‘Has it Come To This?’
The Streets at The Royal Festival Hall
Festival season is upon us, and on Thursday, I was in attendance at the opening event of the Southbank Centre’s annual season of cultural activity, Meltdown Festival. Each year, the festival’s lineup is curated by an established music artist or act — previous directors have included Elvis Costello, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Morrissey, Jarvis Cocker, Nick Cave, and John Peel to name but a few. Meltdown has been an annual treat of cultural variety since 1993, with the exception only of 2006 when the Royal Festival Hall in the Soutbank Centre was closed for refurbishment, and 2020 when it was postponed until 2022 due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
This year, Meltdown was curated by Grammy Award winning British rapper, Little Simz — whose album Sometimes I Might Be Introvert was a personal favourite of mine in 2022. I loved that album for so many reasons, but one reason was just the sheer variety of influences Simz was able to pull off on one record, from Radiohead to FKA Twigs, to Gorillaz to Dizzee Rascall, and above all, Mike Skinner of The Streets. So, no brainer that Simz chooses to open her curated Meltdown Festival with Skinner himself. Skinner, after all, is still a hot influence not just for Simbi but for a myriad of other commercially and critically successful artists — from The 1975 to Charli XCX, and even new up-and-coming British acts cite Skinner’s spoken word story telling style over grimy beats as a point of inspiration, like Peace Okezie AKA Master Peace who even collaborated with Skinner on The Streets’ track Wrong Answers Only, or frontman of alternative indie pop band Hard Life, Murray Matravers.
Aside from those Skinner is influencing, the man himself is still touring and releasing music under The Streets title, some 20 years on from the release of his seminal 2002 debut, Original Pirate Material. Recorded mostly in a room in a South London house rented at the time by a 26 year old Skinner, the album is musically influenced by UK garage and American hip hop, while its lyrics tell stories of British working-class life. The Guardian dubbed it №1 album of the decade in 2009. Skinner’s wry, witty, and irreverent observational songwriting on British drug culture, romance and heartbreak, and masculinity was paired with a clear passion for the music of UK garage and pirate radio stations. The opening track of the record, Turn The Page, opens with a fanfare of bombastic strings while Skinner provides some powerful spoken word verse:
“Hear the strings rising, the war’s over, the bells ring
Memories fading, soldiers slaying, looks like geezers raving”
It served as a powerful mission statement for the album, as Skinner warns the audience “Brace yourself ’cause this goes deep// I’ll show you the secrets to sky and the birds // Actions speak louder than words // Stand by me, my apprentice // Be brave, clench fists”. What follows is the magnificent Has It Come to This? which features an earworm soul sampled vocal in the backing track, over which Skinner waxes lyrical about drugs, garage music, and the London landscape to which the music is indelibly tied: “My Underground train runs from Mile End to Ealing // From Brixton to Boundsgreen // My spitting’s dirty, my beats are clean, so smoke weed and be lean”. These kind of verses, paired with the cover art of a high-rise block of council housing make it undeniably clear: this album is a work of the English urban landscape, or as Skinner himself says on the track “Deep seated urban decay, deep seated urban decay”. After that, we go on a journey of genres to the ska/reggae infused Let’s Push Things forward, the grimy breakdown of English masculine aggression on Geezers Need Excitement, the momentous lament for lost love and regret that is It’s Too Late, the laddish, spunky punky anthem Don’t Mug Yourself, the ecstatic reverie of Weak Becomes Heroes which sees Skinner recounting his first experience with ecstasy at a house party contrasted with his life 5 years after the drugs and partying, and closing on the nervy and uncertain finale of Stay Positive. Everything after Skinner’s debut never really reached the same peak of creativity, irreverence, and influence as this. It would be hard to overstate the shadow which Original Pirate Material cast, and continues to cast, on British music.
Needless to say, I was very excited to see Skinner kickoff Meltdown on Thursday, but have come away incredibly disappointed. I want to give Skinner the benefit of the doubt — the Royal Festival Hall, a luxurious venue intended for classic orchestral performances, was not necessarily the ideal site for the rave-ready rhythms of The Streets, especially given it is an entirely seated setting. But, having witnessed Master Peace lead a self-proclaimed slut-pop rave in the almost university-lecture-theatre style Queen Elizabeth Hall at last years Chaka Khan curated Meltdown, I was optimistic that the 46 year old Skinner, a far more seasoned, experienced and established artist than the twenty-something Okezie, would be able to successfully fill the hall with his leftfield style. I guess that was me… “Just tryin’ to stay positive”. Instead, what we got was Skinner making constant reference to the restriction of the venue — attempting to irreverently poke fun of the setup, repeatedly “joking” about how the audience standing up in their seats was unfair to other audience members who remained sat behind them. I say attempting, and put joking in quotation marks, because for it to have been a joke it would have had to be funny — rather, the consistent reference to this situation took me and most audience members around me out of the performance, and quite frankly, just got a bit annoying. It felt as if Skinner was trying to come off as the meta, irreverent observationalist that we are all familiar with from Original Pirate Material, but in his older-age was less able to improvise on the spot and so kept returning to the same old bit, beating it like a dead-horse. Skinner ordered the audience to sit or stand via visual prompt — primarily by standing up or jumping off an upturned monitor. During the bits he demanded the audience remained seated, he repeatedly reiterated how he could see the passion in their eyes to stand up and have a good time — he said this like 5 times throughout the night…it stopped being funny after the first one.
It’s not that I care about being told to sit or to stand, nor that any of Skinner’s jokes were offensive (on the contrary, it was how inoffensive they were that really irked) — it’s that I can’t really stand washed, former auteurs headlining a momentous festival in the Brutalist utopia of the Royal Albert Hall, whilst endlessly repeating the same dead, dry, and honestly cringe old bits. Get better material, Mike, seriously.
But fine, I can forgive bad stage presence or a not very charismatic frontman as long as the performance of the music itself is good — but that’s the problem…Skinner kept up with his shit stand-up routine over the soulful sideman providing the iconic vocals of tracks like Has It Come to This? and Weak Become Heroes. While the talented musicians in the slick and subtle band deftly handled the skittering beats, jazzy interludes and operatic undercurrents of The Street’s catalogue, Skinner kept chatting absolute shit between his spoken word parts about how he expected a standing ovation at the end (and how that was a funny thing to want given the seated/standing setup). I think Skinner’s reason for the constant shit banter, other than wanting to come across as the cheeky chappy full of good chat that we loved from Original Pirate Material primarily, was, I believe, unfortunately, to pad the run time of the gig. Now, this might sound strange given The Street’s has been releasing for nearly 25 years, with 7 albums worth of material to choose from, but I think Skinner knows as much as we do that the material after Original Pirate Material is not only less well-known, but also less well-received. He knew to play the greatest hits, most of which came from his debut, and pad the time in between by repeating how much he knew the audience wanted to stand up and/or sit down, and how one audience member had a Burberry shirt on. And all I could think was…god, has it come to this? One of the most innovative and influential musicians of British music has resorted to padding his headlining set of an important festival with bottom of the barrel crowd-work, all the while surrounding himself with evidently talented musicians, to parasite off their abilities in an attempt to elevate himself. If anyone deserved an ovation, it wasn’t Skinner, it was the masterful guitarists, the awesome drummer, and above all the phenomenal vocalist who he kept talking over.
Skinner’s incessant chatter just reeked of desperation and insecurity — part of why his debut was so successful was partly because it was a product of its time, and depended in large part upon the twenty something year old Skinner to be the vector of the message in the young-man’s game that was garage music. His PR image was as a funny, irreverent young street poet speaking relatably to his peers about life in the UK — about “another day in the life of a geezer”, about texting girls, going to parties and doing drugs, about being a stoner and playing playstation. But not only is that early 2000s geezer lifestyle sort of gone now, but that young man is gone too — and yet, Skinner tries to keep the act alive, desperate for approval, desperate for applause or for a laugh, all the while peddling shit bits. By contrast, Master Peace dealt with the restrictions of the venue masterfully, making reference to it only once at the beginning of his set and coming off as very real and authentic, asking his audience to bare with him in the unusual setup, but promising that by the end they’d all be raving…and by the end, we were!
Some of the best artists I’ve ever seen are artists that don’t talk much during their live performances. When I saw The Cure, for instance, in 2022, Robert Smith had a little spiel in the beginning of the night to thank people for flocking to the Wembley arena in the snow for the gig, a little joke before Friday I’m In Love, and then a thank you at the end — the set was nearly 3 hours long. Smith didn’t need to keep talking — he knew that that wasn’t what fans were there to see (though, I believe most Cure fans would happily have heard more from Smith, I certainly would have). They were there for the music, and he was happy to let the music speak for itself, and do the talking for him. He was confident in his material, as he rightly should be! Skinner, on the other hand, spoke too much and what he had to say was nothing of substance or of comedy, no matter how hard he tried — rather, it was telling of a desperation, insecurity, and a lack of confidence in himself as a performer, and of his material.
Looking at the reception to the gig from other perhaps more mainstream outlets I find myself to be in the minority — most people seemed to enjoy the gig. The Times’ headline read “Mike Skinner has total command of his audience”, while another read “Mike Skinner goes high culture”. And to these reviewers, and any other members of the audience who enjoyed the performance, all I have to say is: more power to you…well, not really. First of all, if getting up on a box to get your audience of middle-aged fans to get up also, and to slow bob along to your music is considered “total command” then I would love to see what these same outlets would make of a band like Refused, who, when their last planned show before their breakup got shut down by the police, had all of their fans turning around and shouting the line from their song Rather Be Dead, “Rather be alive”, and attempted through physical altercations with the cops to prevent the final gig from being shut down. That is total control of one’s audience, not repeating some shit jokes at them and jumping on a box to indicate that you want them to stand up. But anyway, no one really reads The Times for their insightful cultural commentary or review…or rather, no one ought to read them for that, and yet many still do. One shudders at the thought.
Second, if Skinner’s pathetic attempts at comedy which ultimately boil down to the same repeated, unfunny bit for an hour straight, over the top of his own music and the skillful playing of his band, is considered “high culture” then I’d hate to see what these critics consider low culture. The point is, if this is truly high culture, then culture has reached even more of a nadir than I previously thought possible.
Admittedly, there probably is a generational disconnect — as one review pointed out, Skinner was performing to “a now middle-aged crowd” to whom his music evokes “misspent teenage years in poetic form”. The reviewer, Mark Worgan continued, that the gig was “part stand-up, part concert, part millennial self-help seminar”. To which I would respond, Mark you should probably go to more stand-up gigs mate — seriously they aren’t that hard to find, there are loads of good cheap works in progresses happening in London at the minute in the lead up to the Fringe, you can do so much better than Skinner’s pathetic attempts at “comedy”. But regardless, I put my hands up: I’m not a millennial in need of self-help from a washed-up parasitic hack, and I’m also not a nostalgia-addled midlifer who is content with slop and member-berries. I’m a gen Z whose introduction to The Streets was by way of homage and reference from culturally relevant artists to and of my generation — and so, in this way, I went back to Original Pirate Material with a completely different lens, and came out of it with completely different expectations of Skinner and his live act. I don’t associate The Streets with teenagers years spent in 2000s London — I was born 5 months and a day after Original Pirate Material released, and I didn’t become a teenager until 2015 — rather I associate his music with other cool relevant young artists of the present who have been inspired by him, and for whom, he was a template. Some might rebuff me for this and argue that I was therefore somehow too late to really appreciate Skinner, but I would argue that on the contrary, I was young enough not to be blinded by nostalgia and the middle-aged desperation of reliving one’s youth to admit when he had gotten a bit cringe and a bit shit.
If I seem to be coming off as harsh, then I’m not sorry! The British music press has forgotten its purpose — to paraphrase Simon Reynolds, we are here to identify the leading edge and proselytise on its behalf, while simultaneously directing laser beams of criticism to discredit the wrong paths being taken and to clear space for the true music of our time, or more accurately, the true music of the future, the true birthing of the new in culture. What we are not here to do is to acquiesce to a postmodern form of appeasement and relativism, where we say that everyone ought to just enjoy whatever slop they just so happen to enjoy, and by so doing, amalgamating all genres, and sublimating all actual attempts at counter-cultural praxis to the desires of algorithmic marketing. Likewise, we are not here to embrace and praise artists based on our nostalgia for them, when their real, actual present output falls far below the material we fell in love with them for. We are here to weaponise praise in support of the new and radical, while also setting challenges for music — and for listeners and readers too. If Mike Skinner wants a standing ovation, he should work bloody harder to get one — he should innovate, not rest on the laurels of his greatest hits while turning in lackluster performances where he treats (or rather tortures) the audience to cringe-inducing bits over his music, all the while charging at least £65 a ticket. If he is unable to do that, if he is unable to innovate and perform, then he should bow out and let other artists who are interested in and able to be the vanguard of new cultural production take the spotlight in his stead. After all, as he mentioned at the gig on Tuesday, his two children have just finished their GCSEs — there must be more important things going on for him in his personal life than ruining his reputation and embarrassing himself on stage for a paycheck, a paycheck which he probably doesn’t even need.
So yes, if you enjoyed The Streets gig on Tuesday, I’m not going to say that I’m happy for you, that I’m glad you got more out of it than I did, or any other of those PoMo catchphrases that allow the reader to revel in their consumption of comfortably nostalgic slop. You deserve better, you should expect better, and you should demand better. If Original Pirate Material was a story of how the weak could become heroes, the show at the Royal Festival Hall was a display of how easily your heroes can become weak.
