SubscribeI really tried to read the Mike Skinner stuff in today’s Observer Music Monthly with an open mind, but it just wasn’t happening. The cheeky – yet honest – chappy singing in the mockney-style about the stuff of life, leaves me yearning for Ian Dury, who did it all with insight so long ago. Skinner’s observations do ring true, but only because he sings about the façade. He seems unable to scratch the surface of anything, let alone get under anybody’s skin.
It’s like watching Christina Aguilera prancing around as a street corner prostitute in the video for Can’t Hold Us Down as she whinges that, ‘The guy gets all the glory the more he can score / While the girl can do the same and yet you call her a whore’. They’re talking about symptoms not diseases and you want to say, ‘yes, now tell us something we don’t know.’
