The High Life: The Streets' Mike Skinner

Those looking to attend the upcoming tour will be heartened to hear that Mike has been honing these skills across the summer with appearances at events like Ibiza Rocks, “it was just an amazing, amazing show. The whole crowd was ... I do these go lows, which has been copied largely, but of which I was the inventor! Lets not forget that! So doing that and getting everyone in the pool it was just a really really cool show. People always have a really good time at a Streets gig.”

Speaking with Mike Skinner and looking through the videos and lyrics to ‘Everything Is Borrowed’ it’s brought back home what an ordinary guy he is. It’s easy to forget the fresh bedroom sound of ‘Original Pirate Material’ and think of the headlines and celeb baiting moments that accompanied his two follow ups. “I think there was a lot of misunderstanding, down to me really, but I never had a celebrity lifestyle, I think I was struggling with my own self image, I think thats what that (‘Hardest way to make an easy living’) was about,” Mike muses. “People can’t fill in the gaps as they have no idea what my life was like at that time and had a lot of preconceptions as to what they thought my life was like. I think you add all those things together and it sounds like I’m complaining, but I was just a young guy thrust into an odd...they weren’t these situations of celebrity that I was in. I was just someone who had really changed in the estimation of people but my lifestyle hadn’t really changed.”

Nowhere is the perception of the music geek next door better illustrated than when Mike gets onto the subject of his obsession with rare drum machines like his recently acquired Roland TR-909 and the potential chances for re-skinning it. “There’s an amazing guy down in Devon, he’s just done the Kaiser Chiefs, I can’t stand the Kaiser Chiefs, but he’s just down all of their gear in white and it looks amazing. I haven’t got too colour schemey on this tour but I love what he’s doing and I’ve actually just got a 1973 Fender bass which he’s turning pink for me, that’s my theme so it will all be luminous pink and yellow and green, but like army camouflage!” When he chats drum machines there’s a quiver in his voice and a near tear in his eye.

As for the future past the release of ‘Everything Is Borrowed’ and the subsequent tour? Well there’s the aforementioned fifth album that is well underway, “I am writing constantly,” says Mike enthusiastically, before revealing the long hard road ahead for the escapist himself, “I’m hoping to be on the Big Day Out in February though I’m still not on their line up. Then obviously we’re going to do America as well next year.”

So even if the future holds Mike Skinner the actor in its sights we can rest assured that there’s a few years left on The Streets yet.