After a decade-long run of five albums that described a parabola of hedonistic excess, success, anxiety and burnout in forensic detail, Mike Skinner wrapped up the Streets in 2011. For someone who became a household name by being both overanalytical and hyper-verbal, the cherubic garage-poet has – perhaps deliberately – been rather quiet about why 2018 felt like the right time to mount a comeback. But here we are, midway through a sold-out tour of relatively modest venues, that will culminate this week with three consecutive nights at Brixton Academy.
The vibe is manic and celebratory, and not just because Skinner sprays multiple bottles of champagne over the crowd like a Formula One champ. In a black Trapstar football top and with hair as close-cropped as it has ever been (the 39-year-old recently described his current designer sportswear look as “health goth”), Skinner seems to vibrate with antic energy, more geyser than geezer. Backed by a five-piece band and flanked by two videographers who seem increasingly nonplussed at the number of drinks sailing through the air, he resuscitates some of his earliest songs, racking up tracks from his debut album Original Pirate Material while sustaining a constant stream of enthusiastic badinage. “Can you see me, Glasgow?” he keeps repeating, like a stage mesmerist embedding a trigger phrase.
If some material occasionally betrays its vintage – on opener Let’s Push Things Forward, for example, there is a shoutout to search engine also-ran AltaVista – Skinner’s deftly sketched snapshots of romantic skirmishes, chemical intoxication and the soapy storylines of a good night’s clubbing remain vivid. The fact that most of the audience seem to have internalised every well-turned line helps offset what is at times a stodgy sound mix. The atmosphere is so buoyant that within five songs, Skinner is out in the crowd, lurching across the first few rows while still hitting his lyrical marks on the clipped, skipping garage of Has It Come to This.
His band includes Rob Harvey on guitar and this former singer from the West Yorkshire baggy-rockers the Music has convincingly recast himself as a skinhead Bez, slamdancing with infectious abandon across the stage. Harvey’s spotlight moment comes when he lends his viking wail to Going Through Hell, a gritted-teeth ode to endurance built on an aggressively angular rock riff. It is the only song from Skinner’s unloved fifth album Computers and Blues to get a runout, but emerges as a surprise standout.
The prankster vibe extends to undercutting the Streets’ emotional touchstone Dry Your Eyes with a false-start burst of Bryan Adams. During an extended encore – which includes a stomp through new song Boys Will be Boys, with rising Birmingham grime star Jaykae spitting verses in a Scotland away shirt – Skinner, now stripped to the waist, squints toward the nearest bar and asks if someone will order him a double vodka. He repeats his request during a newly disco-fied version of Weak Become Heroes and then, during the boisterous Chas-and-Dave knees-up of Fit But You Know It, throws himself into and on to the crowd, propelled, in raffish repose, across the venue to claim his drink. He downs it messily to deafening cheers before being transported with unnatural speed back to the stage on aloft arms. It all happens with such bizarre fluidity that it looks like a magic stunt by some trickster god, and feels like a Streets coronation.
•The Streets are at Academy, Leeds, on 23 April. Box office: 0844 477-2000. Then touring until 27 April.
