The Streets, Alexandra Palace review: Even in middle age, Mike Skinner causes mayhem

More than any writer of his era, Mike Skinner loves a narrative arc. It’s there in many of The Streets’ everyman geezer poet tales of booze, birds, break-ups and bad nights out; his 2004 opus, second album A Grand Don’t Come for Free, even went the whole hog, a concept album that played out like a film somebody forgot to capture.

This year, Skinner finally fully realised his cinematic ambitions, a decade in the making. The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light, a film that puts the low in low-budget, is a grimy, slightly wooden but nonetheless enjoyable clubland noir murder mystery in which Skinner writes, acts, directs, produces and funds. The accompanying album – The Streets’ first official studio album since 2011’s Computers and Blues, the record that was meant to wrap up Skinner’s first creative outlet – acts as the film’s soundtrack.

And so on the closing night of a UK tour at what he called “the people’s palace” (Skinner lives in neighbouring Highgate and spent much of the night displaying minute local knowledge), he attempted to give this 90-minute show something of a through thread – what he calls a mosh-pit championship battle between the men and the women – as he wrestled with a much more existential question: how does an erstwhile raver, one synonymous with laddish hedonism, deal with the onset of middle age?

It’s not entirely clear whether he yet has an answer. At 44, Skinner can just about still relate to a time when The Streets were a genuinely fresh and unique voice of British youth. The set was therefore frontloaded with tracks from matchless 2002 debut Original Pirate Material: during the stabbing synths of steadily rising perennial set opener “Turn the Page”, Skinner got into the crowd. He did so again during his most underrated song, the dreamy “The Escapist” – but it was a rare moment of real engagement with his increasingly distant self.

It would be grossly unfair to say he’s phoning the early stuff in – during a wild “Don’t Mug Yourself” he jumped off the riser, legs akimbo, a flash of the old energy – but you got the impression he could do that stuff in his sleep.

It was noticeable that while the crowd went mad for the UK garage groove of “Has it Come to This?” and a brilliant rendition of “Weak Become Heroes”, the four-piece band raising the song’s pulse into a rave, Skinner’s own excitement fevered with newer songs. He was clearly energised by The Darker… material “Troubled Waters”, with its dark, barren synths, and the shadowy, wavy post-comedown vibes of Too Much Yayo.

A restless intellect, it was as if Skinner needed more stimulation than merely performing music. And so the injected storyline of sorts – directing a girls-only mosh pit by the end of the set and a boys-only one in the encore – which he hinted at from the start and slowly built up throughout. It was a neat idea taken too far: he often seemed more interested in setting up the premise than actually singing the songs. In the encore, his it’ll-be-ok-mate number one ballad “Dry Your Eyes” and dense, disorientating night-out-gone-wrong classic “Blinded by the Lights” came off as secondary to his instructing the crowd what to do.

The pay-offs – a mayhem-inducing “Fit But You Know it” and a feral take on closing 2020’s “Take Me as I Am” that saw Skinner throw his shoe and crowdsurf after it – provoked the biggest responses of the night. In that respect, Skinner will feel mission accomplished.