UK Rap: The word on The Streets

Mike Skinner used to sell fast food, but his debut album, Original Pirate Material, looks set to catapult him to the top of the Britrap scene. Gavin Martin meets the 22-year-old live wire and hails the current explosion of home-grown rappers

When Mike Skinner, aka The Streets, the 22-year-old lyrical king of British rap, discovers I live within the sound of Bow Bells, he's immediately curious. "Are you a bit dodgy, then?" he asks, grinning, between mouthfuls of chicken salad. "Has anyone ever called you a muppet? When was the last time you called someone a slag?"

Skinner's crooked teeth, bloodshot eyes, indeterminate facial hair and sallow complexion make it hard to believe he's from the generation that produced the production-line muppets of Pop Idol. In the interview, he asks as many questions as he answers and constantly deflects attention away from himself, on to a broader canvas.

"Sorry," he says, half-way through interrogating me about long-term relation- ships, drugs, politics and the collapse of the World Trade Centre. "It just gets boring talking about the same thing to everyone. Talking about inspiration is so wanky, so west London. I'm not really into art; I'm into science," he winks.

Skinner's quick, lateral wit and inquisitiveness should be expected, as they are among the qualities that make his album, Original Pirate Material, one of the greatest British debuts of the past 20 years. Produced, performed and written almost entirely by the former fast-food salesman, the album is a smart and funny, free-wheeling and reflective broadcast from the rough end of the nation's youth culture. The songs – or, as Mike prefers to call them, tunes – tackle male violence ("Geezers Need Excitement"), the lure of heroin ("Stay Positive"), Britain's cultural vacuum ("Let's Push Things Forward") and the E-generation legacy ("Weak Become Heroes"). The cross-cutting duel between a know-it-all, dope-smoking student and meathead lager lout on "The Irony of It All" underlines Skinner's mastery of accent and character. He was born in north London but raised in hard-pressed circumstances in West Heath, Birmingham, and he currently lives in Brixton. Critics have praised both his Midland twang and his "mockney" brogue.

"Brummies say I sound like a Londoner, and Londoners say I sound like a Brummie," he shrugs. "I'm not going to worry about it. Accent is about who you want to be. There's Londoners who try to wash out their accent; there's Londoners who want to sound more cockney. Maybe I want to be a Londoner – I don't know. Also, a lifetime of being told your accent sounds stupid doesn't encourage you to stay faithful to that accent."

Original Pirate Material arrives at an opportune moment in the evolution of Brit-rap, as home-grown concerns and styles are finally emerging out of the shadow of US dominance. Roots Manuva's inimitable blend of ragga chat and neo-biblical verse comes directly from London's reggae sound systems and his father's preaching background. Like the duo Luck and Neat, Manuva points to the cockney Jamaican Smiley Culture as "a Britrap pioneer".

The contribution of the Luton-based rap crew Phi-Life Cypher helped to make Damon Albarn's cartoon outfit Gorillaz one of the top-selling albums of last year. After 10 years on the circuit, the London-based Armenian MC Blade had his first Top 30 chart entry with "Ya Don't See the Signs". The Harlesden-based MC Wildflower, featured on the recent Herbaliser single "Good Girl Gone Bad", says that "the switch came when people stopped rapping in an American accent and started celebrating Britishness."

The So Solid Crew member Asher D's ambition "to follow in the footsteps of Nas and Biggie" may be thwarted by a custodial sentence when he appears in court on a firearms charge later this month. But the effect of the best-selling south-London collective and the pirate radio culture out of which they grew is still being felt. Ms Dynamite, a one-time Crew associate, is preparing to release one of the year's most eagerly awaited offerings.

Shunned by major record companies, Britrap has often been considered a joke. Skinner admits that it took many years in his bedroom studio before he arrived at the idea for The Streets. He first tried to form a collective with like-minded local MCs, but his slower style of delivery was out of step with his potential partners. Then he sent tapes to underground American labels. "But they said, 'Why do you want to sound like us? There's millions of us over here. Be yourself.' It made me think."

The development of jungle – an unmistakably British form of dance music – and a year spent in Sydney helped to give Skinner the confidence to find his own voice. "I worked out life in Australia," he says nonchalantly. "I used to think black Americans were all really hard and lived really exciting lives and had all been shot at. When I got to Australia, I realised no one really lives that life. There's dodgy areas, of varying degrees, but what you do is make it exciting and interesting for people to listen to. It's a trick really: people think I'm really exciting, but I'm not."

Unlike So Solid Crew, Skinner features no firearms in his vignettes. His characters use fists and French fries to stir up trouble. "I don't know how to fire a gun, so I don't talk about guns. It's not really violent where I come from. I mean, you could buy a gun for £400, but I didn't need to have a gun."

He still admires So Solid Crew and is happy to see the Britrap revolution, invoked on "Let's Push Things Forward", coming to fruition. However, a list of the names of Skinner's perceived Britrap forefathers passes by him unrecognised. The Manchester punk poet John Cooper Clarke, the deadpan Specials vocalist Terry Hall, the self-proclaimed "big-shot original rapper" Mark E Smith... only the verbally dextrous Ian Dury raises a flicker of recognition ("I've heard of him, but I've never heard him"). He does admit that he's been into "everything from house to Jimi Hendrix", and the first band he saw was Radiohead.

"I was 14 and drank four cans of Strongbow and puked, so I can't remember too much. I was quite into them for a while, but anything I've heard by Radiohead recently sounds like they're doing it for the sake of doing it. It's like they're hiding behind their music – there's no honesty to it. I don't want to cuss him; he's made some great tunes and he's probably a really great bloke, but what I like is honesty."

The directness of Original Pirate Material is certainly striking. But with a constituency in thrall to the cult of the superstar DJ and US cultural imperialism, the birth throes of Britrap has been long and painful. "It's an honesty thing," nods Skinner. "That's the barrier to get over, because nobody thinks anyone wants to know about their own backyard. But any American is living just as exciting or boring a life as anyone over here. You just get the confidence to know that by making loads of tunes and getting better and better at it. Then you realise that you're as good as anyone else, and that the reason other people are good is that they are talking about what they know."

"The revelation will not be civilised – it will be unruly, grimy, low-down and raw," says the London hip-hop don DJ Skit, who hosts the first package tour of Britrap bands in May. Skinner's management and record company have plans for him to put a live show together, but he says that he would rather "stay in the studio and make up some tunes". Album number two is almost finished, he asserts calmly. So what can we expect?

"I'm going to tell the truth: the first album's all a lie, actually," he says, freestyling wildly. "I was really born in Canterbury, and my father's a duke. I myself am an earl and at home I've got a waxed jacket. My family has been wearing Burberry for 600 years and at school I wore plus-fours and a monocle." He must have looked a right muppet.