Mike Skinner
The Streets’ UK rap auteur talks country music, raving in your forties and making movies.
MIKE SKINNER is fatigued. “We were up ’til 5am yesterday delivering the film,” he says of new movie/album The Darker The Shadow The Brighter The Light. The LP’s the The Streets’ sixth since he arrived with 2002’s Original Pirate Material, a home-grown, startling take on beats, bass and rhymes. Subsequent releases, including 2004’s platinumshifting grot-life concept A Grand Don’t Come For Free and ’06’s queasy celebrity autopsy The
Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living, showed acute, focused talent unafraid to engage with the strains of existence and matters emotional. Having pressed pause on the project in 2011, Skinner’s now back on The Streets in earnest. “I bit off way more than I could chew with the film,” he yawns. “But I’ve just swallowed it.” You’ve made a feature film, by yourself – hard work?
Yeah, it’s been horrific. It’s the ultimate challenge. You know, writing songs, writing a book, making music videos, they’re all difficult, but nothing is as difficult as making a movie because it’s all of those things together. It’s a very strange experience. You basically just have to have faith in the script, this document that you came up with years ago – just do this and it will make sense. And actually, it has made sense.
It’s been described as a ‘tripped-out noir murder mystery,’ in clubs.
Oh, 100 per cent like noir. My favourite book is The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. And films like Devil In A Blue Dress, The Usual Suspects… Brian De Palma’s Blow Out is absolutely incredible. Weird thrillers, weird mysteries, with that twist. A Grand Don’t Come For
Free, that’s a noir set in Birmingham somewhere.
There’s no gumshoe guy in it but there kind of is, because you’re hearing this guy making his way through the world, trying to solve a puzzle. It’s literally a film script, there’s an inciting incident, a point of no return, a denouement. After my first album, there were two things, really, that I became obsessed with, screenwriting and studying lyrics.
Whose lyrics did you investigate? If you do that, really, you’re studying country music, because the only culture that has lyricists, you know, true lyricists, is country music. You end up just getting really into it because you’re hearing all the best stuff, from like outlaw country, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, down to the really basic stuff. A Boy Named Sue by Shel Silverstein is my favourite song, just the economy of that. By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Harper Valley P.T.A., Loretta Lynn’s She’s Got You… country music’s kind of the best really.
How do you relate to club music now, as a 45-year-old dad?
Funnily enough, I’d say I probably relate more to it now than I ever did. In Birmingham [pre
Original Pirate Material ] we were all listening to club music at home, or in cars, we weren’t going to clubs, they were literally like, dangerous. When I finished The Streets, I was a DJ full time, so I find it completely relaxing and normal now, and you still relate to the music in exactly the same way. Standing on-stage, singing songs that you wrote 20 years ago, you’re sort of impersonating yourself – you’re your own karaoke artist. But I also remember exactly what I was trying to do in, say, A Grand
Don’t Come For Free, and I’m still trying to do exactly the same thing now, genuinely. The goal is to get to the same place that I did then and not because it was popular, just because I am the same person.
What have the decades in music taught you?
You can turn the air conditioning up, or order something else on Amazon to make your life a bit more comfortable, but ultimately doing difficult things is where happiness lies. It does feel genuinely scary doing a film because the chance for public humiliation is great, and public humiliation is what people are scared of the most, I think. But unfortunately it’s the only true form of happiness, doing different difficult things.
Tell us something you’ve never told an interviewer before.
I think most of the time when you go on eBay, and you buy something signed by someone famous, it’s not signed by them. You don’t want people to be disappointed, but I’ve seen a lot of signed Streets stuff that doesn’t look like how I would sign it. As told to Ian Harrison
The Darker The Shadow The Brighter The Light is out now on 679/Warner. The Streets tour the UK this month.
“Doing difficult things is where happiness lies.” MIKE SKINNER