Talking to me via Zoom, Skinner is in what looks like the (slightly) converted front room of his undoubtedly nice house in north London. This light-filled space is his music room-slash-studio, in which the kit is minimal but enough: big speakers flanking a Victorian fireplace, piano, his phone, a bean bag-slash-cushion on the floor on which he plonks himself for our conversation.

“It took me a long time to realise it, but if you put all your crap somewhere else, you can have a really tidy room,” he says, looking round a place that is indeed remarkably clutter-free. ​“I had a studio with a lot of stuff in it, and I gradually realised that the only thing I really want are my speakers.”

So, around him in his playroom, no shiny sales discs for 2002’s landmark proto-garage debut album Original Pirate Material, nor for 2004’s moment-defining Number One hit Dry Your Eyes. No portraits from the period we might call Peak Streets, when Skinner was a magazine coverstar, the ​“British Eminem” who won a Brit Award (British Male, 2005) and an Ivor Novello (Dry Your Eyes, Best Song Musically and Lyrically, 2005). No framed posters reflecting the successes of Mike Skinner, label-runner, when his imprint The Beats Recordings launched Example, Professor Green and The Mitchell Brothers.

Still, while times and tech have moved on, Skinner’s ambition, vision and energy remain. His range of interests, in and out of music, are wide – Take That and First and Second World War history are only the tip of the iceberg. Last summer he released the track How Long’s It Been? with Flohio, at the time describing her ​“energy [as] insane. She adds colour to a quite serious trap energy and makes something just as unpredictable and homespun as anyone from Atlanta. She has the juice on stage.”

His long-in-the-works Streets film (a musical) is still very much a going concern. ​“It’s a film about a DJ,” he says of a project he wrote and in which he’ll play a version of himself, ​“and the other thing is that the songs are the voiceover. Imagine Goodfellas, but the guy’s rapping instead of telling you he always wanted to be a gangster.” Also ongoing: his side-hustle as a documentarian (see: 2017’s Don’t Call It Road Rap).

“That’s a green screen there,” he says, rotating his phone screen for a virtual tour. ​“I’m getting ready to start doing the next video for the album and I’m going to do it all in here. This is just a space I can do anything with.”

That includes finishing the video for the new single, the Kevin Parker-featuring psych-rap Call My Phone Thinking I’m Doing Nothing Better, which Skinner shot on his iPhone. And it includes mixing the entire album – again, on his phone. Really? Really.

“I used Cubase SX3. I tried it out on the iPad last year, and I really liked it. I’ve had my eye on [using] the iPad for ages because I’m lazy and I like the battery life. So I tried it on the iPad and I was like, this could actually work. Then I sort of forgot about it.”

Then, as he was beginning to mix the album last December, the software became available for the iPhone.

“It was weird, I just installed it and I thought I’d just try and do a mix on my phone. All my musician friends are all a bit like: ​‘Really?’ But for what I do, I’m ruthlessly minimal. I’ve always tried to get my track count down, I’m always removing stuff. I’ve never liked to have a lot of vocals. Whenever I have done [loads of vocals] in the past, it’s not really been what I’m good at.”

Plus, since dissolving The Streets in 2011 (Skinner put the show back on the road in 2017 for a series of rapturously received comeback gigs), he’s been DJing like a champ, taking his Tonga nights round the UK and Europe.

“And when you DJ, you can’t be too complicated. And the great thing about it being on your phone – which really blew my mind – is that you can work absolutely anywhere. I know we’ve had laptops for years. But with this, I can work on the tube, I can be standing in a queue…”

All that said: ​“When I make my psychedelic album, I probably won’t be able to do that on my phone.”

A psychedelic album? We shouldn’t put it past him. A psychedelic album on his phone? Ditto.

But for now, let’s dig into the tracks and acts on None Of Us Are Getting Out Of This Life Alive: an album that, in the tradition of Skinner’s A Grand Don’t Come For Free, is a concept album of sorts.

That 2004 ​“rap opera” album revolved around a wodge of cash lost down the back of the telly. This seventh Streets album (after five studio albums and a previous mixtape, 2011’s Cyberspace and Reds), while it doesn’t follow a step-by-step narrative, focuses on lives lived via mobile phone and social media and the isolation therein. Of the moment and on the money, right?

