Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living

Mike Skinner’s Mercury Prize-nominated debut Original Pirate Material had established him as a witty and original MC-ing proposition – a motor-mouthed phoenix from the ashes of the UK garage scene. A concept album, a hip-hopera, whatever you wanted to call it, it took things to a completely different level for The Streets with three million copies sold worldwide, multiple Brit and Ivor Novello awards. It also gave a totally authentic but superbly artful voice to the real middle England – the middle England not of warm beer and cricket, but Barratt Homes and Bacardi Breezers.
Perhaps the most action-packed thirty-seven minutes in the history of pop – or rap, or rock and roll come to that – The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living is nothing short of a voyage to the heart of celebrity darkness.
The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living is the story of how he got back on track. Using his special talent for combining beats and rhymes to make sense of what had happened to him, he poured everything he’d learnt into his music. In production terms, he’s totally upped his game on this album. Everything is a little crisper and a little faster – honed and polished to be the perfect vehicle for his trademark forensic lyrical observations.
The first single ‘When You Wasn't Famous' is as brash, immediate and witty as anything he has previously put his name to and head and shoulders above anything else of its ilk, once more proving that nobody spins a yarn quite like Skinner.
Mike Skinner has followed up a sweetly brilliant album about the sort of thing that might happen to him if he wasn’t famous, with a viciously brilliant album about the sort of things that have happened to him now he is.