Taking to the streets
When Mike Skinner, aka the Streets, was in his bedroom recording his excellent first album Original Pirate Material, he accidentally captured his mother, in the background, calling out that tea was ready.
It fits well with an artist who observes and records the mundane (but sometimes sordid) moments of the kind of bloke who watches This Morning drinking Tenants Super amid wall-to-wall empty cans.
Skinner, who writes with the skill of a craftsman and the punch of a cuckold about twenty-something geezers, has been called the voice of the excluded; he prefers, however, to describe himself as 'Barratt class: suburban estates, not poor but not much money about'.
It must be hard, when you're climbing the ladder like Skinner, to write another album about life on the lower rungs. US hip-hop artists frequently struggle to ring true when they swap the ghetto for Gucci.
But this isn't hip-hop - it's British garage - and Skinner avoids the trap with his new, concept album - A Grand Don't Come for Free - which tells the sorry tale of a man who finds love, then loses it.
Another found-and-lost theme runs in reverse. The grand of the title goes missing, but turns up unexpectedly at the end. 'One does not have to be a Bible student', writes John Sutherland (a professor of literature) in the Guardian, 'to realise that the narrative is constructed around Christs parable of the lost piece of silver.'
Most Bible students won't see past the language (should you go 'threes-up on a gram with mates' or stay in with the girlfriend 'roaching a spliff and watching Eastenders'?); but whether this album is a parable or not, Skinner skuffles his way towards a moving finale which provides two different endings. The positive one offers a spine-tingling glimpse of redemption - set beautifully amid 'the dodgy things going on and the actions I regretted'.
Christians will find many lines offensive and depressing. But forget middle-class religion for a moment; Jesus surely longs to escape church more to mix in this culture - manifested, only if we allow him, through the creative and compassionate presence of his people.
Those with ears to hear will do well not to cover them in shock. It might need guts for some of us to take to the Streets.
Brian Draper
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