In the millennial fervour for a generational spokesperson, unassuming Cockneyfied Brummie Mike Skinner proved an unexpectedly engaging contender. Original Pirate Material's chronicles of metropolitan male working-class life supplied the deromanticised dark side of Doherty's moon-faced adulation of urban squalor. Third single Weak Become Heroes, much more than a paean to the occasional perfection of chemical excess, was an elegiac triumph of looping piano and closing-credits strings that worked as both retrospective and epilogue. Rooted in the distinctly twentieth-century Summer of Love and the Government vs Repetitive Beats wars of the early 1990s, Weak Become Heroes stakes the same claims as Underworld’s Born Slippy for dance culture’s transcendent and egalitarian qualities, stumbles open-handed and grinning through Sorted for E's and Wizz while that song’s narrator looks on in studied contempt, before meandering home, one ill-judged takeaway poorer but rich in memories, as the night’s fluorescence fades to a drizzly grey dawn. Alternating clear-eyed observation with quiet reflection, Skinner tips his cap to his own heroes and influences, and sets the cap on a fractured fifteen-year dream in masterly fashion that leaves us ready to wake up, shake it off and move on, if not up.
Rhian Jones
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[Album: Original Pirate Material]
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