Friday, May 17, 2024
THE STREETS – A GRAND DON’T COME FOR FREE
I know what you’re expecting me to say. You’re expecting me to say that this is garage’s Beauty Stab, a car crash of a second album, an anachronism long since superseded in relevance and sonics by the grimy rascals. Perhaps on an incautious first listen you may well agree that this is the case.
But, as usual, you have to keep listening. If you’re really desperate for a car crash of a second album, I refer you to N*E*R*D*’s Fly Or Die, a record for rubberneckers if ever there were one. But the second Streets album is an extraordinary thing – the first garage opera, garage’s Tommy (only much better), the missing link between Sham 69’s That’s Life and Spearmint’s A Week Away.
It is certainly a concept album insofar as there is a storyline all the way through it, a storyline which zooms in on and magnifies a particular example of the general picture of frustration and decay which Mike Skinner captured on Original Pirate Material. It is not Phil Daniels goes garage, though wouldn’t necessarily be worse if it were, and in places is also very blackly funny indeed.
It starts with a stoned moan from Skinner: “It Was Supposed To Be So Easy,” a fantastic “25 Miles”-style episodic song which sees Skinner fail to achieve anything on that day’s checklist (yes it’s a day in the life, give or take a week, so therefore this is also garage’s Ulysses), namely get his DVD back to the video shop in time before he has to pay a “big fine” (he gets to the shop but has forgotten to put the DVD back in its box), take some money out of the cash machine (“Insufficient funds,” naturally), ring his mum to tell her he won’t be back for tea (his crap mobile’s battery runs out) and then “grab my savings” - £1000 which he has rather incautiously left in a shoebox on top of his TV – which on returning home he finds have vanished without a trace. Everything seems to be against him and he mourns in utter despair (“100,000 pennies no more”). So the President of the Immortals (to borrow a Thomas Hardy meme) has decided to choose this day to have his sport with Skinner, and the rest of the album details his subsequent psychological and physical journey through hell, signposted by the Cecil B de Mille orchestral fanfare which provides the track’s main sample.
Starting with his doomed attempts to attract the opposite sex. In “Could Well Be In” he tries chatting up a girl (the chorus, over a tune which sounds like Bruce Hornsby playing “Werewolves Of London,” goes: “I saw this thing on ITV the other week/Said that if she played with her hair she was probably keen”) and seems to get on reasonably well (“She didn’t look too bored with what I had to say”). Skinner, however, is a master of microanalysis, and beautifully describes his agony as she pauses to take a call on her mobile (“Peeling the label off, spinning the ashtray”), making the seconds stretch out into years, pretending to watch the football on the TV.
Genteel poverty? Well, just poverty, brilliantly encapsulated on “Not Addicted” where Skinner watches some more football on his TV and places a bet in his head (“I couldn’t be bothered to drag myself to the shop”) on the outcome, even though “I don’t know the first thing about football.” He fantasises mournfully about how much he would have won if he’d bet on the game in reality, but as the game progresses in a different way (“The last passer passed the last pass”) he wipes his brow in relief that he didn’t bother. He concludes philosophically that “I need to rethink the techniques of my betting shit…Instead of betting on to win the football/I’ll bet to lose the cricket.”
Musically the garage elements have been subtle, though the overlay may in extremis remind some listeners of Madness stranded in a lift with the Tricky of Pre-Millenium Tension (whatever else this is, this is also fundamentally a pop record). However, one of the album’s many great setpieces now comes with “Blinded By The Light,” a considerably bleaker sequel to “Weak Become Heroes” – here, the weak just become weaker. Rarely has the act of going to a club been described so joylessly in song – “The lights are blinding my eyes/People pushing by,” says Skinner as he forlornly tries to contact his girlfriend Simone and best mate Dan on his mobile (“Where have they gone?”). The music brilliantly yanks together acid house’s stentorian bleep with the more restless (not quite grime) beats as Skinner feels never lonelier (“Brandy or beer? Water’s a good idea…No one looks like mingling”). He then takes a pill (“Oh, that’s proper rain/It tastes like hairspray”) and then, perhaps inadvisably, another one (“Belly’s tingling a bit”). Nonetheless, he becomes progressively more out of it and retreats into his particular kind of damaged bliss. Stoned, he thinks he sees Simone and Dan kissing elsewhere in the club, but by now, he purrs with a terrible blank smirk, “Now I’m fucked and I don’t care.”
From this abyss (or the edge of one) we cut swiftly to a picture of domestic bliss in “I Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way.” Over a vocal backing which may represent the invention of garage doo-wop, Skinner intones “I sit on the sofa at my girl’s” smoking reefers and watching “her TV” as the back of his TV is now broken (and this is of absolutely central relevance to the album’s plot as a whole) “’cos basically I love her.” Although his mind is ceaselessly tempted by the prospect of going out with his mates, he concludes (for now) that: “I love sitting on the sofa with my girl for real…I don’t want to knock my mates, but there it’s the same old drill.” Then he changes his mind, rapidly and rather brutally, but only momentarily – “There’s a whole world out there, but I don’t give a…you know what I mean.” Will this last? The soul vocalising fadeout is absolutely priceless as the singer sweetly croons, Mayfield-style: “I’ve got one packet of Rizla over there/But it’s nearly run out/I’ve got bits of cigarettes all over the place/The clipper needs a shake/The ashtray needs emptying/But I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
It isn’t that simple, though. “Get Out Of My House” is a duet with Nottingham-based female rapper C-Mone which, though not up to the Cubist level of Dizzee’s “I Luv U,” transmits the impression of an EastEnders argument soundtracked by next door’s eski mix CD-R. “Go, get out of my house, please,” commands the good Lady, “And actually give me back my keys/But I’ll be proper angry if you/Don’t come back later on your knees,” while all the time Skinner is muttering his protests in the background. He pleads with her (“please, please, PLEASE”) not to be like this; he had to go and pick up pills for his “epilepsy,” and much, much worse, “I haven’t ‘phoned that bloke from the TV company” to fix the abovementioned broken TV. Eventually, however – and again sounding gradually more and more lubricated – Skinner turns the tables and snarls “I’ll get out of your house, THEN…but I’ll still be seething when you text me to make up and be friends.” His mind then goes to pot as he turns from his girl to the listener, woozily wagging his finger: “It’s bad enough remembering my opinions without remembering my reasons for them,” before issuing taunts to his Other: “And that thing about femme fatale…well and she’s fit…she’s FITTER THAN YOU ANYWAY – I like her, I’m never gonna meet her…” (and thereby linking this song to the next) before the song dissolves in muttered neurosis mirrored by the crazily paved, stoned synth behind him (“Fucking TV company”). Finally he slags off the synth – “You can turn THAT off.”
And turn on the guitar – a Chinn and Chapman guitar at that, accompanied by Joe Meek whooshes – for the record’s logistic centrepiece (and also its first single) “Fit But You Know It.” Here is Skinner’s moment of, shall we say, Madness (or should that be Splodgenessabounds?) where he abandons his spliff/sofa life jacket and ends up, sozzled (“So I reckon you’re about an 8 or a 9/Maybe even 9½ in four beer’s time”), in the queue at McDonalds, fancying the woman with a sizeable degree of chronicity, but thinking himself above the level of her attraction/attractiveness – “You’re fit/But my gosh don’t you KNOW it!” (the second line uttered as a disgusted/envious snarl). A “white-shirted guy” behind him in the queue is similarly eyeing the lady up, and ends up walking away with her as Skinner again descends towards new depths of blottohood – from “wondering what the shrapnel in my back packet could afford” to abject wretchedness (“Don’t touch me!” he yells repeatedly in the breakdown halfway through, sounding surprisingly like Chris Evans), ending up intoning “Yeah, yeah, oyeh” (and when was the last time that a town crier’s meme troubled the world of pop?) and a swooningly ecstatic sign-off of “I think I’m going to fall over.” The track, as someone says, rocks (and that’s Skinner himself thrashing away on guitar).
But then, the reckoning: in “Such a Twat” he reveals that, hot on the heels of said white-shirted man, he too has had his way/it off with the “fit” girl – “in McDonald’s car park” – and already is regretting it, with his chorus of “Why did I have to go and do a stu-pid-thing-like-that?” (deliberate vocal emphasis on the beat, mechanically, throughout the record, like a neutered Terry Hall, if such a thing is conceivable). In contrast to “I Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way,” Skinner now guiltily asserts that he felt that “I didn’t want to waste my youth in a girl’s house to the sound of spliffs.” He tries to ring her up, but fate decrees against it – “Oh, fucking ‘PHONES, MAN!…I have to stand in a certain spot in my kitchen or it cuts out.” Meanwhile, errant memories continue to stream out of his consciousness: “And that incident with the ice cream – I forgot, it all ended up in our vodka.”
Here is where the mood switches to melodrama and the music becomes noticeably darker in character. The menacing, RZA-ish “What Is He Thinking” is a brilliant exposition of claustrophobic living room paranoia – Aston and Davies in Pinter’s The Caretaker, agonising about whether to visit Sidcup. Skinner has discovered his CP coat “draped over the edge of that dusty chair” in the living room of his mate Scott. Neither is saying anything to the other; Scott sits there watching TV – “I wish I could read what his eyes are saying/Staring straight and not blinking” says Skinner. The piece then turns into a dialogue, or rather a pair of parallel internal monologues; Scott knows that the coat had been borrowed from Simone’s house and taken to his house by another man, but doesn’t know how to break the news to him. Skinner also thinks, as the coat was nicked, so were his savings, but Scott knows nothing of the latter. Finally, Scott can stand it no further and turns round to tell Skinner that “the person who brought the coat round was…Dan.” Cue Hammer horror chords as the penultimate nail is hammered into Skinner’s coffin.
The acoustic orchestral ballad “Dry Your Eyes,” which if released as a single might give the Streets their first number one, is a lacerating piece of work. Here a stunned Skinner confronts Simone, knowing that he is as much to blame for the collapse of the relationship, if not more, than her, but unable to persuade her to take him back. Then the chorus, sung (I think) by Skinner - “Dry your eyes, mate/I know it’s hard to take/But her mind has been made up” – in the style of Bernard Sumner. It’s possibly the greatest use of the word “mate” in pop.
Frantically Skinner tries to rewind their lives back: “I can’t imagine my life without you and me,” he implores, “It wasn’t supposed to be easy (linking back to the opening song),” and then, again, the triple “please,” now genuine.
The beat stops and the strings play a Barber-esque adagio. Skinner has never sounded more alone, more wrecked, than on this passage – no rapping, no stance, so close to the microphone he is almost inside you: “And I’m just standing there. I can’t say a word. ‘Cos everything’s just gone. I’ve got nothing. Absolutely nothing.” This is a level of despair to which he has not previously brought us, not even in 2002’s “Stay Positive.” He continues to try to change her mind (“Trying to pull her close out of bare desperation/…Look into her eyes to make her listen again”), becomes frustrated (“I’m not gonna fuckin’ just fuckin’ leave it all now!…You’re well out of order now”), all to no avail. Like “Stay Positive,” the song ends on a locked groove. Remember how Sinatra finally loses his cool on No One Cares, on its final track “None But The Lonely Heart,” and how the final blank line “…can know my sadness” seems to be emanating from a man already dead, Werther concluding his own wretched life…well, this performance almost approaches it.
And catharsis is still to come in the album’s astonishing eight-minute coda “Empty Cans.” The song itself divides into two; or, more precisely, we are given two variations on the same song. As with the film Sliding Doors, these represent two possible paths down which the protagonist’s life could go.
Version one is the negative version, where Skinner rejects the world and turns absolutely and finally in on himself. Beginning with the album’s most brutal beats, Skinner snarls through his teeth, King Lear in the bunker: “If I want to sit in and drink Super Tennents in the day I will - no one’s gonna fucking tell me jack…But can you rely on anyone in this world? No you can’t. It’s not my fault that there’s wall-to-wall empty cans…It’s fucked up that a man’s life can just be attacked…Watching This Morning with a beer is much better than relying on those cunts for mates I was given.”
Scott rings, offering to fix the TV for him, but Skinner shouts at him to fuck off. He then rings a TV repairman from the Yellow Pages who turns up, takes the TV away and returns the next day, trying to con Skinner into paying more money than the problem was worth. An argument ensues, they fight, Skinner’s head is slammed into the edge of his fridge and the TV repairman beats a retreat. Skinner might as well be dying as he spits out: “No one gives a shit about Mike. That’s why I’m acting nasty. You know what you can do with your life…introduce it up your jacksey!”
“Everyone’s a cunt in this life. No one’s there for me.”
He dies.
The music stops.
The music rewinds.
The song begins again. But now: “it’s all my fault that there’s wall-to-wall empty cans.” And this time, when Scott rings, extremely apologetic, Skinner is still angry but willing to forgive, so he allows Scott to come round and have a go at fixing his TV.
As Scott comes round the music suddenly turns into a major key – like a new sun rising on his life. They both roll their sleeves up and have a go at unscrewing the back of the TV, and then they find what has caused the blockage – Skinner’s grand of savings, which Scott pulls triumphantly from the back of the set, having previously fallen down there.
Skinner, now ecstatic, decides to invite some mates around; he gets on particularly well with a girl called Alison. At the end of the song, he turns round to face the screen, to face us, and delivers, not an epitaph, but a moral: “No one’s really there fighting for you in the last garrison/No one except yourself, that is.”
And then a haiku to close the story, a moral curiously in agreement with that offered by Gilbert O’Sullivan on “We Will”:
“The end of something I did not want to end
Beginning of hard times to come
But something that was not meant to be is done
And this is the start of what was.”
Thus A Grand Don’t Come For Free by the Streets, a record which goes beyond grime because it sees the light trying to shine through behind the grime, which strides out of the garage and re-engages itself, and us, with the world. It is an absolutely and completely sui generis work of genius, an essential listen for anyone interested in where music might take them. It is brilliant.
I know what you’re expecting me to say. You’re expecting me to say that this is garage’s Beauty Stab, a car crash of a second album, an anachronism long since superseded in relevance and sonics by the grimy rascals. Perhaps on an incautious first listen you may well agree that this is the case.
But, as usual, you have to keep listening. If you’re really desperate for a car crash of a second album, I refer you to N*E*R*D*’s Fly Or Die, a record for rubberneckers if ever there were one. But the second Streets album is an extraordinary thing – the first garage opera, garage’s Tommy (only much better), the missing link between Sham 69’s That’s Life and Spearmint’s A Week Away.
It is certainly a concept album insofar as there is a storyline all the way through it, a storyline which zooms in on and magnifies a particular example of the general picture of frustration and decay which Mike Skinner captured on Original Pirate Material. It is not Phil Daniels goes garage, though wouldn’t necessarily be worse if it were, and in places is also very blackly funny indeed.
It starts with a stoned moan from Skinner: “It Was Supposed To Be So Easy,” a fantastic “25 Miles”-style episodic song which sees Skinner fail to achieve anything on that day’s checklist (yes it’s a day in the life, give or take a week, so therefore this is also garage’s Ulysses), namely get his DVD back to the video shop in time before he has to pay a “big fine” (he gets to the shop but has forgotten to put the DVD back in its box), take some money out of the cash machine (“Insufficient funds,” naturally), ring his mum to tell her he won’t be back for tea (his crap mobile’s battery runs out) and then “grab my savings” - £1000 which he has rather incautiously left in a shoebox on top of his TV – which on returning home he finds have vanished without a trace. Everything seems to be against him and he mourns in utter despair (“100,000 pennies no more”). So the President of the Immortals (to borrow a Thomas Hardy meme) has decided to choose this day to have his sport with Skinner, and the rest of the album details his subsequent psychological and physical journey through hell, signposted by the Cecil B de Mille orchestral fanfare which provides the track’s main sample.
Starting with his doomed attempts to attract the opposite sex. In “Could Well Be In” he tries chatting up a girl (the chorus, over a tune which sounds like Bruce Hornsby playing “Werewolves Of London,” goes: “I saw this thing on ITV the other week/Said that if she played with her hair she was probably keen”) and seems to get on reasonably well (“She didn’t look too bored with what I had to say”). Skinner, however, is a master of microanalysis, and beautifully describes his agony as she pauses to take a call on her mobile (“Peeling the label off, spinning the ashtray”), making the seconds stretch out into years, pretending to watch the football on the TV.
Genteel poverty? Well, just poverty, brilliantly encapsulated on “Not Addicted” where Skinner watches some more football on his TV and places a bet in his head (“I couldn’t be bothered to drag myself to the shop”) on the outcome, even though “I don’t know the first thing about football.” He fantasises mournfully about how much he would have won if he’d bet on the game in reality, but as the game progresses in a different way (“The last passer passed the last pass”) he wipes his brow in relief that he didn’t bother. He concludes philosophically that “I need to rethink the techniques of my betting shit…Instead of betting on to win the football/I’ll bet to lose the cricket.”
Musically the garage elements have been subtle, though the overlay may in extremis remind some listeners of Madness stranded in a lift with the Tricky of Pre-Millenium Tension (whatever else this is, this is also fundamentally a pop record). However, one of the album’s many great setpieces now comes with “Blinded By The Light,” a considerably bleaker sequel to “Weak Become Heroes” – here, the weak just become weaker. Rarely has the act of going to a club been described so joylessly in song – “The lights are blinding my eyes/People pushing by,” says Skinner as he forlornly tries to contact his girlfriend Simone and best mate Dan on his mobile (“Where have they gone?”). The music brilliantly yanks together acid house’s stentorian bleep with the more restless (not quite grime) beats as Skinner feels never lonelier (“Brandy or beer? Water’s a good idea…No one looks like mingling”). He then takes a pill (“Oh, that’s proper rain/It tastes like hairspray”) and then, perhaps inadvisably, another one (“Belly’s tingling a bit”). Nonetheless, he becomes progressively more out of it and retreats into his particular kind of damaged bliss. Stoned, he thinks he sees Simone and Dan kissing elsewhere in the club, but by now, he purrs with a terrible blank smirk, “Now I’m fucked and I don’t care.”
From this abyss (or the edge of one) we cut swiftly to a picture of domestic bliss in “I Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way.” Over a vocal backing which may represent the invention of garage doo-wop, Skinner intones “I sit on the sofa at my girl’s” smoking reefers and watching “her TV” as the back of his TV is now broken (and this is of absolutely central relevance to the album’s plot as a whole) “’cos basically I love her.” Although his mind is ceaselessly tempted by the prospect of going out with his mates, he concludes (for now) that: “I love sitting on the sofa with my girl for real…I don’t want to knock my mates, but there it’s the same old drill.” Then he changes his mind, rapidly and rather brutally, but only momentarily – “There’s a whole world out there, but I don’t give a…you know what I mean.” Will this last? The soul vocalising fadeout is absolutely priceless as the singer sweetly croons, Mayfield-style: “I’ve got one packet of Rizla over there/But it’s nearly run out/I’ve got bits of cigarettes all over the place/The clipper needs a shake/The ashtray needs emptying/But I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
It isn’t that simple, though. “Get Out Of My House” is a duet with Nottingham-based female rapper C-Mone which, though not up to the Cubist level of Dizzee’s “I Luv U,” transmits the impression of an EastEnders argument soundtracked by next door’s eski mix CD-R. “Go, get out of my house, please,” commands the good Lady, “And actually give me back my keys/But I’ll be proper angry if you/Don’t come back later on your knees,” while all the time Skinner is muttering his protests in the background. He pleads with her (“please, please, PLEASE”) not to be like this; he had to go and pick up pills for his “epilepsy,” and much, much worse, “I haven’t ‘phoned that bloke from the TV company” to fix the abovementioned broken TV. Eventually, however – and again sounding gradually more and more lubricated – Skinner turns the tables and snarls “I’ll get out of your house, THEN…but I’ll still be seething when you text me to make up and be friends.” His mind then goes to pot as he turns from his girl to the listener, woozily wagging his finger: “It’s bad enough remembering my opinions without remembering my reasons for them,” before issuing taunts to his Other: “And that thing about femme fatale…well and she’s fit…she’s FITTER THAN YOU ANYWAY – I like her, I’m never gonna meet her…” (and thereby linking this song to the next) before the song dissolves in muttered neurosis mirrored by the crazily paved, stoned synth behind him (“Fucking TV company”). Finally he slags off the synth – “You can turn THAT off.”
And turn on the guitar – a Chinn and Chapman guitar at that, accompanied by Joe Meek whooshes – for the record’s logistic centrepiece (and also its first single) “Fit But You Know It.” Here is Skinner’s moment of, shall we say, Madness (or should that be Splodgenessabounds?) where he abandons his spliff/sofa life jacket and ends up, sozzled (“So I reckon you’re about an 8 or a 9/Maybe even 9½ in four beer’s time”), in the queue at McDonalds, fancying the woman with a sizeable degree of chronicity, but thinking himself above the level of her attraction/attractiveness – “You’re fit/But my gosh don’t you KNOW it!” (the second line uttered as a disgusted/envious snarl). A “white-shirted guy” behind him in the queue is similarly eyeing the lady up, and ends up walking away with her as Skinner again descends towards new depths of blottohood – from “wondering what the shrapnel in my back packet could afford” to abject wretchedness (“Don’t touch me!” he yells repeatedly in the breakdown halfway through, sounding surprisingly like Chris Evans), ending up intoning “Yeah, yeah, oyeh” (and when was the last time that a town crier’s meme troubled the world of pop?) and a swooningly ecstatic sign-off of “I think I’m going to fall over.” The track, as someone says, rocks (and that’s Skinner himself thrashing away on guitar).
But then, the reckoning: in “Such a Twat” he reveals that, hot on the heels of said white-shirted man, he too has had his way/it off with the “fit” girl – “in McDonald’s car park” – and already is regretting it, with his chorus of “Why did I have to go and do a stu-pid-thing-like-that?” (deliberate vocal emphasis on the beat, mechanically, throughout the record, like a neutered Terry Hall, if such a thing is conceivable). In contrast to “I Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way,” Skinner now guiltily asserts that he felt that “I didn’t want to waste my youth in a girl’s house to the sound of spliffs.” He tries to ring her up, but fate decrees against it – “Oh, fucking ‘PHONES, MAN!…I have to stand in a certain spot in my kitchen or it cuts out.” Meanwhile, errant memories continue to stream out of his consciousness: “And that incident with the ice cream – I forgot, it all ended up in our vodka.”
Here is where the mood switches to melodrama and the music becomes noticeably darker in character. The menacing, RZA-ish “What Is He Thinking” is a brilliant exposition of claustrophobic living room paranoia – Aston and Davies in Pinter’s The Caretaker, agonising about whether to visit Sidcup. Skinner has discovered his CP coat “draped over the edge of that dusty chair” in the living room of his mate Scott. Neither is saying anything to the other; Scott sits there watching TV – “I wish I could read what his eyes are saying/Staring straight and not blinking” says Skinner. The piece then turns into a dialogue, or rather a pair of parallel internal monologues; Scott knows that the coat had been borrowed from Simone’s house and taken to his house by another man, but doesn’t know how to break the news to him. Skinner also thinks, as the coat was nicked, so were his savings, but Scott knows nothing of the latter. Finally, Scott can stand it no further and turns round to tell Skinner that “the person who brought the coat round was…Dan.” Cue Hammer horror chords as the penultimate nail is hammered into Skinner’s coffin.
The acoustic orchestral ballad “Dry Your Eyes,” which if released as a single might give the Streets their first number one, is a lacerating piece of work. Here a stunned Skinner confronts Simone, knowing that he is as much to blame for the collapse of the relationship, if not more, than her, but unable to persuade her to take him back. Then the chorus, sung (I think) by Skinner - “Dry your eyes, mate/I know it’s hard to take/But her mind has been made up” – in the style of Bernard Sumner. It’s possibly the greatest use of the word “mate” in pop.
Frantically Skinner tries to rewind their lives back: “I can’t imagine my life without you and me,” he implores, “It wasn’t supposed to be easy (linking back to the opening song),” and then, again, the triple “please,” now genuine.
The beat stops and the strings play a Barber-esque adagio. Skinner has never sounded more alone, more wrecked, than on this passage – no rapping, no stance, so close to the microphone he is almost inside you: “And I’m just standing there. I can’t say a word. ‘Cos everything’s just gone. I’ve got nothing. Absolutely nothing.” This is a level of despair to which he has not previously brought us, not even in 2002’s “Stay Positive.” He continues to try to change her mind (“Trying to pull her close out of bare desperation/…Look into her eyes to make her listen again”), becomes frustrated (“I’m not gonna fuckin’ just fuckin’ leave it all now!…You’re well out of order now”), all to no avail. Like “Stay Positive,” the song ends on a locked groove. Remember how Sinatra finally loses his cool on No One Cares, on its final track “None But The Lonely Heart,” and how the final blank line “…can know my sadness” seems to be emanating from a man already dead, Werther concluding his own wretched life…well, this performance almost approaches it.
And catharsis is still to come in the album’s astonishing eight-minute coda “Empty Cans.” The song itself divides into two; or, more precisely, we are given two variations on the same song. As with the film Sliding Doors, these represent two possible paths down which the protagonist’s life could go.
Version one is the negative version, where Skinner rejects the world and turns absolutely and finally in on himself. Beginning with the album’s most brutal beats, Skinner snarls through his teeth, King Lear in the bunker: “If I want to sit in and drink Super Tennents in the day I will - no one’s gonna fucking tell me jack…But can you rely on anyone in this world? No you can’t. It’s not my fault that there’s wall-to-wall empty cans…It’s fucked up that a man’s life can just be attacked…Watching This Morning with a beer is much better than relying on those cunts for mates I was given.”
Scott rings, offering to fix the TV for him, but Skinner shouts at him to fuck off. He then rings a TV repairman from the Yellow Pages who turns up, takes the TV away and returns the next day, trying to con Skinner into paying more money than the problem was worth. An argument ensues, they fight, Skinner’s head is slammed into the edge of his fridge and the TV repairman beats a retreat. Skinner might as well be dying as he spits out: “No one gives a shit about Mike. That’s why I’m acting nasty. You know what you can do with your life…introduce it up your jacksey!”
“Everyone’s a cunt in this life. No one’s there for me.”
He dies.
The music stops.
The music rewinds.
The song begins again. But now: “it’s all my fault that there’s wall-to-wall empty cans.” And this time, when Scott rings, extremely apologetic, Skinner is still angry but willing to forgive, so he allows Scott to come round and have a go at fixing his TV.
As Scott comes round the music suddenly turns into a major key – like a new sun rising on his life. They both roll their sleeves up and have a go at unscrewing the back of the TV, and then they find what has caused the blockage – Skinner’s grand of savings, which Scott pulls triumphantly from the back of the set, having previously fallen down there.
Skinner, now ecstatic, decides to invite some mates around; he gets on particularly well with a girl called Alison. At the end of the song, he turns round to face the screen, to face us, and delivers, not an epitaph, but a moral: “No one’s really there fighting for you in the last garrison/No one except yourself, that is.”
And then a haiku to close the story, a moral curiously in agreement with that offered by Gilbert O’Sullivan on “We Will”:
“The end of something I did not want to end
Beginning of hard times to come
But something that was not meant to be is done
And this is the start of what was.”
Thus A Grand Don’t Come For Free by the Streets, a record which goes beyond grime because it sees the light trying to shine through behind the grime, which strides out of the garage and re-engages itself, and us, with the world. It is an absolutely and completely sui generis work of genius, an essential listen for anyone interested in where music might take them. It is brilliant.
