The Streets @ Metro City
w/ Slim Set
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
Dry your eyes, Perth. Mike Skinner and The Streets are back and if a Tuesday night in WA is anything to go by, this reformation has plenty of legs.
From a smart if little known choice of support act in Slim Set, it was a successful night at Metro City all round. The Sydney Westies led by captivating MC Dev sounded more like garage and two-step loving Westies of the UK variety, and built up an impressive dance floor over 40 fun-filled minutes. Dev’s speedy flow touched on everything from KFC to Parramatta and other east coast geographical locales, while he noted they’d been to Fremantle that day and discovered “Freo rhymes with Oreo”. Peaking on singles Lazy and Cooked, Slim Set were a high energy, grimey warm up.
Much like the master storytelling of The Streets‘ 2004 concept album A Grand Don’t Come For Free, Mike Skinner unleashed a number of distinctive plot lines on the crowd on Tuesday. Similar to a comedian in the way he returned to earlier punch lines and anecdotes, such as “the sparkly Holden with the speed stripe” versus “the 15-year old black Ford that goes fast”, he also led The Streets through some 23 hits and classics.
Kicking off with no less than eight bangers from their landmark first two albums, seven of which were from 2002 debut Original Pirate Material, ensured the healthy crowd was in good voice early. Turn the Page, Let’s Push Things Forward, Same Old Thing, Sharp Darts, Don’t Mug Yourself… the onslaught came thick and fast as Skinner sprayed the crowd with champagne and encouraged some skulling of drinks and other debauchery.
Has It Come to This? took us back to the song that started it all, while Geezers Need Excitement saw Skinner climb his foldback speaker and leap back onto the stage. It rarely got less rock and roll from there, although he did later sit on the same speaker in an emotional moment, singing Never Went to Church for his dad.
Backing vocalists Kevin Mark Trail and Rob Harvey (looking quite different to his days as frontman of The Music) took centre stage for the epic It’s Too Late, while Skinner’s insistence that “when the girls go, they go” paid off when he talked several women into crowd surfing, because “it’s 2019”, and why shouldn’t they feel free to without threat of being inappropriately groped? Damn straight. It was a well played moment as the joyful chorus of Heaven For the Weather rocked in the background. Dry Your Eyes then closed the main set with the crowd singing along to The Streets’ version of a power ballad from the tiered balcony to the floor.
Giving us shit about how much Perth crowds have changed “since you’ve gotten a Louis Vuitton” during the encore, it also provided some of the night’s highlights. Harvey’s funk guitar riffing gave Weak Become Heroes a fresh take, while Blinded By the Lights and Fit But You Know It fought it out for track of the night, the former a strobe-laden masterpiece and the latter a full on party to close proceedings.
Dry your eyes then, it’s been an open relationship for too long. It’s time to re-commit to The Streets once more – there may be plenty more fish in the sea but there’s few as clever as Mike Skinner (even when he’s ploughing us with booze). It’s not over, after all.
HARVEY RAE
Photos by Alfred Gorman
