The Streets: The Hardest Way To Make A Living (679) ****

MIKE SKINNER'S EXISTENCE has been transformed by success and fortune. It's a fortune accrued by observing, in startlingly prosaic detail, a life of Wetherspoons and scams, ashtrays and longing for haughty girls, of cab ranks and late night fumblings. The musical backbeat to Skinner's tracks always seemed disconnected, however, remote from his own patter, as if emanating from down in the cellar of some nightclub from which he's excluded, on the wrong side of the velvet rope.