Wot’s He Sayin’?

British pop reclaims its accent

By Craig Taylor
April 5, 2006

O.G.: Original Geezer: Mike Skinner aka the Streets. Photo Ewen Spencer. Courtesy Warner Music Canada.

The release of another album by the Streets is a cause for celebration in the U.K. The disc, entitled The Hardest Way to Make An Easy Living, is the Streets' third, and will be in British stores on April 10. An explanation first: for those who think grime can be solved with Mr. Clean and that a garage is only a suitable place to park a car, the Streets are not a band. Rather, it's one individual, Mike Skinner, who burst onto the U.K. music scene in 2000 with some recordings made, by and large, in his mother's house. Skinner mixed elements of U.K. garage and the emerging beats of the grime scene, all soaked in a D.I.Y. aesthetic. You could almost hear the sounds of Skinner's suburban neighbourhood in West Heath, Birmingham, leaking into the tracks. The music loped about, particularly in Skinner's laconic first single, Let's Push Things Forward. I still remember hearing it on London radio station XFM when it was first released: the overheated guitars of the latest NME-anointed rock band suddenly gave way to a guy talking over a cod-reggae beat. It shouldn't have worked – it was like sitting in a pub listening to an entertaining drunk – but it did.

While the music had a certain hypnotic charm, it was Skinner's voice and lyrics that made the deepest impressions. Skinner took the advice "write what you know" to new levels. Skinner touches on the big issues of life – love, holidaying in Spain, that feeling when Ecstasy kicks in and you can't stop rubbing your hands on your thighs… and he's also produced the great breakup song of the last few years. The ballad Dry Your Eyes became a massive U.K. hit, not least because it eschewed mopey banalities like "Everything I do, I do it for you" for the sheer inarticulateness that comes with a split. Skinner sings: "I'm not going to f---ing just f---ing leave it all now / Cuz you said it'd be forever and that was your vow / And you're going to let our thing simply crash and fall down? / You're well out of order now, this is well out of town."

More important, Skinner has led a recent resurgence in British artists singing with their own accents. There is a long and storied history of British musicians suppressing their accents: Cliff Richards, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were too enamoured with the American voice; Sting could have been from anywhere; then there's Phil Collins's pan-global awfulness. Anyone listening to a diet of mainstream rock, as I did, would have grown up thinking, as I did, that accents simply disappeared when a singer opened his or her mouth.

For me, that phase thankfully ended with my belated discovery of the Clash and the Sex Pistols, both of which could snarl in accent. More recently, there's a pleasure that comes with regional accent spotting. The Futureheads rose from their practice space at the Sunderland City Detached Youth Project, and even their cover of Kate Bush's Hounds of Love can't hide the flat tones of their Sunderland accents. The Rakes applied their non-specific Midlands accent to suitable subject matter in their single Work, Work, Work (Pub, Club, Sleep). Listen hard enough to the Zutons and you'll hear their perky Liverpudlian vowels.

London calling: The Clash, circa 1983. Photo by Getty Images/Getty Images.

One of the best representatives of the Bristol accent has been Tricky. In the Massive Attack days, his vowels were dragged out and mangled. New rhyme schemes emerged. When Massive Attack broke in North America, Tricky was one of the first to demonstrate that hip hop could sound equally good without an American accent.

Skinner's voice is a little different. Yes, it's British, and to an outsider it might sound like Skinner is the most regional of the lot. After growing up in Birmingham and messing about in his early years making hip hop with an American accent, he eventually adopted Mockney. "Adopted" might be too strong a word – Mockney seems to slip into the moufs of most British musicians. Blur's Parklife album was a tribute to the lost art of Mockney ("See you layah"). Mockney is an accent that has its roots in east London; it's been spreading down the Thames estuary and, gradually, to the rest of the country. It's the kind of accent adopted by film directors (Guy Ritchie), their wives (Madonna) and even certain Royals – like the Queen's granddaughter Zara Phillips – in an effort to downplay poshness or an American accent. Estuary English is even reaching out to rural pockets, endangering regional accents in places like Suffolk.

In Skinner's mouth, the Mockney gets amplified. It is a gift, an addition to the geezer persona he has cultivated with his sharp writing. The word "DVD" becomes the glorious "day-vay-day"; over the course of his narratives, Skinner doesn't think much, but he does fink. He finks about everyfing: the texting, drinks, drugs and – perhaps this is the true sign of brilliance – works them into songs in a way that transforms them into short stories. On Blinded By The Light, Skinner just talks over a pedestrian beat, but he tells a beautifully observed story of a night at a club, waiting for the drugs to kick in, and getting suddenly and irretrievably swept away on a feeling of goodwill for his fellow clubbers – the faces that keep "pushing by / then walking off into the night."

The success of Skinner's voice has given confidence to others in his wake. The biggest recipient is East London rapper Dizzee Rascal. "The only person to really say something in a British accent was the Streets," Dizzee explained to a Philadelphia newspaper while on tour in 2004. "People took to that authenticity. My angle then, maybe, was to take that thing – the Streets' thing... into the underground, into the pirate world." Dizzee's accent is even more of a local pleasure, a puzzle from the E3 post code of London, waiting to be unlocked. Give his debut, Boy in da Corner, to a student learning English and watch the dazed look spread across her face.

Skinner's new album focuses on the horrors and pleasures of celebrity. The first single, When You Wasn't Famous, revolves around the idea that picking up girls is so easy when you're him, the only way to recapture that true pulling feeling is to pick up a girl who has the same level of fame. The song is already a hit in the U.K. – especially the section where Skinner talks about a pop star who smokes crack before her appearance on kiddy pop TV show CD:UK. The resulting gossip is enough to keep the single in circulation for months, but do the in-jokes and spot-on reflections of celebrity life carry the same meaning for North Americans? Odds are they won't. For all the critical praise he's gathered, it seems people don't fully understand Skinner's subjects. My favorite petty dismissal comes from an anonymous contributor to the online Urban Dictionary. On the Streets: "A pretty crappy band from the U.K. consisting of a British man talking in front of a melody. It's [sic] only redeeming quality is the fact that he has a British accent."

Craig Taylor is a feature writer for the Guardian in London, England.

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