Rock and pop currently pride themselves on being prosaic and predictable. Dance music, nu-metal, garage rock, manufactured pop: for the most part, they do exactly what they say on the tin. Your jaw seldom drops; your eyes seldom boggle with surprise.
It is therefore intriguing to attend a gig where there is no clue as to what might happen. Twenty-two-year-old Mike Skinner may have made one of the year's best albums with his debut as The Streets, Original Pirate Material, but it is difficult to see how it will translate to the stage. Skinner's stock-in-trade involves talking over garage-influenced beats in a voice that recalls a Brummie-fied Alan Whicker. He is a fantastic lyricist, but his tales of seedy goings-on in pub car parks hardly lend themselves to hip-hop's macho theatrics, nor to the extravagant son-et-lumière treatment of dance acts such as the Chemical Brothers. Then again, he can't just stand there and talk all night.
Or perhaps he can. Ambling onstage clutching a beer, the hands-free attachment from a mobile phone dangling around his neck, Skinner has an undeniable, indefinible charisma. It is certainly hard to tell how seriously he takes himself. He indulges in standard garage MC practices, organising call-and-response routines with the audience and shouting: "Booo!" But these routines involve encouraging the audience to shout "Mick, you fucker!" at him.
Skinner's show, however, is more than just a stand-up routine. The music is as original and parochial as his lyrics, a jagged mix of garage, drum'n'bass, hip-hop and R&B. It is sharp and self-aware: Skinner slips the chorus of The Specials' Ghost Town into the ska-influenced Let's Push Things Forward. His onstage foil, singer Kevin Mark Trail, has a fantastic voice. Nevertheless, as he and Skinner sing the mournful chorus of It's Too Late, they sound engagingly like blokes howling along to a pub jukebox shortly before closing time. It is contradictory stuff. Like Skinner himself, however, it is impossible to dislike and - best of all - endlessly surprising.
