The Best writer since the turn of the millennium, the street-level bard.
Why Mike Skinner isn’t Poet Laureate beats me. The Streets produce the most universal music under the sun, transcending all social barriers and uniting everyone with words that just sum up how it is. We’ve all been there, nervous with someone we really like and ‘Could Well Be In’ describes the spectrum of emotion that goes with it implicitly.
Looking for the signals, “I saw this thing on ITV the other week, said if she plays with her hair, she’s probably keen” and reading the situation, “She’s playing with her hair well regularly, so I reckon I could well be in.” That simple, catchy chorus defines in two lines what so many other acts strive but fail to allude to in a whole album.
Playing with the ashtray and peeling the label off the bottle (a recognised condition of the sexually frustrated) confirms again The Streets’ concrete grasp of life in the lives of young people alive in 2004. Not only that, but Mike Skinner is the best teller of stories in songs since Lennon and McCartney.
His everyman quality for bringing the essential essence of real life into his music has made him a hit with music fans everywhere, gained him a number one single and album in the same week and attracted an extremely wide-ranging audience to his tunes. The positive fact you don’t have to conform to any of these silly social groups, e.g. Chavs and Greibos and all that, to appreciate the fully human aspect of what The Streets have to say.
The fourth consecutive single from the phenomenal number 1 album continues the consistent trend of rock-solid tunes flowing from The Streets. For those who don’t give The Streets a chance, they’ll never know that ‘Could Well Be In’ is the modern classic and Mike Skinner the modern bard. Street-level.