Well well well I took a week off of academia and working and low and behold after the inevitable crash the creative inspiration came back. So hey there!
This week I discovered Mike Skinner’s dream of an Artist in Residence series on 6 Music. What a man. It made ‘life admin’ more bearable: things like searching for a new dentist after reading the 1 star reviews of my current one (can’t do that to myself in good faith), discovering how many different kinds of bike panniers are out there and how you can absolutely buy the wrong kind (who knew), battling with software from the early 2010s to sort out our council tax bill and unnecessarily fretting about the next steps in my life even though I am far off needing to make them (am I???). My mum laughed when I referred to these responsibilities as ‘life admin’, saying that it’s basically the sum of adult life and its mundane minutae, and I was like, yup, the administrative side of existence and the gnarly feelings it brings.
Still, with BBC 6 Music Artist in Residence and a timer on my phone telling me I was only gonna do 40 minutes of the stuff, I was there, I was mildly more engaged. I’ve just finished Mike Skinner’s pre-show playlist (Whitney Houston, Elton John, Dr Dre) and as I write I’m delving into his favourite soundtracks (Barbara Streisand, Hans Zimmer, Susan Boyle’s version of I Dreamed a Dream — how I value the honesty). Luckily there’s around 8 episodes in the series, so more fuel for responsibilities.
Anyway Mike’s gone full in with this series — from club bangers to songwriters, rappers to MCs. He fills the episodes with anecdotes and advice, such as: make sure you choose what song your child is going to hear first in this world. Mike was very proud that for both of his kids the song of choice was Gladys Knight’s Midnight Train to Georgia. Spoken like a true musician but half surprised it wasn’t some club anthem. I wonder what mine would be: Ain’t No Mountain High Enough by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell if I’m feeling optimistic, A Song for Our Daughter by Laura Marling if I want to instil an appreciation for strings, Proud by Heather Small if I am fancying a love of irony and storytelling and remembering how my mum always used to play that when we were cleaning the house growing up. Yes, before Proud became a refrain in the BBC comedy series Miranda, my mum had a compilation album called ‘ Pure ChillOut’ with blue butterflies on the front and Heather Small was primarily associated with cleaning the bathroom. There’s a deep profundity that comes with asking yourself ‘what have you done today to make yourself proud’ while undertaking the messiest jobs associated with domesticity. Maybe Heather can be added to a hypothetical life admin playlist but then again, what I most crave to sit alongside the mundane is a sense of novelty, hence why I sought out Mike in the first place.
I’ve slept on The Streets until now. I love the classic ‘Fit But You Know It’ which I usually blast to feel full of myself, walking somewhere with too many eyes like the tube platform. Helps make me feel like the shit. And then I’ve encountered the strings of ‘Turn the Page’ in Charlotte Regan’s film, Scrapper. There’s an iconic opening scene of Georgie — a full of herself preteen — rambling over a bridge on a stolen bike. The camera pans and bam, ‘Turn the Page’ starts. Harris Dickinson, the guy who plays Georgie’s dad, quite blatantly jokes that actor Lola Campbell was pretty brutal to him in filming. Apparently she thought he was really uncool. I find this hilarious because it’s such a familiar dynamic: my guess is Lola was probably at that god-awful age of fancying Harris and being embarrassed about it because, well, he’s a fully grown man isn’t he and those feelings are distressing and bit cringe and she’s probably fully aware of that. Or perhaps that was just 10 y/o me with teenagers and young men, don’t wanna project onto Lola, she’s allowed to be critical for her own reasons, to chop a grown man down to size.
Anyway, have been finding my way through The Streets’ back catalogue on Youtube. I came across a video of Mike Skinner reading from his book where he recalls ‘being so off [his] face’ performing ‘Don’t Mug Yourself’ on Top of the Pops, that ‘it was virtually an out of body experience’. He calls getting wasted before a show ‘honest’, when placed alongside performers who relay the same information to audiences night after night in a predetermined script, as if Liverpool could be like Birmingham could be like London; how the potential and space for something to go wrong (as well as right) creates an atmosphere of ‘what if’ and adds to the spontaneity of the collective experience. You probably don’t need drugs for that Mike, but, hey, it’s rock and roll, baby, it’s the suspension of the ordinary, it’s the escape from normalcy and into the open jaws of the show and its communion.
The best bit about the video was looking at the comments afterwards talking about the 2002 TOTP performance. My favourite is from @friendman1852, who said ‘I remember seeing it on TV. It was utterly ludicrous and I’ve been looking for it since. A stand out memory is Mike, saucer eyed and seemingly speaking in tongues, blearily pawing at the bass guitar making a racket while the bassist (still wearing the bass) was laughing and shrugging. It’s ridiculous that it went out at like 7pm. I’m DYING to see it again, there must be some hero out there with a copy.’
Well, after that comment, I just had to find this recording. Glad to report some generous soul had uploaded it to Youtube so it was very easy. Go watch it for yourself. You’ll see it’s really not as bad as @friendman1852 remembered: the performance is relatively composed, but, yes, Mike is properly saucer-eyed and there is this comedy gold moment where the facade of the live performance is broken. First, Skinner tries to kick the bassist and misses. Then, he comes back and starts strumming on the bass so the bassist can’t play anymore and of course because all of Top of the Pops is prerecorded, the beat carries on indifferently as the bass player just waves his arms about for four bars before committing back to the illusion as Mike trundles away.
Back in the day Mike was a 22 year old trailblazer in Reebok, revolutionising rap through homemade jungle and garage beats and dissonant vocals. The sound is fiery, honest, laddish (irreverently so) and full of brilliant word play. In his early work he transports you so convincingly into the early 2000s world of underground and youth culture set alongside concerns of Brummie working class masculinity. As Skinner’s career and life shifts, so does the content of The Streets and its storytelling; the humour remains scathing as preoccupations with fame and mental health come more prominently to the forefront. Now I’ve only really chomped into the debut album Original Pirate Material, but in that one alone Skinner turns his eye to everything from the Criminal Justice Bill to alcoholism to the Saturday night fight at the local chip shop. He gives these episodes the scale to play out their drama and irony like a Renaissance play.
Think Mike has mellowed these days. Apparently last year he released a film and album — The Darker The Shadow, The Brighter The Light (what a name)— which took him seven years to make, and is a club murder mystery, ooo. He plays a character also called Mike Skinner, very clever. Makes me think of the blending of autobiography with art and how great it is to dissolve and play with the barrier of the two distinctions to bring about new kinds of forms because the barrier is never completely there or completely gone, is it?
For a few minutes Mike has the ability to make me feel like a right cheeky shit and a jungle head and a musician grappling with fame and a dude on a night out trying to pull even though I am definitely a woman typing this in the back-end of nowhere visiting my parents for the weekend. And that’s storytelling, done at its finest. Yeehaw. Thank you, Mike, for getting me wrangled about this guy looking at me wrong on a night out, thinking I could definitely take him, knowing I have never been in a physical fight in my life and that I am currently sat Googling alternative dentists because I fear I may cause irreparable damage if I stay at my current one. Life, always here in its irony and multiplicity.
That’s all the rambling for now.
Eden x