Don't mug yourself !

There is always an ironic sense of boredom in a bank holiday weekend. Things don’t go slower just because there’s an additional day when you can add some booze to the toxic waste you have been accumulating during the working week.

Parties don’t start later leaving you the time to tidy up your room (pardon me…flat) and you are not entitled to some extra hours of sleep because the bloody British sun sneaks in as soon as it wakes up finding its way through the gap between the curtain and the cardboard (pardon me…wall).

That’s the main reason why people don’t know what to do with their Monday and they simply can’t wait to get back to work because the wait for the next (and normal) weekend is much more exciting than the miserable end of a prolonged joy. Luckily the next Bank Holiday weekend is far. Two weeks time and here it goes again.

My bank holiday weekend was no different from what I have just described. I met up with my friend who came to England for a musical event we’ll hardly forget but most of all we made the acquaintance of an Anglo/Caribbean girl who is seriously fond of Nanni Moretti.
Now: I am a huge fan of this director and I sometimes tend to resemble to a few of his characters but even tough she tried to explain to us the reasons for such a big love, we still found it amazing that someone who doesn’t know Italy at all (let alone its culture) can find Moretti an “unpredictable genius whose talent is so big that even a blind person could read between the lines of the subtitles on his movies”. Right. What’s next?

The party where I and my friend met this woman on Saturday night came as a big surprise. Imagine a huge house in Harlesden (north-west London), a bunch of artists who gathered for the event to show their informal documentaries or artistic pictures to musicians, dancers, psychos, onlookers, me and my friend.
It was wicked to say the least and in the end we left our email addresses to be told when the next monthly party takes place.
I even ended up getting to know a guy (he calls himself a “musical poet” and I have a few reasons to say he’s not that wrong) who told me about his love for experimental music, Tom Waits and Mike Patton. We exchanged email addresses and we’ll meet again very soon. I reckon we both have a couple of things in mind we could work on together…

When I moved to the UK 3 years ago with my weird “Italy meets America and Jamaica” accent I had to learn the whole language from scratch. Situations taught me that it’s not always important to learn how to write/say things perfectly because the silent understanding of everyday conversation takes you further than a bunch of stupid years at school.
All true but a couple of things made me wonder if I’d have ever learned the attitude (more than the language itself) the Brits speak with. One reason was that I couldn’t understand the monologue in Parklife from Blur. The other was that I couldn’t understand a damn thing Mike Skinner from The Streets was saying.

Original Pirate Material was an album which accompanied me during my first summer in London with its mid-tempos, upbeats and theatrical lyrics “pushed forward” by a teenager from Birmingham with a funny face and a stunning talent. Today I was reading a review I wrote for his second album and I was watching a few videos I somehow managed to record during last year.

The lyrical power is stronger than ever and his attitude (and basically what he says) is much clearer now than it was when, half asleep, I was driving from the south coast of Britain on the wrong side of the motorway for the first time in my life.
Mike Skinner reinvented a genre giving the status of “common language” to the slang spoken in and outside pubs and schools by teenagers. Yes, by chavs.
That’s the product of today’s working class of the Old Blighty and that’s what you get on a Mike Skinner’s album.

A few videos:

The Streets - The Irony Of It All
Mike Skinner on "Pranging Out"
The Streets - Blinded By The Lights
The Streets - Let's Push Things Forward