Wednesday, May 03, 2006  

Here's the complete interview transcript for a short article I did in the May 2006 issue of Harp. The assignment was to ask Skinner about his drinkin' & druggin'. And, like, music stuff.

The Streets' Mike Skinner:
Light 'Em
By Christopher Porter

Following the success of 2004's concept album A Grand Don't Come for Free, British rappper-producer Mike Skinner indulged in lots of drugs and debauchery while also enduring the death of his father. The Streets' lone member chronicles his wild life on The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living, another top-notch storybook with banging beats. Skinner's lyrics are funny, cutting and intelligent, and he's unrelentingly honest about his indulgences, illegal or otherwise.

With your second album you went into it with the idea of writing it as a song cycle. Was this one more a result of individual pieces that just happen to come together?

I do write the songs all at the same time. I did that on the first album, and I did it obviously on the second. And I did it on this one. In a way it is all one story, there's just no reference to time.

The one story being you dealing with your post-2004 success and the death of your father?

Yeah, but they're all basically [part] of the same story.

The first single, "When You Wasn't Famous," is causing a bit of a stir. It features you having sex and smoking crack with a fellow pop star, who you then see on TV a few hours later looking just fine. Have the tabloids been bugging you to name the person in the song?

I think if I actually spoke to the tabloids they'd probably bug me. They've dug up many things in my career, so that doesn't bother me. That's just the way it is in England. That's the game that you're in.

Were the revelations on the album a way of you devaluing the tabloids, by just putting the information out there yourself about all the crazy times you've had the past few years?

No. Even though I don't ever speak to them, and I have no intention to speak to them, I've got absolute respect for them. All they're really doing is the same as me: They're trying to sell papers and I'm trying to sell records. If I can think of a really good idea for a song, I won't put nothing in my way to make that song happen. The only difference with them is that their songs, so to speak, are involved in real people's lives. But they can't worry about that because they're too busy trying to sell papers.

But you don't name names....

I mean, if I had to.... To be honest, I wouldn't be a journalist. But someone's got to do it, because there are a lot of papers to sell: you name names. If the papers never named names, no one would buy the papers. It's a necessary -- it's not the papers that are really bad; they're just a product of what people so fervently want. Because people who are two steps away from it, they'll spend their quid on the paper, read the story, the scandal about Hugh Grant or whatever, and then mutter at that the papers, "Oh, that's terrible, you shouldn't exploit him like that." But you spend the quid on the paper. So I've got no ax to grind with the papers; I just don't deal with them. More healthy for me.

What prompted the "Two Nations Divided by One Language" song?

All my musical references are American, really. I'm a great lover of America. But that [song's] just my sense of humor. I'm not knocking America in any way. It was originally supposed to be on the Biggie Smalls duets album. I met up with P Diddy when I was here in November [2005], and he was putting the album together. That was the song I did that was supposed to be a duet with Biggie. I wrote the only song I could think of writing. [It was left off the Biggie duets CD.] Rightfully so, to be honest. It wasn't deemed suitable for American mass consumption.

You've made an art of the rap ballad. On this CD it's "Never Went to Church" and "Out Goes Out the Window." Has your family heard "Never Went to Church"?

Yeah. They like it, but it's difficult, because it involves them in a way. My mom's been able to retire and move down to London; I keep her so close, that it doesn't really matter. It's not an issue. We don't really talk about my job too much. We've got a life that's away from that. It is expression, but I'm also making a good life for her. So however that happens....

Was she shocked at anything on the new album?

My parents are quite what you might call liberal. They've seen it all before, to be honest.

Now that this album is done, do you see yourself as having come out of the wild, drink and drug period you document on it, or is that still ongoing?

It's very much a part of my life. It's never what I'd call that much of a problem; I just had to sort a few things out. Because I'm British, I'm surrounded by that all my life. I can abstain, and I can carry on with my business, but it will always be -- that's just what the British do. I've got a really big family as well; that's just the way we do things. But music was always the only real thing in my life.

Since you're so honest about your drug use, do you ever worry about being a target of an investigation?

No. I think because I'm honest, I'm not a target. With the British papers, the only the angle they can find is an inconsistency. So if you're on kids' TV or reading the news or something, and you get found doing drugs, it's like, "That's very naughty" and it's a big scandal. But if you got a photo of me doing drugs, that's not a scandal. In fact, I could give you photos of me doing drugs. There's a whole DVD that we're about to release. It's quite a safe thing to do; just put it all out there. Then there's very few things that might be deemed scandalous.

What's this DVD?

We've been filming this DVD the past few years. You know that last song on the album, "Fake Streets Hat," all that talking you can hear, the stage stuff? That's all from a video from that whole weekend. I don't know when it's coming out. We've got all the footage; it's just turning it into something. I've been too busy promoting the album at the moment, but as soon as it dies down a bit, we'll get on it [the DVD].

Do you have a favorite drink and drug?

Yeah, I quite like the American way, really. I think that's quite funny. What is it? Adderall and Klonopin. I think you guys are bit inhibited about talking about it sometimes, but I actually think you're quite sophisticated with your partying. But we just probably do it a lot more and talk about it a lot more. But you're a lot more open about sex; we're pretty inhibited about all that stuff.

Those are both prescription drugs; what about the illegal stuff?

Well, anything, to be honest. I mean, I rarely decide to do drugs. I don't go out and decide I'm gonna get off my face. But there's always something going on to get involved in.

No worries about addiction?

Not really. I suppose if I were to be addicted to anything it would probably be booze. I don't think it would be all the time. I think I could quite easily get drunk every night, but I think I'd be a long way off from waking up and drinking.

What's your drink of choice?

Brandy, and just beer, really. But not American beer; European beer. It's got to be at least 4 percent [alcohol]. Not Miller Light.

You talk a lot about your gambling habits on the new CD. Is that still going on?

Not really. To be honest, the only addiction that I can ever say I've had is music. That will always completely consume my life. I think if I lost that I'd very quickly go downhill.

What did you like to bet on?

In England we have this thing called spread betting; it's not fixed odds. You bet live. You can bet on the red and yellow cards. You can bet on corners, multicorners, which is like the amount of corners that Man U is gonna get multiplied by the amount of corners Chelsea is gonna get. You can bet on who is gonna be the first to score; you can bet on what minute the first goal comes, what minute the last goal comes. It's just endless. Once you get into it it's like the crack of gambling. There's a lot of little nuances in games that you begin to see the game through. Whenever I watch a football game now, I tend to watch the player's faces more, because then you can hope to predict whether there are going to be any fouls or reds or yellows. That's what I'm really into: reds and yellow cards, mainly. Whether the game's gonna turn ugly or whether it's gonna remain peaceful. Sky, which is our big satellite company, has started putting up those stats on their screen. Betting in England is quite reliable, really; we're quite peaceful. When it really gets nutty is when you're betting on Spanish League stuff. Because if it's a hot day and somebody looks at somebody funny, you can end up with half the players being sent off. African tournaments are pretty cool as well. Because even though it gets really violent, they don't give out as many reds and yellows. So one guy will run in and be literally four foot in the air with both feet karate kicking another player, and he won't even get a yellow card. The game won't stop playing. It makes you realize why all the Africans, when they play on English teams, foul a lot. That's just the way it is. Like with German people, when you're out and about in Germany, they push you out of the way. That's just what Germans do.

What's up next for your label, the Beats?

We got the Mitchell Brothers, we got Professor Green and we just a signed a new guy named Example. To be honest, that is my main priority now. I produced some of the Kano stuff. As a producer, Kano's my biggest success.

A couple of years ago in The Guardian, a professor wrote that your last album was comparable to Dostoyevsky and Samuel Pepys. What did you think of that? Do you have any influences from the literary world?

No. I'm probably more influenced by Nas than I am Dostoyevsky. I didn't know what a poem was until.... As I've gotten older, to be honest, I've read about poetry. What I'm really into is songwriting: the Jimmy Webbs, the Kris Kristoffersons and stuff like that. I think songs can be poetic, but I think comparing songs to poetry, it's not the same thing.
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Lemon-Red and Music: For Robots have video commentary from Mike Skinner about each track on The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living. Stream the whole CD on AOL Music.

Posted by CP | Link |

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