On this day in 2002: The Streets released Original Pirate Material

Originally published in Hot Press in 2002:

“It’s not pop. Do you know what I mean?” Mike Skinner is telling me. It’s eight in the morning on the release day of Original Pirate Material; and, despite the hour, this geezer – to use a pet word of his – is clearly already in full effect. His voice rings with the kind of absolute certainty you can only muster when you have an entire movement behind you: but if there is a movement afoot, this fresh-faced 22-year-old – aka mod-garage maverick The Streets – has invented it, populated it and personified it himself.

“The Streets is rock and roll,” he continues, extremely emphatically. “That’s what I was saying, when I said that I make ‘bangers, not anthems’ [a lyric from the …Material single 'Let's Push Things Forward’].

“It’s like: Don’t knock me for doing my own thing. I make rock and roll music, not pop music. And if it doesn’t fit into the pop criteria, then don’t blame me. ’Cos I wasn’t trying to be pop. Do you know what I mean?”

It’s definitely not pop. If you had to categorise The Streets’ debut - a hilarious, terrifying, acutely-drawn near-documentary snapshot of the aimlessness and exhilaration of young suburban life - its closest kin is garage, followed by hip-hop (especially Skinner’s faves Wu-Tang Clan), two-tone (think The Specials) and dub reggae. But really - in the sense that it is a self-produced solo project, totally blindsides you, sounds like nothing else, and opens the book on a fresh new page in pop music – everything about The Streets is rock and roll.

Don’t let the beats fool you: as Skinner says, this ain’t your typical garage joint. Having grown up on a Barratt estate in Birmingham, the ‘streets’ Skinner documents are not the shiny-glam, aspirational, fictitious settings you find behind ‘normal’ garage tracks, but are distinctly suburban: identical, sprawling, vista-less, totally removed from the variety, opportunity and cosmopolitanism of city life, and characterised by all-too-predictable wasted-youth scenarios involving drugs and violence. His tales are as fast-moving and vivid as raw documentary, and his rapping – skittering from geezerish black humour to dead seriousness in the space of half-sentences – recalls Gil Scott-Heron’s socially-conscious ghetto poetry in its unflinching candour and economy.

In particular, an arresting mid-album one-two punch encapsulates his whole gritty, spliff-boredom-and-adrenaline-fuelled aesthetic. ‘Geezers Need Excitement’, with its point-blank lyrics and terrifying train-wreck orchestra break, is practically a public service message (‘If their lives don’t provide ‘em they stay inside violence/Common sense/Simple common sense’) – and ‘Same Old Thing’ sums up bereft youth quicker than you can say No Future (“Apparently/There’s a whole world out there somewhere”, drones a protagonist through a headache-fug of Bensons and beer, fucked up and spoiling for a brawl after yet another night of ‘football and smut’, time-killing and pointless aggro: “I just don’t see it…/I just don’t see it…”)

It’s an exceptionally British record – but as specifically observed as it is, it’s only for the Eastenders colloquialisms that it couldn’t just as easily be a grimy street-level view of the suburban ghettoes of New York, Paris, Belfast, Dublin, anywhere.

Like any even-handed documentary however, Original Pirate Material shows us the vertiginous highs alongside the bleak lows: there’s No Future, sure, but the present (birds, pints, brandy, E, spliff, Bensons, Gran Turismo) is kinda fun, frequently hilarious, occasionally transcendent. The record is street-smart and lairy; but that doesn’t stop it having a strain of buoyant, stubborn, idealistic, weed-through-the-pavement-cracks positivity that is, simply put, tremendously inspiring. It’s only April, but it already looks a lot like being album of the year.

And appositely enough, Mike Skinner is a very 2002 kind of artist. Self-produced, having worked by day and made tunes by night, Skinner and people like him are redrawing the template for how to be an artist in the idiotic, money-crazed, recession-panicked, throwaway-pop-poisoned Noughties.

For him, success wasn’t about changing to match the latest blink-and-you-miss-it version of the saleable pop zeitgeist: it was about valuing his own peculiar truth (he speaks in his own half-Birmingham, half-London twang, following years of “rapping in American accents, talking about bitches, trying to sound like the Wu”). And for him, success wasn’t about fretting over lack of time, head-space and financial support: it was about selling 40 hours of every week to someone else, in exchange for the freedom to possess himself utterly outside of that time. His history, in fact, reads like that of most of the working musicians I know in our own capital city.

“I done all sorts,” Mike says when quizzed on his life previous to being The Streets full-time, which he has been for just under two years. “I done quite a bit of office work especially – temping – near the end. The way I saw it, there were jobs I could get, that required the least amount of effort, and paid me the most money. Those were the ones I wanted, really.

“And temping is so fucking ridiculous,” he says. “I mean, half the time, you’re covering for someone who didn’t have anything to do anyway. You know what I mean? That was the reason I was able to spend so much time on lyrics. It’s cos I was working in an office where no-one even knew I was there.

“It’s weird,” he reflects suddenly. “There was a tune I did once called ‘Street Score’ – it didn’t make it onto the album, but there’s a line in there, saying something like: ‘The Streets is a lie. I don’t live The Streets, go out all the time and that. I’m too busy making tunes.’ Cos to be half-decent at making tunes, you have to dedicate your whole life to it.

“Ever since it’s been my living though,” he says, “I’ve actually lived The Streets a lot more, because I’ve got spare time. Whereas before, it was like: you have a job to go to, in the day. And then at every other hour of the day, you make tunes.”

Mike Skinner’s initial grand plan, it turns out, was to earn a living by (humbly enough) becoming a famous producer. It was when that didn’t happen that he wrote Original Pirate Material out of pure frustration.

“I made The Streets because basically it was driving me so mad tryin’ to be a producer and get somewhere,” he says. “So what I decided to do was, I was gonna make sorta run-of-the-mill dance records, for money, and I was going to do The Streets, as my passion. My own little baby. And that was how I was going to sort my head out.

“I honestly thought that the dance records were gonna do well, and I honestly thought everyone would fuckin’ hate The Streets. But looking back, I think it’s because with The Streets I genuinely did not give a shit about what I was doing – “ he enunciates in his exquisite Brummie/East End staccato – “in the sense that I wasn’t trying to please anyone. I think that’s the reason people have embraced it so much.”

Ironically, while OPM’s reviews have been universally, hysterically positive, the reaction of the UK garage community itself has, so far, been ever so slightly lukewarm; and it remains to be seen whether the club kids and chillout compilation buyers are going to be won over by something harshly literal rather than escapist. In stark opposition to the smooth, tribalistic, cooler-than-you aspirational quality of clubby garage, OPM reflects reality perhaps slightly too closely for comfort: it speaks of what the UK’s garage youth truly are, not what they want to believe themselves to be. Either way, Mike is loath to utter a bad word.

“I came to London,” he says, “and… (pause) I do like garage, it’s like one of my favourite forms of music, aside from hip hop. But um… I never felt like I really… belonged, do you know what I mean? I can’t honestly stand up and pretend that, y’know, I know anyone in the garage scene, or whatever. All I really did was make a record that sounded like what I was into. I’m more garage than anything else, but I don’t think that a lot of garage heads are really gonna… (changes tack) Garage is all club music. It’s all about dancing, it’s all about the flex and the bump and the b-line. Whereas mine is just kinda… listening music.

“It’s that whole thing of em –“ Mike thinks – “how does it go: ‘Every great idea starts off as blasphemy.’ The Streets – I couldn’t give it away when I first made it. Then, people got used to it, and kind of warmed to it, and felt a bit at home with it, and suddenly it’s the greatest album. You read all the reviews, saying how great the album is. But most people hated it when they first heard it. Even the rappers I was working with, when we all started out, they weren’t really into it. And that’s how it ended up being just me.”

It’s very telling, a sign of the times really, that it’s such a surprise to find an album of such sharp wit and intelligence – not to mention of such fierce integrity – on a major label. Seeing as, you know, the album is not so much littered with drug references as written around them. Seeing as he slams every form and aspect of the establishment, from record company suits to the alcohol-condoning, spliff-criminalising UK government to the lazy and unimaginative record-buying populace (“You say that everything sounds the same,” he admonishes us: “…and then you go buy them”). Seeing as, in other words, like we established earlier, Original Pirate Material is so “not pop”.

“Well, we’ve been really lucky,” Mike says. “I’m not actually signed to Warners, I’m signed to Locked On, who are a garage label, basically, who put out 12-inches and who have never released a CD in their life. But luckily, they had this deal going. So basically what we’ve ended up getting is, we’ve had all the control, cos it’s an indie label, but we’ve also had all the clout and the money from the major label. If you get that balance right, it can be explosive.

“I mean, this morning, when this album came out, we shipped 30,000 copies into the shops. And there’s no way, if you were on a little indie label, there’s no way you’d have the bottle to front 30,000 records, without shittin’ yourself that you’re gonna lose 80 grand. It’s easy to lose control with the majors, though,” he ruminates. “They’re not evil, though, they’re just banks. And they do wanna control it. You’ve just got to make sure that you’re in control, and tell ‘em when you need money.”

Tell them when you need money! Sure. Hey, no problem.

“It’s not hard,” he informs me. “To be honest. It’s not hard. Life isn’t that hard. You’ve just gotta… have a go, like. I mean, I spent years of my life blaming people, and fucking wallowing and asking myself why no-one cares about me, you know. And then you realise, Hang on a minute, yeah, no-one really cares about me: but they’ll care about me a lot more if I fucking have a smile on my face, and just fucking… attack life. D’you know what I mean?”

For Those I Love:

“Hearing Mike Skinner totally opened me up to the idea of telling my own stories. I was talking to my old English teacher recently – we’re very close – and he said, ‘Even at an early secondary school age you were always writing about the minutiae of stuff. It was never the big picture’. That’s probably something I picked up from Original Pirate Material, which is about the smaller moments in somebody’s day and the ripple effect it can have." (2021)

The 1975's Matty Healy

On being inspired by his favourite bands growing up:

“The one where I knew I was going to start a band was The Streets. Original Pirate Material was such a great record." (2022)

Kojaque

"Original Pirate Material is one of the best albums ever made – that and A Grand Don’t Come for Free, although I think I prefer Original Pirate Material. A few of the songs from A Grand don’t serve as standalone songs. But then again, it was made in a time that if you wanted to hear the album, you had to buy it. So they weren’t made with the intention of being listened to out of context...” (2023)

Doves' Jimi Goodwin

"Original Pirate Material’s great. Especially for a debut. He’s really captured that stoned at three in the morning vibe, the urban boredom. That’s how a lot of kids live – getting off their bin every night and stumbling down the Esso shop to get themselves a Mars bar and a pint of milk..." (2002)