Self-anointed ‘geezer’ Mike Skinner will be calling an end to his music career under moniker The Streets following the release of new album Computers And Blues. He revealed that he’ll be calling it quits in a candid interview with UK magazine The Observer. After a propulsive rise in the early Nineties Naughties and major critical props, Skinner’s pervasively downbeat tone in the interview (excerpts below) reveals a man left cynical and jaded from an industry that earned him huge popularity and fistfuls of dollars. It’s pretty sad stuff…
He explained why he is going to call it quits: “It’s obvious. I’ve been doing it for 10 years and I’ve always tried to do something different with each album. Some [of my work has] been amazingly received and some of it hasn’t been, and I’ve run out of new avenues.
Of the direction of his new album Skinner said: “[Computers and Blues] is not really a new direction. It’s all the directions I’ve already been down rehashed into something that’s… quite nice on the ears. I signed a five-album deal, so the economics of the Streets really shaped it as much as my inspiration,” he continues. “It would be silly to end the Streets on the fourth album and then make another just to satisfy a deal, or to do six albums and do five of them on Warner and one of them independently. So it’s part of the economics of my business and part of getting to that point.”
“I don’t want to do the Streets anymore. I should have moved on a long time ago.”
With the benefit of hindsight, maybe we should have seen it coming. After the release of his hugely successful breakthrough debut Original Pirate Material, the themes that he concentrated on in subsequent albums were somewhat prophetic – book ended by The A Grand Don’t Come for Free (2004) and now Computers and Blues – much of his writing focused on the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or something else Hamlet said about life at the top sucking. Cheer up, Mike. There’s plenty for fish in the sea.
Computers and Blues (Atlantic) is out on 7 February
