Mike Skinner Talks Life After The Streets

With The Streets, Mike Skinner successfully soundtracked the dreary taxi rides home from nights out, the days spent sat at home getting stoned, and generally made the mundaneness of modern life sound REALLY good. Five albums in, he put The Streets to rest and disappeared off the radar for a while. But…he’s back, along with Rob Harvey from The Music and their new project The D.O.T.

After premiering their video for "You Never Asked" - featuring man of the moment Danny Brown - and we caught up with Mike the other day to have a little chinwag.

Noisey: Last year you hung up The Streets moniker, why did you decide to start making music again?

Mike: I never didn’t want to do music and I certainly wanted to make a big change, but it’s only really become clear now what it is that I wanted. I wanted to not do The Streets and to be more of a producer really. So, literally as soon as The Streets deal ended, I was doing the soundtrack to The Inbetweeners. It was really fun and kind of what I’d always dreamed of doing when I was a kid. So, The D.O.T is really an extension of that.

Yeah, it's quite a departure from the sound of The Streets, was that intentional?

There’s people that really like The Streets and it wouldn’t be right to go far off that. If I did a Streets album without any of my vocals on it people would be like “what the hell's that?” - but that’s what I want to do. I want to concentrate on the production. My sort of production is obviously influenced a lot by rap and grime. But no one has really put a voice like Rob's on those tracks. It’s exciting, there’s people that really love it and really hate it, which believe it or not is what happened with The Streets.

Oh really? I love Original Pirate Material!

A lot less people now say that Original Pirate Material was a load of shit. It makes sense because it’s been 10 years, people have got used to it. I don’t know whether anyone is going to like The D.O.T, but I do know is that it hasn’t really been done before.

Also, I follow your Twitter account and it went quiet for a while, which was sad…

Yeah, and it’ll be quiet again, y’know. It’s not really normal having 200,000 people following your words. It’s not how humans evolved, so it’s weird. I’ve never wanted to get on peoples nerves.

Good point. So, wow did the link up with Danny Brown come about?

He’s really into UK stuff and into what I was doing. So, when I went to see him at XOYO a couple of months ago we had a party and went off to Paris the next day with a really sore head. That's when I started to email him. I sent him a track and he sent me a vocal back.

So, it was all over email?

Yeah, and then we decided we needed to make a video. He was like, "I’m gonna be in Prague in a week and then I’m not coming back to Europe for a while". We were like, “Wow, okay” and flew out there. I hate it when you get those videos where there’s a guy rapping on it, but he wasn’t there so you see him on a TV screen or something. It was really important to us that it didn’t feel like one of those.

Would you say the track is representative of the album as a whole?

No, this record, and that, is mainly stuff that’s already been on Soundcloud. This first album is kind of like a Soundcloud greatest hits. Then, there’s going to be another album which is all new stuff and that’s coming February next year.

What do you think about Soundcloud and the way the industry is going?

I spend a lot of my life on Soundcloud. It’s really interesting. I speak to Diplo sometimes and Mad Decent and they’re basically like an events company. They don’t sell their music, it just goes out there. In the old days a label would release something every month but Mad Decent do something almost every day. They do the Block Party things and all the events, and Diplo is out there making gazillions DJing. I think the dance people know what they’re doing and all they’re trying to do is get DJing work. The economics of the music is irrelevant, it’s like, get the music out there, get people listening to it, and get people coming to see you.

Yeah, I mean Skrillex is earning millions from DJing…

The whole EDM thing is kind of the model. But for us, we’re sort of half a traditional band and half a dance thing. Rob plays the guitar and I play the keyboards, but it’s very electronic as well.

Deadmau5 was saying he just puts his laptop in and presses play, but you’re playing stuff too?

That whole EDM thing, when it’s in the correct environment, like the Electric Daisy festival in America or whatever, it works. But it’s when you get, say, a DJ on a stage at Glastonbury it can be a bit confusing for the traditional rock’n’roll punters.

True it is a bit weird. So, what are your shows going to be like?

The gigs on this tour are going to be tiny. We probably won’t even fill them, but y’know, it feels like the old days. The people that do like The D.O.T - and you can probably count them on two hands - they really do like it. The lesson for the modern world really is to ignore the mass media and give the audience what they want.

Brave move. Finally, what have you been listening to lately?

I’ve been listening to trap. It's weird, it started about three months ago and already it’s starting to feel quite saturated. Before that I was mad into moombahton and I’ve kind of got these ideas about really slow house. It’s kind of like a chopped and screwed nu-disco which is the sour house thing that I keep banging on about. Every few months there’s some new idea or something. Disclosure are also fantastic, and all that half time drum & bass shit about like "Under Yuh Skirt" by Mavado, which I think is a Zeds Dead tune, weirdly. That’s the prototype for me really, taking what dubstep did and applying it to drum & bass.

Cool, thanks Mike!

The D.O.T’s debut album drops October 22.