The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living

The Streets' third album, reviewed for The Word in May 2006.

Do you remember when a long white limousine would have been a stupefying sight on a British street, as extraordinary as a flying saucer? Now every Saturday night the town centres are full of them, hauling cargoes of puking teenagers apeing the bling scenarios of a hip hop video. At the time of his emergence with the startlingly good Original Pirate Material, Mike Skinner of The Streets looked set to become those teenagers' Poet Laureate - the cheeky chavvy with a gift for rhyming their everyday lives. But in 2006 Mike Skinner accepts he cannot posture as a spokesman for streets of any sort. He is a pop star now. He woke up one morning and found his long white limousine was still there in the driveway. It had not turned back into a pumpkin. What's more there was a fit-looking bird in bed next to him - and, fuck me, she was a pop star too!

Bear in mind that on his last album, A Grand Don't Come For Free, Skinner's lyrical reference points included an overdue rental DVD, beer mats, his mobile phone menu and watching The Bill. That's all gone now. The title track of The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living, and the majority of its other songs, are about his real life as the 'famous boy' of the wonderfully engaging When You Wasn't Famous. The Streets' third LP is a candid X-ray of pop star existence, a funny yet thoughtful meditation on fame, sex and the inevitable overlap between the two. Reference points this time around: tantrums on tour, tantrums when you come off tour, buying Ferraris, promo marketing budgets and the perils of celebrity drug consumption: 'You see the thing that's got it all fucked up now is camera phones.'

It's almost unknown for musicians to report back to their fans in this guileless way, but Skinner has seen that 'keepin' it real' cannot mean pretending that he still queues for kebabs after the pubs shut. What it does mean is that he must not get lost in showbiz, and luckily for his art, he's kept every shred of self-awareness. Inside his head, as he confesses on Pranging Out, there is a still, small voice that observes his pop star excesses with clinical detachment. His sex songs, likewise, tend towards scientific analysis: War Of The Sexes and It All Goes Out The Window follow the maze of courtship rituals and duplicity, just as When You Wasn't Famous applies a sort of geometric formula to the power balance of celeb-to-groupie and celeb-to-celeb relationships. His observations of mating games are so precise they're practically hip hop anthroplogy.

The Streets' new record will seal Skinner's reputation as a proper singer-songwriter, worthy of that distinguished English lineage that traditionalists like to place him in: Dury, Davies, Weller, Squeeze and Madness. It's not just the eye for our passing foibles, or the story-telling charm of his scammers' yarn You Can't Con An Honest Jon; it's the emotional power he can deploy in a song about his recently-deceased Dad, Never Been To Church, with its mix of soul-searching and the poignant authenticity of small details - the dying man putting his stuff in bins to save anyone the bother afterwards. That particular tune, as it happens, leans a bit closely to the piano chords of Let It Be but elsewhere Skinner's music sounds as fresh as his lyrics. He's especially good at switching a smooth rapper's flow for awkward, lurching lines whose Cockney-Brum syllables crash memorably into the garage/R&B scenery.

I've seldom come to the end of a hip hop album and wished it were longer but that's the case here. Then again, The Streets were always more Geezer than Gangsta, with an unpretentious urchin image that sold itself to middle-aged hearts right from the start. 'Around here we say birds not bitches,' he once sang, and on a new track called Two Nations (as in the old quip 'divided by a common language') he reflects on being a British artist in a US medium. The fact is that he's transcended those influences as surely as London boys like the Stones once ramped up the blues into something utterly different. Four years ago, Original Pirate Material introduced a restless young wannabe rap star. The Streets' third album fulfils not only the promise of the first but also its prediction. The beauty is that The Streets have become much more than that. If he can keep his mental thread from unraveling - and he seems acutely conscious of the risks that go with his job - then Mike Skinner might delight us for years and years.

Buy the CD at Amazon.co.uk

Buy the CD at Amazon.com