Saw some discussion of The Streets’s early work, and went to see if this article was still online - it’s not because the Vice brand partnership vertical (I’m sorry) that it was originally written for is gone. So here you go again!
I don't hold with the insidious theory that making brilliant art is a young man's game – or, in the words of Sickboy in Trainspotting, that “you have it, then you lose it”. It's a trope that's been with us since the beginning of rock'n'roll, dammit since the romantic poets, that idea that inspiration is intrinsically tied up with the energy of youth, that great works come like a bolt from the blue and artists are best off dying young1 rather than chasing round in ever-decreasing circles trying to relight your creative fire the rest of your sorry life. But it's clearly rubbish, a denial of craft and labour, put about by fantasists and advertisers and used as justification by those with a vested interest in keeping us emotionally immature and by the worst kind of poseurs for their ghastly Peter Pan antics.
Every so often, though, something I see or hear will make me think again – will make me have a flickering moment of belief in the essential white light of youthful creativity. And 'Original Pirate Material' is one of those things. I mean, have you heard it recently? Really heard it? Played it loud from the beginning, given it your full attention, let that utterly insane opening salvo of 'Turn the Page', 'Has it Come to This' and 'Let's Push Things Forward' work their magic on you? It's arm-hair raising stuff, it really is. The false hierarchies and dreary consensus of best-ever lists is another of those things I don't hold with, but yeah this really, really deserved to be on all those best-of-the-2000s lists, and I will gladly fight its corner against the Arctic Monkeys, Dizzee, Radiohead, Outkast, whatever you care to bring in fact.
Like almost all the best music, I didn't really get it at first. It was tinny-sounding and clattery, where I was used to dance music's oomph; I couldn't work out what Skinner's roaming accent was getting at as he slipped and slid across the rhythms, in and out of ordinary conversational cadence, lurching from sublime to ridiculous within single phrases. It was intriguing right enough, but it was impossible to shake the idea that it was all a bit contrived, an indie-weakened version of soundsystem/MC culture, or even more naggingly the idea that it was a wind-up, that this music was taking the piss out of all of us. Lines nicked from 'Gladiator' and talk about his Reeboks? Be serious. And then I had the epiphany.
The scene couldn't have been set better, really. I was out in Amsterdam for eight days on my first ever magazine feature assignment – to cover a conference on Amazon shamanic practice AND a High Times convention. I'd been hanging out with psychonauts, ravers, witch doctors2 and Dutch farmers, and experienced the best that ancient cultures and modern science had to offer; I was in a terrific mood as I was finally doing the job I'd always wanted to, and had been able to utter the immortal phrase “can I claim my ritual on expenses3, please?” on the phone to the Face magazine office. So when someone mentioned “that new band The Streets are playing the Melkweg” I was pretty much up for it.
The DJ beforehand, a Dutchman called Big Head, was playing what was generally known as “breakstep”, a kind of funky uncle to dubstep, and I liked it so much I bought his mix CD4. The Streets were very late coming on, but the crowd were raving and so was I, so who cared? When they did crash onto the stage, though, Skinner immediately and repeatedly asking the crowd if anyone had any cocaine, it was a glorious disruption of the groove, their sound spiky and awkward, and from the beginning I loved it. I don't remember a lot about the band except there was an ex-member of the Senseless Things5 on bass, and that Skinner and his co-vocalist spent a lot of the set pushing, shoving and trying to trip one another up.
And that's when it clicked into place: yes, this was a piss-take, but it was a deadly serious piss-take. This child-like 24-year-old was not just meandering between voices, themes and levels of seriousness, he was embodying every single one of them. He was a shaman too6. What was chaos and what was control became impossible to discern7. The only time I could remember seeing elemental clowning like this before on a stage was the Happy Mondays back in 1990, but I also recognised the spirit of so many loony rave urchins I'd been bamboozled and bantered at and had lighters stolen by over the years8, the never-ending babble of these Shakespearean monkeys, possessed by the endless power of the English language to spin out shaggy dog stories, to make jokes of the most serious matters and suddenly turn jokes deathly serious. The films that were projected as back stories to each of the tracks matched the quotidian urban subject matter of those songs – but they, like the lyrics and the music, revealed something so much more primal beneath. And still you could dance, laugh, drink and carouse to it.
Which is why, when I listen to 'Original Pirate Material' now, I don't hear “bloke poetry” or grittiness or mundanity or social realism any of those other things that are inevitably reeled out. I hear constant windows in to the most profound and abstracted of human instincts and experiences: vertigo, jealousy, transition, glory, loss, innocence and so much more. Just listen to the sudden swerves from domestic detail to dizzying generality in 'It's Too Late' or the affirmation and melancholy in 'Weak Become Heroes': these are about so, so much more than losing a girl or doing a pill9. They're about being human. Only years later did I start realising that Skinner was writing in a great English language tradition going a millennium back to Beowulf and taking in Sterne, Carroll, Lear, Pound, Spike Milligan, Ivor Cutler, Mark E Smith and Roots Manuva10, gibbering gobshites and bullshit artists, holy fools who could skip wildly into parts of our psyches where angels fear to tread.
He could never top this, could he? None of this is to dismiss Skinner's later work – he has on occasion made some glorious music and told some great tales since, and especially on 'Computers and Blues' when he turned full circle back to some of his early themes and freeform lyricism he showed he was tapped into the same wellspring – but 'Original Pirate Material' had it all. Everything afterwards, whether it's his narratives of modern life and celebrity, or his more philosophical turns, couldn't help but be self-conscious, trying to impose more structure onto what he had already expressed so perfectly in its rants, sketches, jokes and asides. This isn't about drugs, it's not about “authenticity”11, and it's not really about youth as such – others have tapped into this very British, very mongrel method of accessing the ways of the human mind from very different places and perspectives – but for Skinner it was all tied into a particular openness to everything that comes with being a hungry young man with his eyes (very) wide open.
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1 See the infamous “27 Club”, much discussed when Amy Winehouse carked it, and so called because it's the number of times anyone who takes it seriously deserves to have their face walloped with a cricket bat.
2 To be precise, a shaman from the Shuar tribe of Ecuador who played the Jew's harp.
3 Yes, bloggers, these were the days when journalists got paid expenses. They were decadent times, the early 00s.
4 In fact it is sitting on my desk right now, and it still sounds good.
5 You think nonsense genre names like “Post Dubstep” or indeed “Breakstep” are silly? Back in the 90s, The Senseless things were lumped, along with Mega City 4 and Silverfish into a genre called Fraggle Rock. Seriously.
6 No Jew's harp though, just a microphone.
7 You want to know how giddy with the brilliance of it all I was feeling at that moment? My brain flashed up the image of Stockard Channing going “chaos... control... chaos... control... you like?” to Will Smith as Donald Sutherland spun a double-sided Kandinsky in 'Six Degress of Separation'. And what? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjwiachXkjc
8 One routine about fake vs real Nike caps that managed to weave in and out of between-song patter for almost the entire set was such archetypal rave bollocks that you'd swear you'd heard it before from someone who was about to do you out of a tenner at some party on a hillside.
9 They're about those things too, though.
10 Peter Ackroyd's 'Albion: the Origins of the English Imagination' is the book you need on this topic, although admittedly he doesn't get right the way through to Roots Manuva.
