Article #244082

Corn Exchange, Edinburgh
With winningly deadpan delivery, Mike Skinner’s concept album about losing £1,000 behind a TV is performed in full with a formidable band

On a stage in Edinburgh, thick with dry ice, a bus shelter materialises and a man in black steps out. Mike Skinner, AKA the Streets, has come to take us back in time. Pint in his right hand, mic in his left, he begins: “It was supposed to be so easy …” And just like that it’s 2004 again.

Had he been trying to court a mass audience, Skinner wrote in his memoir, “I certainly wouldn’t have made a concept album about someone losing a thousand pounds down the back of the TV”. Yet that is indeed the premise of his 2004 album A Grand Don’t Come for Free, a British classic which, judging by the noisy Corn Exchange crowd, is loved by more than one generation.