I don't often leave concerts early. Nor would I have departed this one before its allotted three score minutes and ten, but for idiocy on my part. Having procured, for myself, a substantially painful throat infection and a dose of flu, I decided that the best thing would be to run it off, and turned up to play rugby against two touring sides on Saturday. I was convinced by team-mates - wisely, one might suggest - that this was unwise. Rather less medically sound was the decision to referee the three forty-minute games instead. Two hours of running around did me no harm. Two hours of shouting left me with a shredded throat and a tendency to cough up blood that would have made Keats pack in the poetry business and head for the Arizonian desert.
So I left just before the encores of this one, after three hours of sipping pint after pint of iced water, many brought manfully from the bar by the Mighty Cornholio. Understand that this review might be a touch jaded as a result of such an unpromising background.
The support act, who I think were called Sway, were kinda fun. They worked the crowd, maintained a good level of banter, and gave it their all in a London wide-boy way. Not original as such, and unlikely to impact the charts any time soon, but solid stuff.
I'm always uncertain how to refer to The Streets. I picture the band as essentially The The-ish in structure: one man (Mike Skinner in this case) with guests, session musicians and effects technicians brought in as needed. But Skinner had a full band here, with guitar, bass, keyboards and drums as well as a second vocalist. The mood was kinda party-ish, the instrumentation heavily emphasised, the take on the set rather funk-influenced. Skinner and his fellow vocalist (whose voice was far more powerful, and tended to dominate) arrived wearing white t-shirts under structured, 80's jackets with the sleeves rolled up. Very Crockett and Tubbs.
My problem with the event is that Skinner's poetry is, or rather should be, the whole point. At his best - and his best is very, very good - he is just talking about utterly mundane events and observations that leave the listener saying "yes! I've been there too!". So it is that Could Well Be In speaks to every bloke who has ever sat there, pretending to listen to a girl while thinking "she's playing her hair. That's a good thing, isn't it? Or does it mean she's bored?":
I saw this thing on ITV the other week,
Said, that if she played with her hair, she's probably keen
She's playin with her hair well regularly,
So I reckon I could well be in.
Similarly, Blinded By The Light is as fine an evocation of a terrible night out, separated from friends, mashed, desperately trying to get bars on the phone as I can imagine. It helps that the everyday familiarity of the events is set against an achingly gorgeous sample, often with a three-against-four juxtaposition of rhythms that underlines the two levels of the lyrics: the narrator thinks he's getting too worked up but actually we know he has no idea how bad things really are.
Skinner, better than any other hip-hop artist I can think of, is able to persuade high-school dropouts to listen to spoken-word narrative and observational poetry.
All of which seems a long way from the concert, but here's my point: there is no point coming to see an essentially lyrical work if the sound system muffles those few words that can be heard over the band. There is a reason that the recitative form is played out against a backing of one or two instruments and no other vocalists. The words are the thing.
So as a performance by The Streets of their stuff, it kinda sucked. No longer the stripped-down form of the boy from a bedroom in Birmingham, it became a funky party sound which kept an uncritical crowd of chavs and neds bouncing along in delight. Skinner and his new playmates played along, slipping cocky musical references to the Arctic Monkeys, the Pussycat Dolls and others into their act, letting slip that Rachel Stevens was his would-be target in his latest, jokily confessional single. But, ultimately, the sound system's lack of quality and the poor balance from the sound desk let him down. I'm glad I saw it, but the best thing was that it persuaded me to get back to the CDs in a quiet room.
The next day was the Give It a Name festival in Manchester. More of that anon...