THE STREETS The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living 679/Warners ****

"Throwing a TV out of the window is nothing clear of weak cliche" observes Mike Skinner halfway through this album. Such rock star behaviour, though, is the very least of Skinner's problems, as evinced by what he details before and after that tepid gesture. You can start with the brandy, the crack cocaine, the rampant egomania and belligerent paranoia and work your way downwards. The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living is Skinner's journey to the heart of celebrity darkness.

The last Streets album was called A Grand Don't Come for Free; there would have been a neat symmetry in calling this Success Don't Come for Free. Given that a large part of his lyrical appeal lies in how cleverly he works banal realism, Skinner deals with banal celebrityism with humour and panache. Opening track Pranging Out is an excess-all-areas account of bad behaviour, delivered not as an earnest admonishment but with all the wide-eyed glee of someone showing you their ribald holiday pics. In many ways this is the album Pete Doherty had neither the wit nor the insight to write.

Not that it's all "my drugs/drink hell". There are digressions into slightly more edifying matters, as on Never Went to Church, where Skinner's observations on religion are both pithy and provocative. On Two Nations he takes on Anglo-American relations with some sardonic asides ("You gave us Johnny Cash, we gave you John Lennon - but you shot him").

Musically, this is crisper and faster than Skinner's previous two works. Lyrically, he's still sublimely scattergun and scabrous - particularly about himself. And, thankfully, he spares us any homilies on redemption, etc. This is the album where, thematically at least, Spinal Tap meets Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It's what they don't teach you at Harvard Music School.

Brian Boyd