Over the phone from New York, Mike Skinner is explaining why he escaped stateside to mix his third album. "At the time, I'd just signed a deal with Reebok and they were putting me on the side of all the buses in London," he says. "I always like to be out of the country when it gets the most mental."
This would probably be a good time for the rapper better known as The Streets to plot a lengthy vacation.
Until now, Skinner has built his career on an ability to make something remarkable of the mundane. His 2002 debut, Original Pirate Material, was a left-field success story - a bedroom album fusing hip hop and rock, billed by Skinner as "a day in the life of a geezer," that somehow captured the zeitgeist of British youth culture. His big breakthrough, 2004's A Grand Don't Come for Free, was a concept album about going to clubs, taking recreational drugs, lining up for chips, meeting a girl, losing a girl, sitting around his couch - all tied together with a storyline in which he suspects his friends of stealing 1,000 pounds, only to discover it behind his TV on the final track. It's not inherently scintillating stuff, but Skinner somehow made it sound epic - generating two massive hit singles in the U.K., the pub-crawl anthem Fit But You Know It and the tear-jerking Dry Your Eyes. Moving three million copies, he became the voice of British kids decked out in athletic gear and living much the same lifestyle he rhymed about.
The kids will have a considerably harder time relating to The Hardest Way to Make An Easy Living, the follow-up album released today. But along with the tabloids, they'll certainly be talking about it.
Rather than pretending to be someone he ceased being a long time ago, Skinner opted to drop the Everyman act and deliver a gossippy, no-holds-barred look at where celebrity has taken him.
Lead single When You Wasn't Famous, which begins with a memorable Kate Moss-era lament ("See, the thing that's got it all fucked up is camera phones - how the hell am I supposed to be able to do a line in front of complete strangers when I know they've all got cameras?") has generated a minor firestorm in the U.K., the tabloids scrambling to uncover the identity of the female pop star Skinner purports to have smoked crack with. Not quite everything is so salacious - Never Went to Church is a genuinely moving tribute to his late father and Two Nations a witty stab at U.K./U.S. culture clash. But the rest of the album is stocked with similar stuff - Skinner laying out in loving detail his coke binges, temper tantrums, gambling addictions, industry frustrations and even a tongue-in-cheek guide to trashing a hotel room.
For his trouble, he can expect considerable backlash - already evidenced by some of his U.K. reviews. But Skinner knew that was coming, and wasn't about to let it stop him from making the album he wanted.
"I don't think people in England really like success," he assesses. "They don't like people who've got money and don't like famous people. I think that's why the tabloids are so brutal - people buy into it, they really do. What's more important to me is making honest records."
Honesty, he felt, was crucial - not just for the sake of a good album, but also for his own sanity. "I found myself in the last year explaining myself to people in pubs an awful lot about stories they'd read about me," he says. "So it's going to give me a lot of peace, this album, because people aren't going to come up to me and go 'What was all that about you losing loads of money gambling?' They're not going to ask me that anymore, 'cause they're going to hear it."
The point, in other words, was to beat the tabloids at their own game - to lay it all out before the gossip columnists had a chance to. But as much as he was driven by full disclosure, Skinner also appears to have been motivated by a fear of creative stagnation.
"I don't like the idea of you being able to compare me to my previous work, or even anyone else's," he says. "I think that's been my strong point - that I've pretty much stood alone. And that includes standing alone away from anything else I've done.
"I don't think anyone could accuse me of musical arrogance," he goes on, a bit defensively. "I don't think anyone could say that I was sitting on what I've got and expecting as much love as before. Because I've taken a risk on this album, or what people might think would be a risk."
Ultimately, for a guy with a short attention span who unabashedly admits his fondness for material possessions, it might all just be a matter of keeping himself entertained.
"To be honest, I was getting a bit bored of writing about pubs and clubs," Skinner says. "So luckily, now I've got all this crazy shit to write about that I've not written about before. Hopefully I'm going to become a recluse and get interested in architecture and have something different to write about on the next album."
