Just over a decade ago, Mike Skinner, the driving force behind The Streets, stopped work on the iconic garage outfit. He said he “genuinely never wanted to rap again” and was sick with the baggage a music career brought. Now, he’s back, with, yes, a new album, but his debut film too.
It turns out that for the past 10 years he has been fulfilling his lifelong dream of making a movie – and the album accidentally emerged during the process. Both film and album are called The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light. “The reason I stopped doing The Streets was to make a film and the reason I started The Streets again was to make a film,” Skinner smiles, dressed head-to-toe in his trademark black.
Skinner, now 44, first emerged with The Streets’ acclaimed 2002 debut Original Pirate Material, which was made on a shoestring budget in his bedroom, and his cutting observations on working-class life delivered in an everyman geezer-y voice spoke to millions. The 2004 follow-up A Grand Don’t Come For Free shot to number one and went four times platinum.
“I think at this point in my life, if I sat down to write a good Streets song, it would probably just remind you of lots of other Streets songs. I was always trying to do the same song… I think making a film has made the music much fresher because it has a different purpose; the songs are serving the characters, the plot.”
He’s right about The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light sounding fresher. It’s as vibrant as The Streets earliest work without being an imitation of it. The title track is a standout, putting Gatsby-era jazz over Skinner’s wry lyrics about a night out at a casino. “I feel reincarnated since this disaster started,” he raps on the track, and he certainly sounds it.
A decade ago, Skinner wasn’t coping well with fame. “When people started to recognise me all the time, that was really stressful for me, I didn’t like it at all,” he says. Famously shy away from the limelight (he avoids eye contact today), he started to struggle with his mental health. “I think looking back, there was an element of self-sabotage, of destruction, of pulling it all apart subconsciously.”
It’s certainly true that The Streets’ later albums weren’t as well-received. By the time 2011’s Computer and Blues arrived, Skinner sounded weary. He started therapy after spiralling – there were a few years of excess in the mid-Noughties after his success – and there was grief to deal with too. His father died not long after Skinner’s second album arrived; he eventually found a psychiatrist who became an important, supportive figure in his life.
“I had a really, really good relationship with my psychiatrist,” he begins, “but sadly, he died from suicide. It was unbelievable.” The shock of losing him in such terrible circumstances still takes him aback. “More than any other relationship in your world, a psychiatrist tells you that everything’s going to be okay and that you just need to put one foot in front of the other and talk about stuff… and then he was gone.
“It was like a fatherly relationship in a way, they’re sort of giving you what your dad would give you and obviously I no longer had a dad. It was a massive wake up call for me.” It’s still something he thinks about today. “Making this film certainly tested my mental health, as vigorously as anything could. I’m speaking now from the point of feeling very strong, but something like this is always a reminder of the [fragility] of it all.”
Skinner’s early work proved ground-breaking for mental health awareness. Mega-hit Dry Your Eyes gave men some much-needed permission to cry and talk about mental health issues, long before it was common to do so. Skinner says it was important – if he was to bring back The Streets – to understand how to get a better work-life balance for his own mental health: previously, he crashed and burned.
“I used to think I needed to be doing stuff every hour of the waking day but actually, all that happened was that I ended up having complete meltdowns and sitting on the sofa for a month to recover. I struggled with that. I learned work had to be sustainable [which] you only really get to when you’re a certain age or if you’ve been through mental problems. I work every day, but I don’t work myself that hard anymore because I don’t want to be completely burned out again.”
He unwinds by watching films. “I’m a huge film noir fan,” he says, lighting up and heading into full-on cinephile mode, reciting Humphry Bogart lines from The Maltese Falcon and waxing lyrical about Kirk Douglas in Out of the Past . “I mean what a film,” he beams. “That’s probably the best dialogue of any film I’ve seen, and the best opening.” (It begins, for those who don’t know, with a man reporting his own murder.)
He’s not a Marvel fan – “I don’t really like superheroes… I don’t get it,” but loves Brian De Palma. “Blowout, Scarface, Dressed to Kill, all classics.” He’s a big Bond fan too. “I’d like to direct a Bond film one day,” he smiles. “That would be a moment.” He gives me his top three Bond films (“Oh easy, Casino Royale – an absolute banger, Goldfinger, Goldeneye”), and says he’s a “big Timothy Dalton fan”. How would his Bond film look? “A bit less dark, a bit less serious. Probably a bit more Seventies.”
Getting his film made wasn’t easy – he says it was “a very lonely process” and there were days “sat on the floor weeping” – but his evident passion for cinema kept him going. A neo-noir thriller set in London’s clubland, it follows a DJ who gets caught up in drug deals and a (kind of) murder. Skinner tried – and failed – to get funding for the project. “I’ve made millions of music videos, my own, for people signed to my label and I was hoping that might help when we were hoping to get funding... it didn’t.”
He had to pay for it himself and make it almost entirely alone for it to be affordable – he created, wrote, directed, starred in and even edited the film, but he “didn’t feel hard done to,” he says. “It’s impossible to make any film right now. Even named directors really have to dance for their dinner. But I don’t think art should be easy. And in fact, it’s because it’s difficult that I think it’s really made me who I am.”
I don’t think art should be easy. And, in fact, it’s because it’s difficult that I think it’s really made me who I am.
To make his debut album Skinner applied for a Prince’s Trust Grant but didn’t get it. Instead, he took extra shifts at Burger King and saved until he had enough to make it. Most of it was recorded in a cupboard in his bedroom, wrapped in a duvet.
“The spirit of the process was the same,” he smiles, although this time he spent considerably more than the £1,500 it cost to make his debut (£100,000, to be precise). “I was inspired by the same feeling I had when I first started making music, which was that I just had to get on with it. I think with any creative endeavour, no one is going to come and save you. I definitely wondered what the hell I was doing at points, but it was the only way to do this.”
There are direct links to his earlier work elsewhere in the film too; the main character is like “the guy from A Grand Don’t Come For Free, grown up,” he says, and it paints a bleak picture of modern Britain. His characters – many of whom are in the music industry – talk about class, division, the housing crisis and struggle pursuing an artistic career.
“I don’t really talk about politics because it would make me sound like I know more than anyone else,” he says, when I ask him about it. Previously though, he has called out Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak for their failure to help the live industries during the pandemic on Who’s Got The Bag (21st June), which he describes as “a protest”. “That came out at a very dire time at the end of Covid when live events were paying a lot of the price,” he says. “There was a lot of indecision.”
In the film, those same live industries can be seen struggling – a club is shut down, and Skinner’s character navigates spaces that show the gulf between London’s rich and poor. He’s not entirely unsympathetic to the predicament the country is in. “If I was the government, I would be prioritising housing over nightclubs right now, that’s the sad reality,” he says. “I don’t think it’s possible to sustain a big nightclub in a big city anymore, when there aren’t enough houses to go around.”
He says live music spaces are “evolving” though, and musicians are ultimately finding new spaces in which to present their work. “I don’t think we have to say nightlife is dying” he says. “I don’t see it going anywhere to be honest, it’s just the venues are changing. I think arts is skewed more towards older people anyway, so theatre and stuff is always seen as more important. But I’m sure when we become the generation that are members of political parties, then we’ll allocate more money to nightclubs anyway.”
He resists giving answers to the political issues his film raises. “I think a story… should only really give you questions,” he says. “The moment you start giving people answers is when you are lecturing them, and nobody wants to be lectured. I always try to remember that the audience is at least as clever, if not cleverer, than I am.
“There isn’t an answer in the film; there isn’t a perspective. It’s more like a mirror. I never sit down thinking I’m going to sum up the times that we’re in,” he says, even though his film, like the best of The Streets’ music, appears to do just that.
So who would this kitchen sink rapper’s favourite film director be, maybe Martin Scorsese or Mike Leigh? The answer turns out to be a curveball. “My favourite director is Wes Anderson. Grand Budapest [Hotel] is an absolute banger.”
He continues, “I really love how he doesn’t try to convince you that everything on screen is real. I really love that about him. I think in the past, there was maybe a kitchen sink vibe to what I was doing. But actually, it’s just a story – it’s not real.”
What about the character in the film or on his latest album? That feels a lot like him. “I mean The Streets are me, but it’s kind of the things I want to be rather than the things I really am. So it’s genuinely me, but also genuinely a fantasy of me,” he says, ending on a line that could be straight out of a Wes Anderson movie.
