Mike Skinner: ‘Music is genuine chaos’ – BBC News

Image copyrightThe StreetsImage caption
Mike Skinner treated himself to a diamond encrusted lighter on a gold neck chain to mark his return
“When I first started DJing properly,” says Mike Skinner, “I thought it would be a sort of dignified way to grow a bit older.
“And… it’s not that. It’s Saturday night, everyone’s 18, 19 and there’s no escape.
“It wasn’t very dignified, but it was an incredible education. Every day you learn something about music that you didn’t know – usually from the DJ before you or the DJ after you – and you can’t buy that sort of experience.”
The 41-year-old creator of The Streets has been hard at his second career behind the decks for almost a decade, since happily bringing his influential UK garage rap act to an end with a fifth and supposedly final album – 2011’s Computers And Blues.
After his hard-earned success (two number one albums); marriage, fatherhood, and being the wrong side of 30 in an exhausting and youth-oriented industry, had deemed his term as the “geezer” poet laureate for the young “sex, drugs ‘n’ on the dole” crowd to be done and dusted.
But following an emotional sell-out Streets comeback tour in 2018, Skinner says he regained his “focus”. He began dropping singles under his famous moniker once again and then set about resurrecting a music film project that had been simmering in some form since the very start.
Now, his experiences of DJ sets around the continent with his balloon-and-bass night Tonga, alongside Murkage Dave, have formed the basis of The Streets’ forthcoming sixth album.
Quadrophenia for ravers
The record, when it arrives, will also soundtrack a nightclub-based celluloid musical, entitled The Darker the Shadow, the Brighter the Light, directed by and starring Skinner.
“The album is like two years old now,” he explains. “I spent a few months with a script editor which was great and then at the end of the year I decided to kind of do it myself really, and we’ve since got different funding through the music industry, rather than the film industry.
“The film has definitely got things in common with Quadrophenia

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