He's pimped his ride, taken too many narcotics and done a bit of driving without a licence through Las Vegas. Now Mike Skinner, aka The Streets, is back on the rails, albeit with a confessional new album that's bound to court controversy. He talks to Brian Boyd
N Bette Davis Eyes, Kim Carnes sings "She's ferocious/And she knows just/What it takes to make a pro blush", thus proving that assonantal slant-rhyme only really works in the medium of popular song. It's effective for musical verse because the vowels (which are the part the voice sings) stay the same. By contrast, consonance rhyme - where the vowels change - works better on the printed page.
Mike Skinner is a demon for the assonantal slant-rhyme. He's also a bit nifty with the old trochaic hexameters, as evinced on his new album, The Hardest Way to Make aEasy Living. "I'm glad you spotted that," he says. "I wanted to get away from the unstressed/stressed metre of the iamb, so I went for the stressed/unstressed trochee. Metre and form are really important to me. You know what's really big now? Homophones [pair/pear, weight/wait etc]. Kanye West uses a lot of them. I'm not so sure about them, though."
For all his impressive knowledge of prosody, Skinner isn't above "wrenching" the odd rhyme - forcing a word out of its natural pronunciation to force the rhyme. You get a lot of badly wrenched rhymes in folk music, for some reason. "Yeah, there's a song called Memento Mori on the new album," he says. "I pronounce the 'mori' so it rhymes with 'sore eye', but really it should rhyme with 'tory'.
"I don't often get the chance to talk like this about my work. You sort of have to keep it uncomplicated for Radio 1 and that. But I'm a songwriter more than I am a poet. Than again, I'm not a big fan of modern songwriting. For me it's all about being plain and simple and removing ideas. If you take the song Dry Your Eyes, I'm not being particularly creative with the wording there - the lyrics only describe body parts and human gestures. Having said that, I'm careful about stuff like the mixing of pronouns and the pacing of information.
"The way I see it in my songs is: if I spoke any quicker you wouldn't understand me; if I spoke any slower you'd be bored."
What strikes you first about Mike Skinner is just how far removed he is from his "geezer" image. What strikes you second is how he talks just how he raps - using the same idiosyncratic, syncopated metre form. This is how he introduces himself: "Hello, you alright?/Just a latte for me/Three sugars if you please/Nice one, cheers."
The third thing is his studio in Chiswick, where we meet. Although you're given the street name and number, you walk past it a few times because the only building on that site is what can only be described as a shed, bearing the legend of a insurance company. It's a literal facade. He opts for a caff around the corner where the staff humorously call him "The Street", as in "The Street is in the basement waiting for you."
Dressed in a dissonant mix of Savile Row and council estate chic, Skinner sports a pair of skull and crossbones socks which he pulls at with abandon whenever talk turns to "the bad stuff", which is essentially what the new album is all about. There is already a considerable media fuss over the first single, When You Wasn't Famous. The song opens with the observation: "The thing that's got it all fucked up now is camera phones - how the hell am I supposed to be able to do a line in front of complete strangers when they've all got cameras?"
Skinner then recounts how he took crack cocaine and had sex with a famous female pop star. The next day he switched on CD:UK and saw said famous female pop star doing her smiley, dancey routine. "Considering the amount of prang you'd done, you looked amazing on CD:UK," he notes. The press release for the single says: "The song threatens to set off a tabloid feeding frenzy which will make the whole Ulrika Jonsson/John Leslie thing look like a storm in a tea-cup".
Three quick things about that . . . The incident they're referring to concerns a serious allegation of violent sexual assault. . . Couldn't they find a better word than "thing". . . "Storm in a tea-cup" is a redundant cliche, all the more unbecoming considering the considerable verbal dexterity of the author of the song.
"Yeah, I know, that press release has gone out under my name and I have to stand over it," he grimaces. "I'm a bit worried about the whole thing. I am expecting some sort of reaction. It's a decision I had to make about the song. I think there's going to be trouble over it." He tugs away at one of his socks. I throw him the name of the female pop star he's referring to in the song for confirmation, but he just winces and starts to tug his other sock.
The man who has been described as "Dostoevsky on Tennents Super" - which he's not mad about but does prefer to the usual "the poet laureate of chav culture" - is individually responsible for freeing UK garage from its US constraints. He's always been more Sid James than Jay-Z in his lyrical concerns. "As much as I grew up on American rap, I had to ask myself very early on, as a British rapper, what are my strong points? I'm not good at showing off, so I would have to try a different way. I know, in certain quarters, I'm not seen as 'cool' in that I address mundane themes, but I only talk about what I know about, and I do that in some detail."
If Skinner's last album, the Novello-winning A Grand Don't Come for Free, was a "story", the new one is more of a moral fable. Over its 11 tracks he addresses his "celeb" status and what fame has done to him.
"Before all this happened, I used to believe what I read in the papers. Now I'm reading stuff in the papers about me which I know isn't true, but people are going to believe it - because I used to. This album is a pre-emptive strike; I talk about all the shock horror things I've got up to - and there's been quite a few. I just thought that me writing the scandals on my own album has got to be better than someone else getting it wrong in the papers. I did go off the rails a bit. Well, not so much off the rails as through the buffer and down the side of a hill as well."
It's all here: the booze, the drugs, the diva tantrums, the losing hundreds of thousands of pounds on his addiction to spread-betting, the fistfights with his manager (the latter had the temerity to beat his charge at a game of table football) and one surreal incident at a rock festival in Holland: "I totally lost it on stage, had a crazy tantrum about all these people in the crowd wearing fake Streets hats. Turns out they were all official merchandise from the Dutch label."
Elsewhere, he sings about some advice proffered by his manager: "Stop fucking pop stars, Michael, there are industry repercussions". But it's not all tales from tabloid hell: War of the Sexes is partly inspired by Neil Strauss's book The Game; Never Went to Church talks about "the two great European narcotics - alcohol and Christianity"; Two Nations treats of the transatlantic musical/linguistic divide.
"I was mentally and emotionally destroyed for a while," Skinner says. "That's what the album is partly about, the bad behaviour I indulged in. I was an idiot. I got carried away, got overexcited, and then three days later I would realise what I had done. I had to leave the country for a while because my name was on buses and everything. How bad did it get? That would probably be the time I drove a Ferrari through Las Vegas - and I can't drive.
"There is a fable in there somewhere. People might think I'm being really flash or whatever talking about all these things. But I'm being honest. This is really what happened to me. I mean, I used to work in Burger King. I'm not one of those people who would spit in the customer's food if they were annoying me. In fact, if I saw someone do that I would report them to the manager. I think it's disgusting. Robbing money from the till is one thing."
People forget that Skinner is from Birmingham."I don't know where people get the idea from that I'm from a block of flats in London," he says. "I'm not middle class, I'm not working class, I'm Barratt class [after the British housebuilding company]. I'm from a suburban estate. Not poor, not rich, and really boring. I lost my Brummie accent because when I moved to London I was in Brixton and it just wasn't seen as the sort of accent to have on the Brixton MC scene. People in Birmingham really disrespect me for losing my accent."
And like every Brummie Barratt boy, he does like his Rolls Royces. "I put a picture of mine on the cover of the album," he says. "It's a 1974 Silver Shadow, real Pimp My Ride stuff. I've spent 10 times more customising it than I actually paid for it. The stereo itself is worth four times the price of the car. I don't actually drive it, though. In fact, I'm scared to even touch it".
With his influence to be heard everywhere now, from Hard-Fi to the almost legally actionable echoes in the Arctic Monkeys, Mike Skinner is happier that, at last, his name is being used in reference to his contemporaries. "I've had some truly mad comparisons. I've been compared to Shakespeare and Dickens and Pepys. It's all rubbish. All I've ever done, or tried to do, with my music can be summarised in three words. Honesty. Conviction. Wit."
The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living is released on April 7th.
