The Streets, who have been given four Brit Award nominations, are aka Mike Skinner, the boy from Birmingham. He has been described as one of the most authentic voices of British youth for many years. Skinner has been compared to a british Eminem, lauded as the voice of Blair’s Britain and the Mercury Music Prize nomination is a heady accolade for one so young. According to David Bowie, Mike Skinner is one of the UK’s few truly unique talents. Now, that’s likely to add to the legend of the boy from Birmingham, “fiddling with keyboards” at the age of five, later building his own sound booth out of a cupboard and an old mattress and turning his bedroom into “rap central”. He sings about life as a geezer, of lager, fast food and failure with women. He has described himself as not working class or middle class but after a British housebuilding company: “Barratt class: suburban estates, not poor but not much money about, really boring”.