The Story of the Streets by Mike Skinner

Author:Mike Skinner [Skinner, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

There was definitely an element of wanting to break with the expectations I’d established. In the music business, once you’ve

given people a clear idea of the kind of performer and person you are, everything becomes very reductive. The story that is repeated

endlessly is basically whatever you put in the press biog at the beginning of each campaign, and that transfers over into the ideas

pretty much everyone you come into contact with has about you. They’re all based on the few words you wrote down on a piece of

paper and gave to your press officer in the run-up to your album coming out.

That bit of paper which you give to them becomes what you are.

It’s quite fun to play around with this when you’re first getting used to it, but if you’ve got as short an attention span as I

have, the idea of doing this same thing over and over again becomes quite overpowering. To the point where you don’t actually want

to be that person any more, you end up wanting to be the exact opposite. Which is why every now and again you’ll see Liam

Gallagher on Alan Carr’s sofa talking about how he’s given up drink and drugs and all he wants to do is stay at home with his wife

and kids.

In my case, this process took me in a rather different direction. As I was getting older, I was realizing that people aren’t

always what they make out. I felt like I was learning things about human nature – as you do in your mid-twenties. You discover that

becoming an adult is a bit of a cover-up. You’re still young and probably just as bad as you always were, but you develop these kind

of airs and graces. The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living was meant to be an attack on the hypocrisy inherent in that process.

Picking up the Guardian and being told that I was the bastard Brit-rap love-child of Dostoevsky and Samuel Pepys probably

fed into that as well. Because I was so obsessed with the idea of story, you’d think I’d have taken great satisfaction from all these

people saying that A Grand Don’t Come For Free was such an amazing narrative construction. The only problem was, I knew it

wasn’t, really. Some of the songs were good, but it certainly wouldn’t have made a great film.

The frame of justification was not entirely cynical, but I’d certainly ticked the boxes in quite a school-literature-essay type of

way. Basically it was a pretty straightforward fairy-tale, in terms of the main character feeling he’d been wronged by the world and

then deciding he just had to get back out there and accept things. The more high-flown the claims people made for that album, the

more I felt it was just something quite simple that happened to work. I wanted to be a bit more sophisticated than that, and I think I

was quite down on humanity at the time, so the right thing to do next seemed to be to describe in forensic detail all the things that

weren’t Disney about me.

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