Tracks
The Streets: "The Escapist"
(2008)
By George Bass | 8 August 2008
Welcome back Mr Skinner! We’re glad you survived your return descent, and hope the air wasn’t too caustic for you up there in the Bozo Zone. After the misanthropic tantrum of 2006’s The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living, it’s a relief to see Minted Mike open the window on his celebrity fetish and air out the stench of Westwood in detention. Perhaps wisely, he’s aiming to exchange it with a more familiar fragrance, recycling the grime of his early symphonies to build something alive and respiring. Originally intended as a cue for the Rupert Wyatt film of the same name, “The Escapist” finds Skinner talking us through his Special Forces survival technique of using white noise to evade interrogation, lungs pumping with sodium pentathol as he meditates his way to freedom. It’s refreshing to see him follow such a straightforward objective rather than struggling to comprehend his fortune.
He may have eased up on the big-beat and insults, but Skinner’s banter is high on a rush of smogless oxygen; he takes his first shaky steps out of his beloved trenches and goes to where grey fades to green, bent on describing every spring bud as his prisons crumble behind him. Fans are already citing the song as a return to the hod-carrying sonnets of Original Pirate Material (2002), and though I wouldn’t wager more than a sportsman’s bet on the basis of one song alone, it’s difficult not to succumb to his enthusiasm and start chancing your arm for the album. Either way, he’s no doubt keen to get back to terra firma—a notion exemplified by the no-nonsense video, apparently shot without his management’s blessing on a spare afternoon. In it we track Skinner as he trots from Dover to Lyon, inadvertently murdering a pair of custom salmon Reeboks while striding. It may not seem like even a small step for man when compared to the fate of the planet, but coming off the back of his über-lucrative contract with the company, the action carries more than just a hint of salvation.