Gig review: The Streets at O2 Academy Leeds

“How are you doing, Leeds?” enquires Mike Skinner to a sold-out house at the O2 Academy Leeds. “Did you come prepared?”

The loud response suggests that 2,000 Loiners are more than ready for everything that Skinner and his five-man live iteration of The Streets, uniformly dressed in black, can throw at them in the next hour and a half.

Although whether anyone is quite prepared for the sight of the 44-year-old rapper, DJ, songwriter and producer and a young female audience member crowd surfing all the way around the room as the band blaze through Blinded By The Lights is a moot point.

It’s the pièce de résistance in a set that rarely lets up across 23 numbers in 90 minutes.

Tracks from six of The Streets’ albums are included, but perhaps inevitably it’s their two multi million-selling records, Original Pirate Material and A Grand Don’t Come For Free, that are most heavily plundered.

Turn The Page, Don’t Mug Yourself and Has It Come To This? are early highlights before Everything Is Borrowed and Never Went To Church burn with a gospel-like intensity.

During The Escapist, Skinner leaves the stage and wades his way through the crowd to deliver his vocal from close to the mixing desk. On The Edge of a Cliff and Troubled Waters are particularly fiery, with Skinner, in preacher mode, proclaiming at the end of the latter that “Jesus loves UK garage”.

Weak Become Heroes is a funky workout while Too Much Yayo, from The Streets’ new album The Darker The Shadow The Brighter The Light, has the audience bellowing its chorus. In Fit But You Know It, Skinner leaps up and down to its chugging guitar riff.

Rob Harvey of Leeds band The Music, who Skinner describes as his “best friend in the world”, joins the band for Bright Sunny Day in the encore, and the chart-topping Dry Your Eyes becomes another singalong before Skinner is off crowd surfing in Blinded By The Lights.

“Who comes to a Streets gig, I don’t know. It’s not something that I would ever do,” he ponders tongue-in-cheek halfway around the room then requests a two-pint cup of lager from the bar.

Bowing out with Take Me As I Am, Skinner sends the audience out into the night with the thought that “Saturday nights are generally special, but this one was off the scale.”

He’s not wrong. This was quite some gig.