In Dr No, there’s a casino scene featuring Sean Connery as Bond. He’s playing chemin de fer, against the icily beautiful Sylvia Trench (Eunice Gayson). Bond is the bank, cool in a penguin suit, and, when Sylvia asks his name, he replies – of course he does: “Bond. James Bond.” Now, we all expect him to do it, but in 1962, when Dr No was released, it was the first time Connery ever spoke those words on screen.
And Connery said them right here, at Les Ambassadeurs casino, off glitzy Park Lane in London. “Yeah, just through those doors,” says Mike Skinner, AKA the Streets, rapper, musician, writer, producer and now, film director. “Bond, James Bond.”
Skinner, Mike Skinner, and I contemplate the heavy, dark doors, as we lounge on leather chesterfields in the library. There are no books on the shelves: the owner is Chinese and the Chinese word for book is too close to the one for bad luck, apparently. Instead, the bookcases display notes about the history of the casino (it also featured in A Hard Day’s Night), and many bottles of whisky. On a side table is a discreet price list: the most expensive – the Yamazaki 25 Years Old 2021 relaunch – is £900 a glass.
I must say, a Dr No casino is not where I expected to meet the Streets. Though some rappers are all LV and Courvoisier, Skinner, now 44, isn’t known for his flashy lifestyle. When he first broke through, in 2001, with Has It Come to This?, the first single from Original Pirate Material, his USP wasn’t glitz, or ghetto, but geezer. The Streets, as a name, was a bit of a joke. He grew up in West Heath, Birmingham. “I’m Barratt class,” he said back then. “Suburban estates, not poor but not much money about, really boring.” He reported from the frontline of an everyday young man’s life, from hitting the dancefloor to hitting on girls, not always with success; his music instantly engaging, with its from-the-heart-to-the-hangover lyrics and homemade garage beats. Now, he’s a little more luxe, but still not showy, in his urban lad-dad black anorak and trainers.
So, not James Bond. But there’s a reason for us meeting in the casino, and it isn’t that we’re about to play baccarat. Skinner discovered Les Ambassadeurs while looking for locations for his new feature film, The Darker the Shadow, the Brighter the Light. The film, which he wrote, directed and acts in (yes, he also did the music), is about a DJ called Mike, who gets drawn into various non-DJ activities: financing and messing up a drug deal, romancing a rich woman, solving a sort-of murder. Though much of the action takes place in clubs – the scenes where the dance crowds go mad are the best parts of the film – the story also moves between Mike’s rubbish flat and his rich girlfriend’s life. And he needed a swish casino for a couple of scenes. Once he came across Les Ambassadeurs, with its huge chandeliers, wide balconies, swathed curtains and silk wallpaper, he was in.
So, us meeting here is a sort of celebration: of the film itself, but also of the film being finished. The Darker the Shadow has dominated Skinner’s life for the past decade, and even last week, he was still tweaking it – the music, the effects – staying up for three nights straight adjusting and editing in post-production. But finally, he had to let his baby go, and the premiere was a few days ago, in east London. He had a brilliant time.
“All of the things you’d be ashamed for loving, usually, like getting out of the limousine, and the flashing lights from the photographers, and the poster on the cinema wall, and the red carpet,” he says, “I absolutely loved it all. It was amazing. Literally, three days earlier, I was in shorts, on a beanbag… our front room is absolutely fucked, boxes everywhere, a mess. Finishing it was so unbelievably stressful, so to go from that to a Burberry mac and the red carpet, it was overwhelming, and then it was amazing.”
There was a Q&A afterwards, and a party, and Skinner got thoroughly smashed. He was meant to have his photo taken for this feature the next day, but just couldn’t make it. Instead he cooked his son a fried egg and got him to school, and then went straight back to bed.
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The Darker the Shadow, the Brighter the Light has been a very long and almost entirely solo project for Skinner. Becoming a film-maker grew out of his dissatisfaction with making music (more of that later) and was the reason he gave up the Streets after the last album proper, Computers and Blues, in 2011. After that, he spent several years trying to get the right movie idea going. At one point he was set to make a hospital thriller, but realised that, with film, “you can’t separate the idea from the budget”.
“With music,” he says, “I could say tomorrow: ‘I’m going to make a prog rock album and it’s going to have incredible keyboard playing on it, and I’ll sing falsetto, and the whole thing is going to be drenched in reverb and it’s going to be a concept album.’ That would be no more difficult than me saying: ‘I’m going to do Original Pirate Material all over again.’ But it’s not the same with film.”
So he started learning. He contributed music to movies, started directing music videos for other people (Formation’s Powerful People; Kane, by Grim Sickers feat JME), then making short films for brands, such as Alexa Chung’s collection with fashion website Mytheresa. He moved deliberately from frontman into the background. In between, he DJed a lot, in clubs around the country: “That’s pretty much all I was doing. DJing and directing.”
His breakthrough, when it came to the film idea, was what he calls “three lightbulb moments”. First, instead of a voiceover, he realised he could use songs: tracks that gave context and plot and moved the story forward. Second, he was reading a lot of Raymond Chandler, and thought he could make a film noir.
“And the third lightbulb moment was: ‘OK, so what’s this film about?’” he says. “And you think, well, crime, cos it’s a film noir, but, I don’t know about the police. I don’t know about procedural. And then all of a sudden, I’m like: ‘Actually, if it was a DJ, there’s so much weird shit that happens in nightclubs…’” He was inspired, partly, by the closure of Fabric in 2016, but also by the conversations he would hear in club backroom offices while waiting to DJ.
Armed with his three lightbulbs, he spent two years writing the music; then two years working on the script; then two years “working out how the hell I’m going to pay for it all”. That was a hard time. He reformed the Streets, made a mixtape and toured, just to raise his profile back up high enough to get financing for the film.
But in the end, as with when he first started the Streets, he decided to do it himself. Music, script, financing, as well as producing, directing, editing. He even spent 2020, during Covid, learning new post-production computer skills, like compositing and 3D, so he could use them when editing the film. He worked hard, and the music/voiceover parts work well, though there are moments in the film that reveal his solo-DIY-first-timer approach.
Did you not think you were a bit mad, doing it all yourself?
“I dunno. I thought: ‘How hard can it be?’” he says, not a little ruefully. “You know, I’ve done millions of music videos. I do music videos every week. So I was like: ‘It’s what, 90 minutes? That’s 30 music videos. We could do that, rather than spending another two years waiting for the money.’ But it’s not like 30 music videos. Because with music videos, you’re not beholden to a story that has to make sense. You just film a load of stuff and pick out what looks the nicest and the music does the rest. You can’t do that with a film.”
By the time he got round to filming, he was already quite strung out. And then he had to act, too. Though, it has to be said, his acting is weirdly… absent. Bella May, who plays Ava, his rich girlfriend, is great, as is Lateef “Teef” Ojetola as Mike’s sidekick Free, and many of the other cast members, often just Skinner’s friends, are convincing. But Skinner’s performance is so low-key and unemotional as to be almost invisible.
“Yeah, well, by the time I was in front of the camera, reading the script out aloud into the camera, it was like… I couldn’t give a shit,” he says. “I was literally just like: ‘Say the words that are in the script.’ Most of the time it was Riley [his manager] reading the words out to me. She read them out, and I just repeated what she said.”
Still, he’s pleased the film is over, and he thinks he’s pleased with the result.
“When you get to the end of a project, you’ve been inside it so long, it just becomes noise,” he says. “And that’s when you need to trust yourself, you learn that through having looked back on so many other things you’ve made. You go from this completely open state of, like, anything is possible, I can change anything, to… It’s done. I have to stand by this.”
It’s unusual to interview a director, even a director-stroke-writer-stroke-actor, and have their overwhelming emotion be relief. But that’s how Skinner feels, as though his homework is finally done. “It’s good now, because I don’t finish every day, even a nice day, with that feeling: ‘Oh God, but there’s the film to do.’”
Now, his day will go one of three ways: he’s DJing, leaving his house in north London at 7pm, getting in late, then sleeping in; he’s away on a Streets tour (though he hasn’t done that since the pandemic); or his routine is based around his family – his wife, Claire Le Marquand, a jewellery designer, and his two kids, a 14-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son – with him making music or pop videos to fit with that. He doesn’t really do much else. Over lockdown, he got into cooking – he subscribed to one of those companies that sends you ingredients with a recipe – and he really enjoyed it: “I actually don’t think I’ve found anything that can put me into as much of a relaxed state.” He doesn’t relax easily. His wife got him a barbecue, and that helps.
Outside that, he’s mildly interested in politics, but hesitant to talk about it: “I’m progressive, and I’m a bit left. I’m not a communist.” But he feels that, unless you’re really leftwing, you may well be labelled as “actually a little bit rightwing. And no one wants to be the 45-year-old musician who’s a little bit rightwing.”
“You know, I like the National Trust, so if that makes me Liz Truss…” he says. “My mum’s a member, and I love it, man. But half the time you’re just: ‘Well, how did this person make their money? [pretends to read a label] Oh, right… Well, yes, it’s still a lovely garden.’”
We talk a bit about kids: his sister-in-law took her eldest to university for the first time recently, and he’s been thinking about his own children reaching that age. Will he be happy for them to leave home?
“I feel like your children should be taking risks in their 20s,” he says. “Experimenting. And I feel like that might involve [them] living at home… I mean, none of us want our children to be aimless, but I feel like the modern world means you might have to support them while they work stuff out. Otherwise, they’re just in the rat race, and once you get to 30, they have to have it worked out, don’t they? At 30, you can’t be: ‘Oh, I’ve got a dream.’”
His own 20s were odd, of course, because he became the Streets aged 22, with the release of Has It Come to This? and then the million-selling Original Pirate Material – so his dreams were taken care of. Done and dusted. He’s thought a lot about what that early success did to him – “I couldn’t believe that if didn’t get up in the morning, I didn’t lose my job” – and what, in fact, he feels any and every musician has to negotiate when it comes to ageing.
“Most musicians were at their peak when they were 23, 25,” he says. “Some of them become big when they’re older, but all musicians have a time and it’s usually early. After that, you’re always imitating yourself. And that’s every single musician. It’s like The Fast and the Furious 9, isn’t it? How many more times can you try and reinvent it? And actually, the more you try and reinvent, the further away [you get] from actually what it is that works.”
He pauses.
“Essentially, it’s all nostalgia. Most of a musician’s career is nostalgia for those few years when they were the thing. Your life is going in a different direction to absolutely everyone else’s, and you have to get your head around that. When you’re a musician, your 20s are amazing, and then the rest of your life is about dealing with that.”
Not that he wants to moan about it: “It’s not hardcore, because you get paid.” The film’s soundtrack – out later this month – will be his first album proper since Computers and Blues (he released a mixtape of collaborations – None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive – in 2020), and an 11-date tour follows. To be honest, despite his protestations about music being “like finding a trick and then selling it, over and over”, he clearly relishes making music and performing. But even in front of a crowd that loves him, he can feel a sense of creative repetition, the dull of a routine.
“It’s like being an athlete,” he says. “You’re aiming for the same thing every day, the same songs every night, and you’ve drilled them in rehearsals. We were doing four shows a day by the end of the rehearsals. So when you do the first show, you can pretty much do it in your sleep. Performing your own songs… there’s bits of the show where I can be on autopilot.”
And that, for someone with a mind as quick as his, is hard. One of the reasons he took up DJing was its unpredictability: he doesn’t know what a crowd wants to hear until he’s playing, and even then, he can mess up the mood by playing just one wrong track. In fact, when he DJs, the only time he relaxes is just after he’s dropped a song that works.
“Every good song is another three minutes where you don’t have to be terrified that everyone’s going to leave,” he says. “You’re trying to survive. You have to work out what songs you like, and what songs they like, and they have to be the same. It’s more creative, because you have no idea what you’re going to do.” You hesitate to say that some DJs have worked out their set before they play.
Anyhow, DJing keeps him in the moment, and closer to real life: when he first finished with the Streets, he felt a bit removed from people and music, because he was always touring. Now he’s out of that album-tour schedule, not only does he enjoy what he does, he finds managing his time easier. Over the years, he’s had a few spirals into depression and, at one point, compulsive gambling: not the Ambassadeurs glamorous kind, but spread-betting on football scores (“I’m not really into football, but I was betting on it”) and losing a lot of money (“tens of thousands, yeah”) in the early 2000s. He learned the hard way that self-regulation and routine is what he needs.
“When you’re a musician, you’d better get your head around discipline,” he says. “Because no one, no one, will stop you destroying yourself when you’re a musician. You watch the Amy Winehouse film… you cannot stop a musician destroying themselves. People talk about a controlling industry, and maybe if you’re in a boyband that’s true, but I don’t know any musicians that are controlled. It’s impossible to control them, because it’s them that has to get up on stage.”
He thinks that a musician’s life is similar to that of actors and sports people – all have the specific pressure of being the only person able to do the thing, the one who has to step up in front of an audience when it’s time – but with those professions, there’s usually a supportive team around, either an actual sports team, or the creative crew of a film or TV show. It’s not always the same, with music.
Still, you get the feeling that, even if he were a sportsperson or an actor, Skinner would be a solo artist. Even though he collaborates, even though he’s social and friendly and draws people to him, his essential soloness is his strength and his weakness. That and his relentless creativity, his absolute desire not to be bored. He doesn’t cope well unless he’s challenging himself. You begin to understand why he moved into film, why he made The Darker the Shadow, even though it was the hardest thing he’s ever done, even though, like DJing, he didn’t have to do it, and could have done it more easily by getting other people involved. He made it, mostly on his own, because he had to.
“For me, personally, I have to be trying to do something more difficult,” he says. “It’s really just about doing difficult things, I think. As long as I’m doing difficult things, then I’m still good.”
