Since he first ended the Streets, Skinner’s career has been hard to untangle. Only someone who has had a previous marriage, children, literally at the end of their life, could teach little things like that.” “He made me see how strange it must be for a girl to go from being a child to suddenly forced on to the market.
#Im here at the club im over you so dont call me up how to
He remembers being dumped as a 14-year-old and his dad explaining how things would get easier, but that he would soon have to work out how to look out for women, too. war joints, know what I mean? But he was incredibly open-minded.” Skinner was the youngest of four siblings, and credits his dad for the wisdom he passed on: “My dad was a lot older – he grew up in the second world war, he literally was in the blitz. Photograph: Herbie Knott/RexĪround the time Skinner’s career was really taking off, he lost his father (grief inspired the beautiful Never Went to Church) after a long illness, which didn’t help his emotional struggles. We spent the whole time talking about skiing.” He laughs: “I think basically the rule is, if you end up talking about the psychiatrist, you’re probably good.” I actually saw my psychiatrist just last week. “And thinking about it is a reason to go to a psychiatrist.” “I only ever got as far as thinking about it,” he says. Skinner once told an interviewer: “I have to be creative or I get suicidal or something.” Records that grappled with his fame, such as Prangin’ Out, from the Streets’ third album, The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living, contained lyrics about doing “something stupid”.
Not like some traumas, but it’s … I guess it’s a bit like winning the lottery. And it’s a traumatic thing, to be very young and very famous. But if you do, then you are absolutely taking a gamble with your mental health. “I don’t generally have a lot of sympathy for celebrities,” he says, “because you can always not walk into the fire. Original Pirate Material made Skinner famous, but it was the Street’s follow up, 2004’s A Grand Don’t Come for Free, that sent his fame stratospheric, and his mind into a spin. You’ve come straight out of the school playground and you’re like: ‘That’s shit, that’s good, this is what I believe in, go.’” “People say: ‘Oh, they’re only 19 or 20 and they’ve made this amazing music,’” he says. Looking back on that first album is a strange experience for Skinner because it came so naturally. If you’re not allowing them to do that you’re really just wasting your time putting all that effort into the art.”
But it takes fans a long time to get to know and like a song, for it to become a part of their life. “My A&R man had to say: ‘Stop taking the piss, people have paid to hear something, an emotion.’ The thing is, artists want to move on quickly to the next thing. At times he could be petulant – he remembers one show where he got drunk and started mocking the lyrics to It’s Too Late. He struggled for subject matter – “You gradually make your life easier and easier until you’ve got nothing left to say” – and success didn’t agree with him. Skinner wound up the Streets in 2011, admitting he was exhausted with the whole thing. In the past he has cut a complex, self-critical and frequently frustrated figure. Skinner’s intelligence has sometimes seemed as much of a burden to him as a gift. but actually, they kind of like basslines.” Because you think: ‘Well, girls like something they can sing along to’ and ‘Girls like romance’. “When you’re a young artist and a boy, you think: ‘Now I’m gonna write one for the girls.’ And, of course, the girls will never like it. Yet rather than seeing it as a defining song that ripped up the rulebook and made it OK for young men to openly talk about their feelings, Skinner maintains it was just a clumsy attempt to impress women. His biggest hit, Dry Your Eyes, was a heartfelt exploration of how it feels to be dumped. Crucially, he found a way to rap about male fragility in a way that appealed directly to men: revealing their cluelessness around the opposite sex (Don’t Mug Yourself), fascination with, and fear of, violence (Geezers Need Excitement) and ultimate self-centredness (It’s Too Late). Born in London, but raised in Birmingham, Skinner’s talent was to take UK garage and make it more relatable to people like him: rather than champagne and velvet VIP ropes, he was conjuring verses about Vauxhall Novas and scrambled eggs.
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