid to express himself honestly. For example, he writes about the experience of discovering that most of the people listening to his music once he becomes popular weren’t really the kind of people he was writing it for. In a roundabout way, I think he is saying that when he first became big he didn’t like the hipsters and upper middle class kids who made up the majority of his fan base. That said, he comes across as someone who is open minded enough to be able to see people individually and not as the stereotypes he might have taken the piss out of before he was famous. Equally, he talks about the importance of live performance money to his success and a lot of lower to lower middle class people simply don’t have the money for this kind of extravagance. That’s not to say that this demographic don’t rate his music, I have no idea about this, but rather that they might be less visible in terms of attendance at shows. He’s also self aware enough to admit that after 5 albums and 10 or more years on the scene that people have probably had enough of his voice and that he’s no longer as myopic about his music as he gets older.
Skinner is obviously an incredibly hard worker, to the point of it becoming a problem. I especially enjoyed the section on his mental breakdown when he writes about how this probably happened because he wasn’t taking as many drugs or drinking as much. Prima facie this seems like a ridiculously counterintuitive assertion but when you read the book you realise that he is basically a workaholic who’s only way of switching off was getting fucked. Once he stopped doing this as he got a bit older, he seems to have been unable to switch off. It’s another good example of his X-ray self-knowledge. To me it seems like knowing himself so well has probably contributed positively to expressing himself so authentically and relatably through his music. Alongside his relentless work ethic, it seems like he is a bit of a musical savant. He says he can’t read music but when he starts to explain how it’s all quite easy actually because you just have to think in terms of vibrations and their fractions I got completely lost! It might seem simple to him but to a musical muggle like me it may as well be Urdu. However, you can tell from his music that he definitely knows what he is talking about and I don’t have to know anything about music to know this. He describes being very interested in how electronics worked when he was a child and how he liked to take things apart and you can see how this might translate into an intuitive technical understanding of the rules of music.
To my delight, Skinner also seems to be a bit of a reader! He writes extensively about reading about storytelling, song writing and narrative structure with an admirably eclectic breadth. This is probably most evident on the album ‘A Grand Don’t Come For Free’, which is a highly structured story. This is another example of how hard he seems to have worked at his craft and how much time he has dedicated to getting better. As I wrote before, he probably did this in a pretty myopic and obsessive way, which seems to be common amongst highly successful people. Of course, there are downsides to this too. At one point he writes about how he doesn’t know what his Dad’s parents did for a living, which obviously isn’t essential to staying alive, but did strike me as a bit odd! This could be a glimpse of how little time Skinner dedicated to finding out about anything not directly related to his goals when he was younger because his knowledge of music is impressively extensive.
He writes interestingly and perceptively about the process of becoming famous and the effect it had on his mindset and personality. He also includes details of his spread betting addiction, which lots of other people might have left out, and is philosophical about his losses and what the experience signified. To quote, “On the one hand you’ve achieved all you’ve ever wanted; on the other, you’ve lost the hope of a different and better life that wishing you could achieve that goal used to give you.” (p210) I thought his reflections on success and achievement were poignant and one of the better parts of the book.
Skinner is obviously a man with lots of ideas and this comes through in all sorts of different ways in the book. Ideas about music, ideas about himself, ideas about history, science, society, football. Pretty much anything you can think of, in fact! In one way, it’s obvious how this abundance of ideas could have helped him creatively. It’s also obvious that he has a brain. However, some of the assertions he makes have more than a whiff of coked up ramblings delivered across a kitchen table at 7am! To give a few examples, he claims high levels of Scandinavian social care are due to oil revenues when really it is only Norway that has any oil, that Richard Dawkins is really Christianity dressed up as atheism, he gives a bizarre half page argument against the NHS and presents an equally bizarre two sentence, Niall Ferguson inspired summary of the American War Of Independence! He also goes on a strange rant about how supporting Manchester United is meaningless because of its international ownership, ever changing cast of players and the merciless commercialisation. He tries to contrast this with supporting Birmingham City even though this club’s ownership is arguably even more international, staff turnover is just as high and is only slightly less commercialised because it is less successful! In short, alongside the interesting ideas Skinner has about music, success and creativity there are quite a few half baked ones it feels like he’s cooked up on a bender!
Another strange part of the book was Skinner’s settling of scores, which thankfully are quite rare! He seems to take offense that Aphex Twin called his music shit once and so takes the opportunity to reciprocate. He also takes it upon himself to defend Chris Martin from ‘upper middle class’ music journalists who are jealous of him. Martin is, according to Skinner, a good bloke because he was going to be on a Streets song until his label intervened and stopped him. Most people, myself included, would probably see Chris Martin as heavily odds on to be a wanker given that he was married to Gwyneth Paltrow for 13 years! These unsubstantiated outbursts struck me as a bit petty and seem to have been tossed into the book for no particular reason as they’re not discernibly linked to any broader narrative about the two celebrities in question. It’s the worst example of Skinner’s propensity to name drop, which thankfully isn’t too apparent on the whole!
One aspect of the book I really disliked was the editor’s decision to suspend random quotes in larger font in the middle of the page every couple of pages. Of course, I’m familiar with this technique from reading magazines and assume its function is to catch the reader’s eye as they flick through the pages. However, I see this as totally redundant when used in a book. If you’ve already bought the book then it’s probable you’re going to read it and not just flick through and look at the words in big letters. People don’t thumb through books like they do magazines so it is just frustrating to have your eye distracted from the text you’re reading to read a quotation from a different page, which you then come across later in the text anyway! It’s infuriating and an inexplicably bad idea. If they absolutely HAD to do it then I would have preferred it if the quotes remained in their original position and weren’t torn out of their context and suspended in a completely different position. It definitely spoiled the reading experience.
On the whole, this was a readable and enjoyable reflection on Mike Skinner’s career. It had some really good parts and was only let down by a few half baked theories, a bit of name dropping and score settling and one truly dreadful editing decision!
PS - it just occurred to me that Skinner has a go at Blur in the book as well, which I found strange given that the song ‘Parklife’ is surely the closest thing you could find to a ‘The Streets’ track before they actually existed!!
