Mike Skinner's career follows the trajectory of a drunken night out - sharp and observant at the start, fuzzy and excessive in the middle (when he misfired with moans about fame and bad behaviour), and now going all philosophical on new album Everything Is Borrowed. His audience certainly understands the parallel, and Skinner knows it. "Has everybody had a good weekend?" he begins. By the time he starts rambling about how "boys are more physical ... they like to dance and shit", he's starting to sound like a hedonistic, sexist lad. Then he delivers the punchline: "'Cos their last relationship fucked them up."
This is brilliant Skinner - indulging his crowd's party leanings before whacking them between the eyes with often very raw emotion - and a recurrent feature of a clever show that backs up Skinner's recent comment that he is the "Pablo Picasso of geezer garage". If anything, oldies like Has It Come to This? show how far he's developed from that original, clubbier sound, developing symphonic narratives that are growing up with his audience.
He could easily have claimed to be "the Roy Orbison of rap" for the devastating honesty of his music, which admits that boys do actually cry. Never Went to Church - about his late father - and Dry Your Eyes are confessional wallops, greeted with what sound like cathartic cheers. Skinner suddenly turns agony aunt, asking a girl in the front row: "Do you love him? Don't break his heart." Then the twinkle returns to his eye and he changes the mood again: "Does everyone wanna get naked?"
