Drunk teenage girls aside, is there anything quite more unappealing than a whinging pop star? Their logic is unfathomable - they make a record, we buy it and make them famous and wealthy, then they make another record telling us how crap their lives are now and try and sell it to us all over again so they can make more money and wallow in more misery.
Sadly (for them at any rate) such exercises in moaning rarely set the tills ringing. From Pulp’s This Is Hardcore to the last Darkness record, they have a habit of repelling all consumers. Now Mike Skinner wants to join the club. If anyone could make this kind of thing work, you’d think it would be him, and indeed the album’s opening track is classic Streets - a brutally honest examination of Skinner’s deteriorating grip on reality that takes in sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and ends with his manager lamping him one over a game of table football.
It’s all good, knockabout cheeky-chappie-goes-a-bit crazy fun, until the line "Logic dictates that I should not be contemplating suicide" throws a much darker light on proceedings. It’s also the point where The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living could have got really interesting. For all his bravado, Skinner has proved time and time again that he has got a real handle on human emotion and the prospect of such severe soul-bearing is an intriguing one. Except he doesn’t deliver, instead settling to bitch about the hassles of fame.
This is, in truth, a pretty dull subject. The reason that A Grand Don’t Come For Free and Original Pirate Material worked so well was that they connected with Ordinary People as songs they could relate to. The only people who will relate to The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living are other disaffected pop stars and, on the title track, record company accountants. There’s even a song about trashing hotel rooms. This is not lyrical gold dust. Nor is it particularly musically interesting, devoid of the spark that characterised his previous work.
On occasion, though, he proves that he’s still got it - usually when he heads back to familiar territory. ‘All Goes Out The Window’ details his continuing problems of the heart, while ‘Never Went To Church’ is a self-aware tribute to his deceased father and ‘Two Nations’ cocks a snook to the US in witty fashion. Even the fairly unlovely single ‘When You Wasn’t Famous’ obtains new life in these surroundings, helped by the fact that it follows a couple of real howlers.
This, perhaps, is the greatest worry surrounding The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living - not that is isn’t a patch on his first two records, more that so much of it is just not very good. The mainstream audience that swooned to ‘Dry Your Eyes’ will run a mile, which is probably the idea. Critically, Skinner is pretty much bullet proof by now, so expect to see acres of print declaring the genius of this record. Don’t believe the type.