Birthday Number 1s: 2004 - Dry Your Eyes

I am quite fond of

Dry Your Eyes - The Streets

which unexpectedly went to Number 1 for a week in the summer of 2004.

It reminds me of South London, where I lived from 2003 until 2012. Pleasingly, both this and the Number 1 on August 1 2005 have a strong South London connection.

Although Mike Skinner was originally from the Midlands, The Streets was a South London thing.

When I first heard Has It Come to This, from the 2002 debut Original Pirate Material, it was exciting to me primarily because I had imagined this kind of music for about a decade. a kind of specifically English adjunct to hip-hop which was not really hip-hop. I had often thought there was a space for something like that to be successful, and the Streets finally was that. Mike Skinner was clever, talented and droll and carried it off for a while.

Dry Your Eyes, a couple of years later, was both the triumph and the end of it. On a concept album - his second album A Grand Don't Come for Free - it was a pop ballad, a regular little heartbreaker amongst twisting narratives. It worked, but it also narrowed The Streets (into a one-way street maybe, arf) and left him nowhere to go. It also, for me anyway, now that it was all over the radio, just made the very sound of The Streets annoying. I went to see them at Brixton Academy around that time and it was very much not for me.

I don't think it's just because of I'm one of those real rock, real instrument guys, though I admit there was that a little bit, but also it just, all of a sudden ... sounded like a nice little idea that had gone sour.

I still quite like Dry Your Eyes. I particularly like the line where he goes "I'm not gonna fuckin' just fuckin' leave it all now" - that's a touch of class. I think the Streets have been really influential - you hear loads of speaky-singy white-working-or-middle-class-guy chatty songs now, I think there's a touch of The Streets in everything from Ed Sheeran to Sleaford Mods.

Mike Skinner always seemed like a pretty nice, super smart, man and he pops back up every now and then, but has never been able to replicate the success, either commercially or critically, of Dry Your Eyes or A Grand Don't Come for Free, which was a huge hit album.

I think quite a lot of pop music in the early 2000s was surprisingly good, but 2004 wasn't a great year for Number 1s - Toxic probably the best of them. Top of the Pops was on its last legs, but in our top floor flat near fancy Clapham and Brixton Prison, with Freeview but not Sky, we used to watch pop video channels if there was nothing else on, so these are the last few years I'm really closely attached to the charts.

That summer, I'd been working at Blackwell's London Business School, was enrolled and ready to go with my PGCE, which I was righty fearful about, and went to a few weddings, lots of films and lots of gigs. But I'd never watch The Streets again.