this is what a geeza i grew up with wrote about me (raps under the name of crispy). most of it is weighted in his favour, i don't agree with the bit that i didn't come up with the garage idea and i didn't realise most of what he was thinking before he wrote.
This is a fucking essay, but all you streets fans that wanna know more about mike are gonna love it... I'm seeing a lot of beef on this site and a lot of people seem to be putting their 2 cents in about mike. so since I've known mike since I was 4, have worked with him since he started in our great little rock band when we were 13 right up until he got signed, I think that entitles me to comment, so here is the real streets. firstly....mike was never a rapper. unless you count fucking about when i made him rhyme a couple of times for a laugh. he has always been a producer, and that was all he ever wanted to be until recently. When we were 6 years old, we were both listening to our brothers de-la soul and beastie boys records so it would be unfair to say he wasn't into hip-hop at an early age, but as his brother got older and developed a taste for indie music, so did mike.
I didn't really see much of him when we left junior school till I was about 12 coming home from school, when I happened to smash his moms window with a basketball, somehow forming an immediate friendship. we started chiiling together, and mike introduced me to some good indie bands, I was feeling the music but not really the singing, and since I was well into my rapping by then, I showed mike a bit of the new hip hop going round, and he was already into cypress hill like a lot of the indie crowd, but wasn't feeling much of the other stuff.
mike showed me a video of guns and roses live, and after watching slash, we both decided to learn the guitar, but mike surpassed me at that pretty quickly, and after a few really poor efforts (remember "renunciation" mike lol!), with the addition of mike's brother dan, (a pretty damn hot drummer and easily the most talented member of our group), and a bassist called john who was older than our dads and bald with a pot belly, motley crue t-shirt and no sense of timing we became Harry and the krishnas worst rage against the machine ripoff ever to stalk the practice studios of birmingham. We kept this up for a good year or so until one day i decided, as there was an extra mic one of the studios we used. to have it away.
mike was furious at me for this and kicked me out of the group (effectively terminating harry and the krishnas) and wouldn't speak to me anymore. (lots of other shit happened during this time, including mike introducing me to acid which was nice of him, but i'll just focus on the music.) Didn't see mike for a couple years then and when I did hook up with him, he was still kerrranging to indie. by now we're about 15-16 by the way, and I was getting well into my hard drugs. I harrassed mike until he came to the steering wheel (actually supposed to be a gay house club but I only ever remeber this one transvestite that worked there, the rest of the place had so many checked shirts the dancefloor looked like a giant rippling tablecloth and the bouncers banned them in the end, but I digress,) and I gave him a bit of billy whizz.
he loved it, i remember him turning around to me on the dancefloor, dealing his lucky pack to umboza and telling me it "felt like coming home- like i've waited all my life for this moment" after that he was up in the club every week, and within a week, had a tony and guy hairdo and a orange satin shirt. now this shirt began to seriously come between me and mike. you see, the problem was, EVERY WEEK he would wear this:- orange satin shirt from top man black marks and spencers suit jacket borrowed from dad black lee jeans, one size too big brother dan's shoes. and I mean, I ain't no fashion freak, but he wore this every week for nearly a year, until I gave him a yellow lacoste t-shirt, which he then wore for the next year.
it became embarrassing, people would come up to me and say - "when is your mate gonna change his clothes, is he a bit weird or something. pluss every time you were talking to a bird, he'd come over, cock-blocking and embarrassing both himself and you, so I kinda left him to his own devices for a bit. After a serious bout of binging on drugs from both ends, I met back up with mike and found him well into the gay new energy scene, and he had moved from using a 4 track to working on a basic 486 using cakewalk, and he was making techno, whic I was also well into, we got talking, and I mentioned that I was well into my trance and techno in the clubs, and wouldn't it be good to combine dance music with hip hop and ragga emceeing.
Mike was also into getting some emcees cos he wanted to move into doing live acts. I had met a few local promoters so we figured a coalition would be a good idea. I introduced him to my mate rod, and mike felt that although he couldn't do anything but dance, he was black, and he looked cool, so he wanted him in the group. we hooked up, had one rehearsal, made a demo, and I landed us a gig at the sanctuary in birmingham through a couple of mates i used to get mashed with in moseley. the gig went down well, but mike insisted on being responsible for managing the act, and he felt he should guide the overall direction as he was the one with the computer and would be putting the most time into it. which we felt was fair enough.
thus - daspyke was born we gigged a lot around birmingham, boogie was particularly supportive of us and gave us our first real taste of playing clubs, experience for which I am eternally greatful we kept this up for a while, and as he learned to rhyme, rod's little brother adrian joined as a second emcee.me and mike put our hearts and souls into that project, but it just never really happened, and after what seemed like an age, I finally got mike to do us a hip hop project with some of the lads me and rod met up with through our mate john. namely, me, a.w. s.k. golden child and paddy. so then we made bc's coming.
Mike really came through on this one, and the beats he made were fat, but sadly, we were all copying americans too hard and failed to come up with a distinctively english sound, and this was reflected by the responses we got from the labels. mike got into a bit of a depression at this point and decided he was gonna go to australia backpacking to find himself, we were all a bit dissappointed cos we felt that we had learned enough to have a real crack at it next time but we had no hard feelings, and wished him well. mike sold his equipment to paddy, who, although he was the least experienced of us, had a lot of heart, but sadly, paddy took the equipment, fucked off and made the worst hip hop album in the history of U.K. rap, which his dad paid to release for him, last i heard it sold 5 copies but that's another story....
I also spent a lot of time chasing after that money for mike cos paddy was trying to skank, talk about bad judgement eh? anyway that basically left us fucked, but not the ones to give up, me + adrian spent a year working with other producers and finding they were crap, and developing our sound, battling with s.k. and the boys and generally living the hip hop life as you do. U.K. Garage came out, sean and the boys were loving it loving it loving it, but we all agreed the emcees were shit, and it would be nice to drop a rhyme on garage beats with a rap style. now I'll clarify this for you all, this was DEFINATELY SHAUN'S IDEA, and we all loved it. Mike had been promising for the whole time he was away that when he got back we were all gonna get together cos his beats had come on a long way, anmd we were all real excited, writing rhymes and getting ready for our first truly great project.
mike's return wasn't all it was cracked up to be, his controlling behaviour quickly led to people becoming tired of his disrespect for their abilities, and control freak attitude, and we felt it best if he waited to see what happened when we all got together instead of doing specifically what he wanted, mike agreed so we all chilled out a bit to see what the next idea was. now about a week later, mike gives me a call and says that he's been talking to shaun, and he likes the ideas he's got, did I know about it?(yes) and did I want in? (yes) so he gave me a beat and said "write whatever you want, just do it your way", so I was well chuffed. so i wrote what is still the best track I have done to this day, and shaun wrote to has it come to this.
as far as I know, no-one else worked on the strrets project. Mike wasn't too keen on what either me or shaun did, so he wrote something using parts of our verses and a few ideas of his own to demonstrate as a template the type of style he wanted to go for. this track was "has it come to this". We liked it, and proceeded to write quite a few other tracks, but although we showed them all to mike, and he assured us that we would get it all down, it never happenned. He then told us that he planned to send has it come to this to locked-on, as they were the premier garage label of the time and he wanted them to be aware of what we were doing. at this point no-one expected a deal.
a week later mike calls me and says locked on are interested in releasing has it come to this, and did we mind if he put it out under the streets name, we said we didn't mind cos i would be cool if we gradually intrduced each member, the idea was that I had the second single, and shaun the third, andf that he was signing as an affiliate label of locked on, and that he would give us seperate contracts with his label. We trusted mike so we felt no need to mail things to ourselves or copyright them as we were all mates and he would sort us out. once he got signed, the second single became the second album and we gradually began to realise that he was just fobbing us off as he had no real use for us anymore.
and he began to convince himself that he had never promised anything and even that we had had nothing to with the project anyway, and couldn't be arsed to turn up, which you can see printed on the homepage. now I'm not a quitter, and I don't need mike for shit, which is why my track comes out in the summer and is destined to show the nation what a real english pioneering artist sounds like, but a lot of people who helped mike get where he is are now on their arse, and have every right to be upset as it is very dangerous to promise people the world, but actually take the world from them, and although I would never advocate giving someones parents grief, when you push someone over the edge you should be ready to face the consequences of your actions, especially if you have stolen that person's dream and you could have made it on your own anyway.
did I mention that after all this he also tried real hard to fuck the one girl I have ever truly loved, andf he knew this. Watch out for mike, he'll take everything you've ever hoped for away from you. even if you have saved his life before. Now I'm not an enemy of yours mike, I think we have known each other too long for that, but, speaking as a brother, you are a selfish cunt and what hurts more that anything is that you have never given me any of my respect due. couldn't even mention my name in an interview. and for that, remix or no remix, I will find it hard to truly ever respect you as an artist.
cos you know, and I know, that we can all make it the way you did, but we're not up there cos we stayed true to ourselves and our friends, and one of our friend didn't know what that meant. cos you know, and I know, that I would never have blown up and not bought you with me. final thought: watch who you step on on you way to the top, cos they'll be waiting for you on the way down.. sound counsel from someone who knows you better than any of these ass kissers. peace all of ya.
Source: http://www.the-streets.co.uk/
