If we have learnt anything from 25 years of The Streets' music, it’s that when Mike Skinner gets off his box, things get very sketchy indeed. Opening 2025’s Little Simz-curated Meltdown season at the Festival Hall last night, the image had never been rendered more literally. “When I jump off this box,” Skinner said, teetering atop an upturned monitor, “you can all stand up and it’s gonna get a bit wild.”
Had it come to this? One of UK garage's most celebrated auteurs orchestrating visual prompts to get his usually rave-ready audience on their feet? As someone this reviewer last saw lobbing his shoes into the Ally Pally audience and then crowd-surfing out to retrieve them, Skinner was always going to feel hemmed in by the seated austerity of the Southbank's "Brutalist utopia" (although the description fits most of his beats too). He emerged to the sirens, emergency lights, operatic wails and synth-goth strings of Turn the Page in chatty but warily reverent mood: “I imagine this is what it’s like being in Hamilton,” he said as the theatrical setting hit home, “we should be watching a classical concert.” As days in the life of geezers go, this was a proud but imposing one.
Instead, as he wandered the aisles delivering detailed instructions on how we should conduct ourselves – stand, sit, sway, jump, always respect the sightline of others – we seemed to be watching a rehearsal run for a televised Streets gig, with Skinner part relatable everybloke rapper, part studio floor manager. In typically meta fashion, it drew us into Skinner’s laddishly self-deprecating experience, under performance pressure ourselves to make the show work. As instructed, we bopped gently in our seats for the subtle skank of Let’s Push This Forward, rose on cue for an energising Don’t Mug Yourself and shifted aside as Skinner invaded the stalls during The Escapist to politely request he dance on someone’s seat.
More than any other UK garage act, The Streets were always about inviting the listener deep inside Skinner’s grimy urban world - his on-the-lash misadventures, bedsit struggles, teary heartbreaks and failed attempts at pulling KFC goddesses. And at such close, formal and considered quarters his insouciant gutter poetry felt more involving than ever. The existential ten-pint musings of Same Old Thing and Everything is Borrowed, their synth fanfares and arena rock riffs gently muted, were particularly intimate. On the Edge of a Cliff, the folk rock story of being saved from a suicide attempt by a philosophical old man extolling the cycle of life, oozed confessional poignancy. And Skinner’s stirring Let it Be rewrite Never Went to Church – a tribute to his late father – was more touching than ever, directed straight at his children in the stalls who, he revealed, never met their grandad.
As purveyors of grand-scale rap operas and concept works – 2023’s comeback record The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light, for instance, was a clubland crime noir accompanied by a film ten years in the making – The Streets are also worthy of such high-culture consideration. With a slick and subtle band deftly handling the skittering beats, jazzy interludes and operatic undercurrents, and a soul sideman covering the sumptuous hooks and choruses, real grace emerged from the grit of Has It Come to This?, It’s Too Late and last year’s collaboration with Fred Again… Mike (Desert Island Duvet). And as much as Skinner begged, pleaded and intricately directed his own standing ovation at the end, after a devastating Dry Your Eyes and a rocked-up Fit but You Know It – UK garage’s own Parklife – it was coming anyway. The meek became art heroes.
