Cheekiest ten minutes of recorded sound – the middle of ‘The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living’
Never mind that it’s the third-best Streets album. Never mind that there are mostly fillers. Never mind the godawful ‘Pranging Out’ remix with train-wreck Doherty. Never mind, even, that the actually-quite-moving ‘Never Went to Church’ is really out of place in that last third. Because even when he’s not saying it very well, Mike Skinner still has plenty to say. And the middle trilogy of songs, two about fame being boring and crazy, and one concerning small-time grifting, are brilliant.
First up, ‘Momento Mori’ (it’s Latin and it says we must all die) talks about Mike’s one main weakness, and it’s not drugs or women, it’s capitalism. He’d rather drop his hard-earned on stripy Italian shirts. Over a lazy, funky keyboard beat. And ‘When You Wasn’t Famous’, about his tryst with an unnamed starlet (probably isn’t Judi Dench) was a killer first single complete with fake dog noises. Sandwiched in between, ‘Can’t Con An Honest Jon’ is the most ‘Original Pirate Material’ of all his tracks, in that it’s not actually about Mike, but some great new characters, very much in the Baron von Marlon vein. Farquar has a dog, right, and… oh, just listen to it.
[download The Streets - Can’t Con An Honest Jon]
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