I've never been the type to go up in British garage. But then I heard Dry Your Eyes on a hungover morning, and suddenly it felt like Mike Skinner had been journaling my life. Now The Streets is playing on Tinderbox and I'm ready to relive it all -- with beer in hand and heart on my shirt.
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Disclaimer: Apropos Magazine received access or a review copy. As always, we share our own impressions — unfiltered.
Six stars
Mike Skinner is not just a rapper. He is a storyteller, a poet with a hoodie and a man who has managed to put into words what the rest of us can only feel. With The Streets, since the early 2000s, he has created music that balances the raw and the touching, the banal and the brilliant.
Debut album Original Pirate Material from 2002 set new standards for British hip hop. It wasn't just beats and rhymes; it was everyday observations from the pub, backyard and bus -- delivered with a deadpan charm and a Birmingham accent unlike anything else. Songs such as Has it come to this? and Let's push things forward didn't just become hits -- they became identity. The soundtrack for those who couldn't afford the taxi home and yet insisted on staying out to the last man.
Two years later came A Grand Don't Come for Free, an album that turned the loss of a thousand pounds into an epic love drama. The album follows a loose narrative thread through hangovers, calls, escapades and a slow realisation that one might be the problem yourself. The single Dry Your Eyes became Skinner's biggest hit—and an involuntary anthem for the emotional working class. It was the first time anyone was allowed to cry in British hip-hop without losing face.
The page followed The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living, in which Skinner did an album track about being famous and tired of it even before it was fashionable. On Everything Is Borrowed The tone became more philosophical. As if he no longer had to convince anyone -- only himself. In 2011, he closed the project with the words: “Computers and blues/This is my last album — goodbye.”
But Mike Skinner has never been good at staying away.
After a few side projects and DJ sets, in 2017 he returned as The Streets with singles, mixtapes and a UK tour. And in 2023, he went all-in with the album and film The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light — a noir-ish universe with neon, paranoia and the old Streets feel, just wrapped up in older and darker thoughts. The film is kitschet and clever, the album is shimmering and honest. It's still him.
But it's live, it's all redeemable.
A The Streets gig isn't a gig -- it's a pub with beat. Skinner speaks to the audience, interrupting himself, pausing numbers to talk, forgetting verses and instead shouting, “You lot know this one, innit!” It feels like he's right there with us -- and not just standing around redoing something old. Back in 2019, he threw champagne over the audience at the Printworks in London and rapped Turn the page as if it were a revelation. A fan handed him a poem in A4 format -- he read it aloud from the stage.
Especially the old songs get new life live.
Don't Mug Yourself becomes a common sweaty call to pull themselves together. Blinded by the Lights acts as collective flashback induction. And Fit But You Know It It starts as fun and ends in pure euphoria. It's not pretty. It's not perfect either. But that's why you're there.
And now he comes to Denmark.
Mike Skinner and The Streets play on Tinderbox Festival on Saturday 28th June at 19:00 on the Panorama stageAnd if everything goes as it should, it will be one of those nights you end up recreating in front of your friends all summer — even if they were there. And it's not just the nostalgia that does it. That's because The Streets still deliver. Not as a '00s thing you put on to be kitsch, but as a living voice that still says something worth hearing.
Reflection:
Mike Skinner has never had it smart. He's had it right. He has written about the feeling of standing alone at a gas station at 03:46, of not being able to say what one should, and of dancing on anyway. And by 2025, that may be more important than ever.
So when he goes on stage in Odense, it won't just be a concert. It will be an encounter with a man who is still trying to understand himself -- along with the rest of us. In an age of ironic filter reviews, clickbait and soulless playlists, it's liberating to be reminded that music can still be something as simple as a voice saying, “I know full well how you feel.”
