Sitting down with British music legend and The Streets founder Mike Skinner, END. delve into his cinematic directorial debut ahead of the launch of the Reebok x The Streets Presented by END. Classic Leather pack.
Mike Skinner has always been interested in storytelling. From the release of his first albums as The Streets at the turn of the Millennium, the Birmingham-born, London based musician wrote songs that transformed images and moments of everyday British nightlife and experience into dramatic movements that captured the essence of the kitchen sink dramas of Mike Leigh or Ken Loach. From the perils of finding love in the big city to petty crime and recreational drug taking, Skinner’s everyman drawl became a voice of a generation, as the promise that the millennium brought became less and less of a reality.
I think everyone who’s ever written a song has imagined it as a movie. I think as I got older though, I kind of thought it was the only progression for me, so it didn’t feel like a dream, more a logical difficult step!
Well, I didn’t know what sort of film I wanted to make for years, really; nothing really stuck. It was a horrible feeling. Until one day, I had the thought that you could do a great film noir about a DJ because a DJ is a bit like a 1940’s private detective! It morphed into its own thing though, which was great but that was the starting point and after that my life, which felt like it had kind of shattered apart, started to come back to being one thing again.
Well, it’s much, much more about people and planning. That’s basically it. You have to get good with people and you have to get good at planning, and both of those things have really stuck with me. Maybe not the people so much but the planning has really changed me, I think. You can achieve so much if you just think about what you are doing ahead of time. It’s also made me really enjoy music again though for the opposite reason!
Not bittersweet at all. Honestly, it was so difficult that the moment we finished it was honestly one of the best moments of my life. It was in the top 5 moments of my life. Amazing feeling. So much respect for anyone who has made a film.
Yes, music videos are a fantastic gateway drug. I’ve been so blessed to be a musician with a need for music videos because I’ve been able to live out my hobbies with it having a purpose to sell the music. There’s a lot you learn about filmmaking from music videos but there’s also a lot you have to put aside when you make a film, because a film has to make sense and the making sense bit is much harder than it looks. I comforted myself at the beginning of shooting the film with the idea that it was simply going to be 30 music videos in a row, but it’s actually harder than that because in music videos you kind of find the story in the edit but you cannot do that with a film, or it makes no sense.
“I think everyone who’s ever written a song has imagined it as a movie. I think as I got older though, I kind of thought it was the only progression for me, so it didn’t feel like a dream, more a logical difficult step!”
Firstly, I think Raymond Chandler is my favourite writer, so that goes a long way, but I just love simple stories that have deeper elements to them rather than ‘literature’, which can be trying to be deep too hard. I’m also a child of the ‘90s which was the great era of neo-noir films like The Usual Suspects, Devil in a Blue Dress and LA Confidential.
Well, I could have not done it as a “The Streets” thing and just done a film noir about a DJ, but I don’t know, it just felt like music was gonna be a thing obviously and, in a way, my second album, A Grand Don’t Come For Free was a kind of film noir anyway. There was a narration and there was a suspense element in there, so I just thought, "well, what if my character from that album had gotten old and ended up stuck again but as a middle-aged DJ". It kind of worked in many different ways at the same time.
The music was easy really compared to everything else I had to do. There’s a lightness to the music because there wasn’t any pressure on it apart from to serve the film in the way it needed to. It was fun making the music.
My first memories consciously of it [Reebok Classic Leather] were at raves in London. There was a certain hippy sensibility to the happy hardcore guys in maybe ‘95 and then obviously it’s always been a staple on the terraces. I actually used to wear Workouts myself and my brother wore Classics, but as time has gone on, they just work in many situations and have many different ways of presenting themselves. They are truly in the canon of, dare I say it, ‘classics’. I wish I’d had the courage to call my best work classic!
I think I’ll just keep doing the same really. I have to get my film onto streaming services, so there’s a bit of work to do for that, but yes, I’m sure after that there will be another. It would be nice, now that I know how I like to do things, to do them in a way that is a little bit easier!
REEBOK X THE STREETS BY END. CLASSIC LEATHER
Chalk, Black & Gold Metallic
IG3982
04/19/2024