The Streets’ classic UK opus Original Pirate Material comes back around for a new vinyl edition. A real turning point in terms of white indie audiences getting into the crucially advanced sounds of British inner cities, Original Pirate Material emerged at a time when major labels were putting all. Streets Original Pirate Material (Disc 2 Only) Streets Records. Jewel Case With Front And Back Inserts - Sticker On Front - Tracks: 1. Turn the Page 2. Has It Come to This? Let's Push Things Forward 4. Sharp darts 5. Same Old Thing 6. Geezers Need Excitement 7. It's Too Late.

1. Original Pirate Material The Streets Rare Candy
2. Rare Pirate Game
3. Original Material

Original Pirate Material The Streets Rare Candy

When Streets tracks first appeared in DJ sets and on garage mix albums circa 2000, they made for an interesting change of pace; instead of hyper-speed ragga chatting or candy-coated divas (or both), listeners heard banging tracks hosted by a strangely conversational bloke with a mock cockney accent and a half-singing, half-rapping delivery. It was Mike Skinner, producer and MC, the half-clued-up, half-clueless voice behind club hits 'Has It Come to This?' and 'Let's Push Things Forward.' Facing an entire full-length of Streets tracks hardly sounded like a pleasant prospect, but Skinner's debut, Original Pirate Material, is an excellent listen -- much better than the heavy-handed hype would make you think. Unlike most garage LPs, it's certainly not a substitute for a night out; it's more a statement on modern-day British youth, complete with all the references to Playstations, Indian takeaway, and copious amounts of cannabis you'd expect. Skinner also has a refreshing way of writing songs, not tracks, that immediately distinguishes him from most in the garage scene. True, describing his delivery as rapping would be giving an undeserved compliment (you surely wouldn't hear any American rappers dropping bombs like this line: 'I wholeheartedly agree with your viewpoint'). Still, nearly every song here succeeds wildly, first place (after the hits) going to 'The Irony of It All,' on which Skinner and a stereotypical British lout go back and forth 'debating' the merits of weed and lager, respectively (Skinner's meek, agreeable commentary increasingly, and hilariously, causes 'Terry' to go off the edge). The production is also excellent; 'Let's Push Things Forward' is all lurching ragga flow, with a one-note organ line and drunken trumpets barely pushing the chorus forward. 'Sharp Darts' and 'Too Much Brandy' have short, brutal tech lines driving them, and really don't need any more for maximum impact. Though club-phobic listeners may find it difficult placing Skinner as just the latest dot along a line connecting quintessentially British musicians/humorists/social critics Nöel Coward, the Kinks, Ian Dury, the Jam, the Specials, and Happy Mondays, Original Pirate Material is a rare garage album: that is, one with a shelf life beyond six months.

'Ooh, the pizza's here .. will someone let him in please?
We didn't order chicken .. Not a problem, we'll pick it out.'

At first hearing, the almost pathological self-effacement of Tim (the mild-mannered bong-builder who goes head to head with lagered-up Terry the law-abider in the Streets' Socratic dialogue The Irony of It All) seems about as far from the defiant self-assertion of the Who's 'Hope I die before I get old' as you could possibly get. But for those who would like to remember the Noughties as a period in which British pop actually moved forward at the same time as regressing into The X Factor's primordial ooze, Mike Skinner's generational rallying cry is every bit as potent as Pete Townshend's ever was.

The two most important criteria for any self-respecting album-of-the-decade contender to meet are that it could not conceivably have been made in any other 10-year period, and that it should be impossible to imagine how that decade might have sounded without it. And the Streets' triumphantly down-home 2002 debut, Original Pirate Material, ticks these boxes for the first decade of the 21st century with the same winning flourish as Massive Attack's Blue Lines did for the 1990s. 4ch copter micro series manual.

Whatever bold claims you might make for Derek B or Mr C or even Massive Attack's 3-D, Mike Skinner was the first to prove that a British rapper could speak directly to a nationwide constituency in a voice entirely his own. The raw-boned but finely honed debut of this '45th-generation Roman' established that British hip-hop could be more than just an aspiring frontier outpost of the imperial American homeland. It also turned out to be the missing link between the observational songwriting of the Kinks and the Specials, and the current pop apotheosis of Dizzee Rascal.

Rare Pirate Game

As large as the album looms over the British musical landscape of late 2009, its roots were to be found in the heyday of UK garage. 'Every garage MC to my knowledge at that time was really a rapper,' Skinner remembers. 'The thing about garage was, it gave you a chance of breaking out and reaching a wider public, whereas if all you were doing was making 'UK hip-hop', there was no hope of that happening. Yet at the same time, being a garage MC was not generally regarded as prestigious. If you're a rapper, that's a good thing: you're a wordsmith. But if you were an MC – at least until the momentous Dizzee Rascal came along – that was more like being a holiday rep.'

So as well as giving Skinner confidence, did the crossover success of UK garage also give him something to react against? 'I've probably said it too many times now,' he nods apologetically, 'but that's where Original Pirate Material came from: all this stuff about get the girl and drink champagne on the dancefloor, it sounds nice to my ears, and I like that bass line, but sorry mate, I don't know what you're talking about.'

'My experience of listening to UK garage, which was huge,' Skinner continues, 'was in people's cars and houses … and the idea behind Original Pirate Material was to make music which reflected that – to be someone who was on the one hand very English, but at the same time a bit like Nas, and could come up with these cool-sounding couplets about all the weed that gets smoked and all the little adventures that you go on.'

Original Material

The big adventure that Skinner was sent on by the success of Original Pirate Material is expected to come full circle with the release of next year's fifth and final Streets album. But in the meantime, how fresh and inspired every track still sounds – from the marvellously grandiloquent opening fanfare of Turn the Page ('Stand by me my apprentice!'), through Too Much Brandy's Marlon-quaffing bacchanal and the ecstatic reverie of Weak Become Heroes, to Stay Positive's nervy and uncertain finale – testifying to the fact that nothing lasts better than music which is truly of its time.