Mike Skinner’s new Streets mixtape None Of Us Are Getting Out Of This Life Alive is our editor’s pick of the albums reviewed on these pages during the past seven days – revisit the review and have a listen via Spotify:
“Maybe not by everyone, but it’s a fair shout that one of the most googled music-related search terms in the last few years has been, ‘Whatever happened to The Streets?’.”
“The simple answer is that Mike Skinner, the cockney-Brummie (or was it the other way round), retired his hugely successful venture in 2011 having produced two inarguably landmark British albums in Original Pirate Material and then A Grand Don’t Come For Free, the latter peaking with the sort of terrace hubris that Oasis had used to such great effect the decade before.”
“Part of the reason for calling it a day was that Skinner felt he was failing to connect with a younger audience, especially given that the UK’s grime scene prospered in …Pirate Material’s wake, although it’s wasn’t true to say as a direct result of the boundaries it crossed. In the self-imposed vacuum, he spent the time off with his young children and then gravitated to DJing, anonymously playing to unaware crowds up and down the country as part of the bass music scene.”