It concludes with an eight-minute alternate-ending track about Mike Skinner’s broken TV and a scrap with the repairman. There’s ‘keeping it real’ and ‘keeping it real’ but this just seems ridiculous.
What comes before is – lets not mince words – a concept album where the hapless Skinner loses a grand, loses his girl and then, following the TV incident, goes down the path of Tennants Super-fuelled destruction or grows up and starts acting like a man. Along the way he encounters televisual flirting tips, football betting, a beery holiday, lost coats and all manner of personal melodrama.
If that sounds a little thin or familiar (and "A Grand Don’t Come For Free” certainly lacks the car-stopping shock of a “Has It Come To This?”) then don’t fret – this album is about themes not songs. Even the disappointing “Fit And You Know It” sounds impressive in context.
And the overriding theme is communication breakdown or, to quote some mockney geezer, "modern life is rubbish". David Beckham – modern day saint and millionaire – might be texting filth on his box-fresh swank phone, but Skinner, like the rest of us, inhabits the real world of poor reception and automatic queuing systems. He doesn’t hark back to some mythical Waterloo Sunset glory days either – he just tells it like it is.
Opening track, “It Was Supposed To Be Easy”, is classic Skinner as he puts a microscope over 21st Century urban living and elevates the mundane – returning an overdue DVD – with an ironic fanfare. Against the triumphant trumpeting soundtrack he forgets the disc, gets splashed by a passing car and finds “insufficient funds” in his bank account. Then, kickstarting a recurrent theme, he thinks he’s forgotten his phone, no he’s remembered it, he’s definitely remembered it, but, ah sh*t, the battery’s flat. “Today I have achieved absolutely nowt, in just being out of the house I have lost out,” he moans. Sometimes his voice simply fades away. Bad reception. And worse is to come. When he gets home his savings - £1,000 - are gone.
It’s curious to think Skinner was once pigeon-holed with the UK garage scene. His beats are cheap like a Casio and his delivery is closer to Kevin Rowland of Dexy’s – the last dispossessed Brummie prone to scattering his records with spontaneous monologues and surreal set-pieces.
But his eye remains sharp. “Blinded By The Lights” is an all-too-realistic tale of clubbing paranoia and “Dry Your Eyes” is a doeful East 17-style weepie where guest-vocalist Matt Sladen plays the angel, or, more likely, the drunken arm on Skinner’s shoulder: “Dry your eyes mate, I know it’s hard to take, but her mind is made up, there’s plenty more fish in the sea.”
That eight-minute closer, “Empty Cans”, sews it all up and, from hearing Skinner at his nastiest – “everyone’s a c**t in this life, no one’s there for me” – we’re left sensing redemption as he walks off into the Stockwell sunrise: an older, wiser man.
Cue credits. The audience applaud.
by Adam Webb