ROCK’N’ROLL CONFIDENTIAL
Mike Skinner
The Streets’ UK rap auteur talks country music, raving in your forties and making movies.
One for the road: The Streets’ Mike Skinner – still doing what he always did.
Ben Cannon
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.”