Mike Skinner's nostalgia

“I’ve known you all my life I don’t know your name”.

My first attendance at a music festival was T In The Park, 2006. But I don’t think of Scotland’s former biggest festival with that name. Stumbling about the campsite at dawn looking for the twin to the one remaining Converse shoe I could find at the bottom of my tent (the other one was nicked), I could hear this Scottish lad nearby, singing a song to himself: “Pee in the Dark, Pee in the Dark, hahahaha, Pee in the Dark.” Shit, I thought. I hope nobody’s urinated on our tent. Then I remember a stereo playing nearby, as the sun was coming up. These weary strings broke through the speakers, and there was this looping piano chord and a gentle counteracting voice, kind of rapping but in a Mockney accent (the vocalist is actually from Birmingham):

Tune reminds me of my first E
Polite, unique, still 16 and feeling horny
Point to the sky, feel free
Sea of people all equal, smiles in front and behind me
Swim in the deep blue sea, cornfields sway lazily
All smiles, all easy, where you from, what you on, and what's your story?

It was the sound of Mike Skinner aka The Streets. Daylight was coming in over the festival site as we were leaving the three-day weekender. It looked like a drained ocean floor full of all the pollution at the bottom of the sea. It had rained all weekend (hello, it was summer in Scotland), and the mud was either glorious or horrifying according to what you were under the influence of. For me, it was just beer and vodka. So yeh, the mud was horrifying. And I only had one shoe left. Says a lot about the calibre of people at P In The Dark – sorry T – that Converse are worth stealing. Anyway, we all went home feeling like champions.

“I’ve known you all my life I don’t know your name”.

When I heard ‘Weak Become Heroes’ for the first time in that field I didn’t have much experience of taking drugs. It was only a drag of some cannabis in university dorms. I didn’t yet know the hairspray-like residue in the back of your throat from the substances that make you feel the way Skinner narrates on this bittersweet paean to his days at raves in the mid-’90s. And yet, the song made me understand exactly what that communal ecstasy felt like. I didn’t need to indulge. I could feel it in my veins.

I went to T In The Park with my best friend at the time. Just us. Her name was Gemma. We met at university in Manchester, studying Law. It was the summer before my final year. I was 19. Gemma and I had listened to The Streets’ second album A Grand Don’t Come For Free as much as if not more than we had studied for our Property Law exams. I knew it by heart, as it spat its way out the speakers of her white Peugeot 206, taking us back and forth from daytime lectures into evening club antics. Every day it was the same. Study your arse off in the day, go out to the club all night. Indie clubs. UK garage clubs. Northern Soul clubs. Reggaeton nights. Everything was available. Every genre. There was an electroclash night in the Northern Quarter when Justice vs Simian’s ‘We Are Your Friends’ was at its peak. The place was full of beer garden furniture, where we climbed the tables and stomped out the tracks. It was mayhem. Sweat on the walls. Carnage.

“I’ve known you all my life I don’t know your name”.

A Grand Don’t Come For Free is one of the greatest concept albums ever. It was sired a “spoken word opera”. It’s a fictional story about how he loses £1000 in his flat, meets a girl - Simone - who he starts dating (‘Fit But You Know It’), goes out raving with Simone (‘Blinded By The Lights’), gets dumped by Simone (‘Dry Your Eyes’), then finds the money he lost at the start of the album down the back of the TV. It was more original than his debut Original Pirate Material. It elevated the bar. It didn’t need to be relatable because it already was at street level, if you like. Taking the humdrum ups and downs of everyday life, and rendering them worthy of this rap symphony.

And yet, as familiar as I was with every joke and tick of A Grand Don’t Come For Free, the second I heard ‘Weak Become Heroes’, I felt like I had only just seen Skinner’s soul. On Original Pirate Material he was rapping in a dry but humorous way about being on the dole, and chasing girls, and eating takeaways, and being bored of the telly and video games. He embraces working-class mundanity, and refuses to be conventionally cool. A hyper-real figure who is self-aware and culturally slippery. Made him cooler than anyone. They called him the British Eminem. He wasn’t the British Eminem. He was more like the rapping Jarvis Cocker.

“I’ve known you all my life I don’t know your name”.

That line is about standing in a rave with faces you’ve never seen, experiencing a sense of belonging you didn’t know was possible. The piano chords are nostalgic, bittersweet about youth. It was introspective in a way that UK garage is never. Both melancholic and euphoric at the same time. The piano stalks the old house melodies, recalling Liquid’s ‘Sweet Harmony’ and ‘Needin U’ by David Morales. The way the strings lead to Skinner’s monologue, then that piano and the beat trickling in. A community of instruments. A tribe of gatherers. A memory of strobe lights and hot dance floors.

It just flies away, doesn’t it? The nights when we’re young. Everything becomes so complicated when the sun comes up. When you’re 20-years-old you sleep it off. Have a Diet Coke and a fry-up. Beans on toast. Ketchup. Tomorrow’s another day.

I miss the rave. I was running today in the LA midday sun and Future Sound Of London’s ‘Papua New Guinea’ came on my headphones. The house classic fired a much-needed euphoria into my muscles as I picked up a cool breeze round the bends of my local reservoir. There’s an insatiable healing that comes with stabbing piano chords and undulating beats. In a state of confusion and loss, rave anthems always bring me home. I don’t know why it’s the case that they are quasi religious to me. Perhaps it’s because they remind me of my childhood, and because they reach so high and so far.

On ‘Weak Becomes Heroes’, Skinner pays credit to the great DJs of the ‘80s: Johnny Walker, Paul Oakenfold, Nicky Holloway, Danny Rampling, “and all the people who gave us these times.” He’s throwing it back to a blip in time when lost souls found sanctuary in each other. It recalls a generation that searched for belonging in the blur of warehouse raves, transcending in shared bliss. And inside the melody is that fragility. We’re talking about young people on the margins. They’ve been overlooked, they are overstimulated, many of them are emotionally starved. In the rave they’re discovering, if only for one night, that they matter. That they are seen. A joy that nobody can judge.

That’s how the weak become heroes. They don’t have to conquer the club. They just have to show up and surrender among the strangers.

It reminds me of how I’ve felt together with the people I miss – when we’re equal and we’re moving in unison in a world that often demands that we shrink. It’s a special kind of success working together in that way. The kind of success you’re not told to aim for. An inside moment: honest, free. No need for words. Just memory.

“I’ve known you all my life I don’t know your name”.