The sun is shining, palm trees are wafting in a soft breeze, and the man who is synonymous with The Streets, one of the UK’s most influential hip-hop acts, is in chipper form. “Every time that background comes on it just makes me so happy,” Mike Skinner says about the Zoom screen created by his young son. The background’s sun and palm trees are in keeping with the musician, producer, songwriter and rapper’s sense of relief that he’s managed to get his first film, The Darker the Shadow, the Brighter the Light, across the line.
The feature, which Skinner is releasing this week in tandem with an album of the same name, has taken about seven years to complete. The battle to make it was, he says, beset with tension, anxiety, financial difficulties, promises delivered and then broken, and a not insignificant factor known as Covid-19.
“There was a lot of not knowing how it was going to come together,” he says. “I started by coming up with a story, but it took me a few years to work out what the idea was. Once I finished the outline I did the music, and then it took another few years to do the script. Then we thought someone might give us some money to do it, so we spent a couple of years trying to work out the financial side of things. In the meantime I was directing a lot of other stuff so I could prove myself to the potential financiers. It became apparent, however, that we weren’t going to get any money, so from just before Covid happened I decided to fund it on my own. Since then it’s been a huge amount of work, and at points I really did think I was crazy.”
Skinner also acts in the film, co-ordinated its special effects, was its director of photography, and edited it.
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“Nothing on its own was that difficult. It was more everything all at the same time. By the end it almost became more of a mental-health issue than anything else. It was showing up and doing the work when I knew we were still years away from the finish point, when I sensed that no one was going to pull me out of this but I still had to keep going.”
Only recently did that sense of its being an uphill battle disappear. “About a month ago it went from being pitch black to as bright as the sun. I handed in the film having not slept for almost a week.”
The Darker the Shadow, the Brighter the Light operates on several levels, Skinner says. Wrapped around what he describes as a “film-noir murder mystery” about a once-notable DJ who gets caught up in a drug deal gone wrong, it also comments on fandom and the vagaries of commercial success.
“I play the main character,” he says, “who had some big songs back in the day and is now probably too old to be in nightclubs. That is kind of like me, to be honest, and the sort of things I say and that people say to me in the film are actually what some people say to me: they used to like my stuff, and where did I go? That’s a pretty common thing to hear when you’re a musician of a certain age.”
At 44 – “more than double the age of people in nightclubs, most of the time” – does he really feel he’s too old? Not when he’s working, he says. “When you’re a DJ the only thing you’ve got to understand is the music, and if you get that right then everything else falls into place. So in that way I don’t feel like I’m too old, but there are definitely moments where I think it would be easier if I had a day job.”
These include, he says, the times when you’re “checking into a hotel at 11pm, setting your alarm for midnight and then going from a quiet, air-conditioned room into a boiling-hot venue where people are shouting and screaming. You start playing tracks in this madness for about 90 minutes, you finish, you push open the fire-escape doors, return to the hotel, and before you know what’s happened you’re back to your travelling-salesman lifestyle again. Ideally, all of it would take place in the day. In fact, I’d love it if it took place during the day.”
Skinner points out the contrast between the intensity and excitement of a nightclub dance floor and the everyday world behind the scenes. “I reckon with any walk of life, the really good stories on television shows or movies often show how ordinary everything is. My experience is that people are just asleep. You see lots of people sleeping in nightclubs – more than you’d think!”
Experience is what it all boils down to, Skinner reckons. So what, he says, if his work isn’t accepted by everyone? It’s what he has learned from making it that matters. As far as the film of The Darker the Shadow, the Brighter the Light goes, “I learned that I can show up with no light at the end of the tunnel, and with no idea where things are going, and I can see it through. At every other point in my life I’ve always been able to imagine how things are going to turn out, but with the film I had no idea what was going to happen. It took up so much of my life because, at times, as I said, there was no apparent end to it. Yet I kept myself on track, even though many times it felt like being in a forest at night, just walking in one direction. I had a certain level of optimism, though, because I sensed that I’d eventually get to a pub!”
Now the movie has made it to UK cinemas – no release date has been announced for Ireland – does it mark the end of a chapter in Skinner’s career?
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“I never look back,” he says. “I don’t know why, but I think there’s something a bit stubborn about doing that. I’m sure I’ll get to an age where I will realise processing needed to be done, but something is stopping me from doing it.” He used to think he could squeeze more out of a day than was possible – then overdid things to the extent that he would burn out and develop extreme anxiety; ultimately, he developed chronic-fatigue syndrome and needed to take a year’s break from music. “I was cheating, really, trying to cheat time,” Skinner says, adding that he’s much more conscious now of self-sustainability. Still, “Maybe there’s a reckoning in the future somewhere where I have to start looking back rather than just forward. Good idea, that.”
The album The Darker the Shadow, the Brighter the Light is released by 679 Recordings/Warner. The Streets play the Telegraph Building, Belfast, on Sunday, October 22nd, and the 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on Monday, October 23rd and Tuesday, October 24th
