The Streets: Original Pirate Material

The first time I heard of The Streets was at the ICA in 2003 when Saint Etienne presented their film Finisterre. It was during the post-film Q&A that Bob Stanley said how much they'd been impressed by this album. I bought it a month or two later at the Impulse! store on Liverpool Street station for £7.99.

It's not quite the same as being slipped a dodgy CD-R in a boozer in Bow, is it? And obviously it says more about me than it says about The Streets/Mike Skinner. Though he's clearly the kind of street poet that middle-class intellectuals love to love. How long before he gets the Seamus Heaney treatment as dished out to Eminem?

I can see what's great about this stuff, but I'd never have discovered it in a million years on my own. I need the Bob Stanleys of this world, and the time it takes for albums like this to bed into Guardian Guide acceptance, before I catch on. My antennae aren't tuned to this frequency.

MusicBrainz entry for this album