Until recently I would have advised anyone interested in the psychology of pop stardom to read Feel, Chris Heath's biography of Robbie Williams, even if they couldn't care less about the singer himself. I would now say that they need to read The Story of the Streets – even if they have no interest in Mike Skinner. For that matter, you could have little interest in popular music either, and should probably still read his memoir. It is cleverer, funnier, more illuminating and beautifully written than anything I have read in the longest time.

1. Story of the Streets

2. by

   Mike Skinner

3. 
   
4. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop

1. Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book

In truth, that doesn't come as a complete surprise. Under the pseudonym the Streets, Skinner has spent the past decade chronicling contemporary youth culture with a charm and authenticity that was at times breathtaking. His first album, Original Pirate Material, made it acceptable for British artists to rap in their own accent, subtly but significantly altering the way his generation saw itself. The literary critic John Sutherland described Skinner as the "voice of the excluded" and his second album, A Grand Don't Come For Free, as "half Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, half Samuel Pepys". Nothing has ever evoked the atmosphere of clubbing on ecstasy in the 90s more perfectly than the single Blinded by the Lights, nor the insecurities of a young man on a date with the tender truth of Could Well Be In, while Fit But You Know It managed to capture the comically crude but complex sexual politics of a busy late-night chip shop on a lads' holiday.

After five albums, the Streets is now over; Skinner announced last year that his career as a musician had come to an end, and his memoir is the final curtain call. Having always been ambivalent about performing, he is clear now that his future lies in making films, and when we meet halfway up a tower block, to recreate the cover shot of the Streets' first album, Skinner is instantly absorbed by the photographer's equipment, asking a series of detailed questions with the avid interest of a multimedia techie.

The Streets' music was often characterised as the soundtrack to pilled-up lager louts, but in person Skinner is cerebral and quite reserved. He tends to start a sentence four or five different ways before he finds exactly what he wants to say, is rather serious and strikingly self-aware, and the very opposite of a showbiz party animal. The night before we meet he had attended a Brits awards after-party – but only in order to see his wife, Claire, who had helped organise it – and, with his mind on the school run in the morning (they have a toddler daughter, Amelia, and a baby son, George), he went home after 15 minutes. "Standing there," he offers quietly, "I'd never felt more alone in my life." Today he has his long-time collaborator Ted Mayhem with him, and the way they trade in-jokes and shorthand seems to confirm what Skinner has often said – that despite a reputation for outlandish hedonism, he is only ever really comfortable with a small circle of friends. "Maybe five."

But then Skinner seems to be drawn to a paradox like a moth to a flame, and his memoir is an amused study of the many ironies his life has held so far. Born in 1978, he grew up in a lower-middle-class family in the suburbs of Birmingham and spent his teens listening to UK garage and American rap, and smoking weed. But garage songs were only ever about drinking champagne with sexy laydeez in London nightclubs – which wasn't something Skinner or his mates knew much about – and rap was all about American gangsters shooting each other. He had been obsessed with making music ever since he could remember, and thought what people like him would obviously like to hear was a rapper telling stories about a life they recognised. He couldn't have been more wrong.

"It didn't pan out the way I thought it would at all. At the time I thought it would be successful with people in Birmingham; they'd go, yeah, it's garage and we're talking about, like, smoking weed and stuff – and that's all we do – so we're going to have some music that we like. That was what I wanted to hear, and I was so arrogant I thought, well, everyone else I know will want to hear that, 'cos everyone listens to garage and smokes weed, so I'm putting it all together. It's very straightforward.

"But what actually ended up happening was that hipsters in London thought, wow, this is amazing, and hipsters in Williamsburg and hipsters in Berlin were like, wow, this is cool. And meanwhile people in Birmingham were like, well, no, we kind of like whoever the big rap thing is. And you're not UK hip-hop, mate, 'cos it needs to sound American."

Metropolitan hipster fans were the last thing Skinner had expected, and his sudden popularity in fashionable circles threw him completely. "It was like, I didn't know how to get my bearings. I guess the people who got into it, if I'm honest, were the sort of people that we didn't really like."

Living in London by then, he abandoned all hope of pleasing his old crowd back home. "I was so convinced that there could never be a correlation between the people who liked my stuff and a mass audience," he writes, "that I never bothered trying to court them." So instead he wrote A Grand Don't Come For Free, a concept album about a sweet Brummie stoner who loses £1,000, suspects his mate nicked it, and then finds it down the back of his telly. You can see why he didn't think he had a mainstream hit on his hands.

Overnight, the record made Skinner a superstar. "It sounds literally unprecedented: there isn't really any other album like this," raved this newspaper, along with pretty much everyone who heard it, and his old rapper mates from Birmingham were soon on the phone complaining that he had ripped off their lives for material.

As authenticity was now clearly working for Skinner, he decided to make the next album all about the new life he was leading. "I felt that honesty was what people liked about me." So, being no longer a sweet Brummie stoner but a cocaine-crazed megastar, he wrote an album about playing festivals to adoring fans, partying at his glamorous bachelor pad, rolling in sex and drugs and money. It was a disaster. Even his greatest fans were appalled.

"Well, I think I wanted to come across as a bit of a twat, actually," he reflects, when I ask how he felt about alienating everyone. "I think I probably thought that bit of me had been under represented on A Grand Don't Come For Free. I felt like I'd painted myself as this sweet, downtrodden sort of thing. Really, what people got off on was the emotional detail that I got right. But at the time I was like, well, I've shown you everything that you could feel sympathetic about. So I was perfectly willing to portray all my bad side."

Skinner is disarmingly matter-of-fact about the person he had become. "I was going through a big change, by being famous – and suddenly I got all this stuff that people rightfully would resent me for. I was kind of aware that I would have hated myself. My barometer was always, would I hate myself if I weren't Mike Skinner? When you write a song you always say to yourself, would I like this? So when you become really famous and stuff, the same question gets asked – would I like me? No, I wouldn't.

"But what would have been worse, for me personally, would have been to make the same album again. I would have really hated myself, because I would then feel that I was not doing what I'd set out to do."

I ask what he would have thought of The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living, had he been a Streets fan instead of himself. "That's probably the best question to ask, because I wouldn't have liked that album." Did he realise that while he was making it? "No. What I was doing – and this is the big mistake that you make – you think about the album that you want to make. And I don't make that mistake any more. Because that taught me that asking yourself whether you would have liked it is a much better question to ask yourself than what do you want to do."

Mike Skinner as a boy getting down to business with the family turntable.

That Skinner should have wound up sounding impregnably cocky is another irony, because by his own admission he is a chronically fearful person. "To me, being a boy was horrible because you could get beaten up at every turn of your life. And you're going to get robbed as well, if you live in the city. You get used to it. There have obviously been horrific things that happen to women in big cities at night, but I would be way, way more afraid for my son than my daughter." He says he is still afraid – "Yeah, totally." I wonder if he thinks most people realise how frightened of violence young men are. "Well, I think young men know how afraid they are."

The suburbs, as he points out in his memoir, are considerably more dangerous than the gangsta rap lifestyle. "As a general rule, meeting Jay-Z at a party at the Light Bar in Covent Garden is probably going to be a lot less dangerous than, say, getting a KFC in Harlesden." But a provincial suburban upbringing also gives his ambition a perspective that I would guess goes a long way towards explaining his success.

"There's a sense of entitlement about everyone in London that you just don't get outside of London. Young MCs in London, they go to clubs and they're meeting AR guys and bumping into famous rappers. And it doesn't matter if you come from below the poverty line in Tower Hamlets, there is a sense of expectation from living in London that you can go anywhere. There's no glass ceiling, you can take it as far as you want.

"Where I come from, I didn't see anyone below the poverty line, there was no desperate struggle for life, there was no gun crime, really. But the best you could do would be to work for a big company and do well. Or start up a business and do well. There was always a ceiling on everything. And that's my form of – um – this would look terrible printed in large letters in the Guardian, but that was kind of like my ghetto, if you see what I mean."

He says he is still chronically anxious, so I ask if he thinks he is simply more honest about his fears than most men. "No, I'm more anxious than most, yeah." He suffered from epilepsy in his childhood, but doesn't think that explains it. "Looking back on it, the epilepsy wasn't that bad. I just made more of a meal of it because I was an anxious person."

He hasn't had a fit since 2000, but following his third album he suffered what sounds like a breakdown; he had stopped doing masses of drink and drugs, was living with his girlfriend – who worked for a record label, and is now his wife – and was trying to write the next album, but unravelled into an insomniac mess. Antidepressants and cognitive behavioural therapy helped, and he surprised people again with his fourth album, though not in such a bad way; Everything is Borrowed deliberately referenced not one detail of modern life, which didn't upset people, though it didn't sell terribly well. But by the time he had nearly finished his fifth and final album, Computers and Blues, he seemed to be getting ill all the time. Diagnosed with ME, he more or less went to bed for 18 months.

"It was a weird one. I don't know what I had and no one really knows. And I think it's still there a little bit in me. But is it ME? I've got no idea. But I had to stop working 'cos that was definitely making me worse. So I switched everything off, I switched off the email and put the phone in the bin, and I just – well, I watched James Bond and The Sopranos."

The Streets feels the love at a 2008 gig on Brighton Beach. Photograph: Matt Crossick/PA

To some it might sound like the inevitable cumulative hangover from sustained drug taking – and Skinner has always been very honest about his consumption, which included any narcotic you can think of. But he says: "No, drugs were never a problem for me, really." Yet, at the height of his partying the media had been full of claims that Skinner was out of control, reaching cocaine psychosis.

"No, it was completely different. It's way more complicated than talking about a cocaine meltdown. And just a lot more nuanced than that. I never had a problem, I thought it was really great fun. But what newspapers do is tell a story. And there was a parallel, really; I was telling a story, and they were telling a story. The thing about newspapers is you can talk about something, and they make it into this huge disaster, but it was just really fun.

"But I'm doing the same stuff as a journalist does; I'm trying to condense my stuff to make an album narrative. Same thing you're doing; same thing we've done with the book. You're creating a narrative. And as we all know, it's just a narrative." Drugs were never an unhappy narrative? "No. Not at all. But you learn a lot. All I would say is crack and smack are so addictive that I wouldn't recommend them. I wouldn't. I don't want anyone else to try and learn that; just take my word for it. It's just really, really addictive."

Skinner has also lost an awful lot of money to spread-betting in his time, but he thinks his only true addiction is work. "I get withdrawal symptoms if I've not created something, like a song or a video, for a few days." Since ending the Streets, he has been making music videos for other artists, scored the music for The Inbetweeners Movie, and is shooting online video diaries. He wants to make a movie, but is making a short film first in order to "show we can do it" and secure finance. He is still only 33, but seems somehow older – not in appearance, but in the contemplative calm of his bearing. I think I probably already know the answer when I ask if he has ever had a moment of regret about ending his music career.

"No. It's like – well, Noel Gallagher has always just stood there and sung a song, and I think you can take that right through to middle age. He's so graceful, isn't he? Whereas Damon Albarn, say, needs to stop, 'cos his kind of music is," and Skinner flaps his hands around his face, "'I'm a bit mad!' Eurgh, it just doesn't work. And unfortunately my music is, 'I'm a bit mad.' So no. No regrets at all."

The Story of the Streets by Mike Skinner is published by Bantam Press on 29 March.