Streets Grand Don't Come For Free CD

Just 18 months after the million selling "Original Pirate Material", which broke the boundaries and set the scene for things to come, The Streets return with "A Grand Don't Come For Free".

The Streets: Mike Skinner.
The Streets: Mike Skinner (vocals).
Additional personnel: Morgan Nicholls (piano, bass instrument); Johnny Jenkins, Leo Ihenacho, C Mone, Teddy Mitchell, Tony Walters, Jacqueline Rawe (background vocals).
Mike Skinner has a problem, and from the sound of it, it's life-threatening. He opens his second Streets full-length by moaning "It was supposed to be so easy..." as though he's about to deliver his deathbed confession, the classic tale of a crime gone wrong. Instead, three minutes later, it's clear what the "it" was: walking down to bring back a DVD rental, taking some money out of the machine, and calling his mother, who he'd just left at home, to tell her he wouldn't be back for tea. Believe it or not, but that's just another day in the life of Britain's favorite bedsit producer cum singer/songwriter. Although listeners may not wonder where he finds his material, they'll quickly realize that A Grand Don't Come for Free is just as immediately striking as Skinner's career-making full-length debut, Original Pirate Material. It succeeds, despite a clear lack of comparable singles, because of its paradoxical concept (and yes, it is a concept album) that a record can be tremendously ambitious even though it charts a very unambitious personality. Skinner's urban British youth persona is even more fully drawn than before, and this time he delivers ...