Mike Skinner thinks Damon Albarn should stop making records.
The musician ended his The Streets project last year and has urged the 43-year-old Blur singer – who is also in Gorillaz and The Good the Bad and the Queen, as well as helming his Dr. Dee opera – to do the same, as he doesn’t have the grace of his former Britpop rival Noel Gallagher.
When asked if he has any regrets about finishing The Streets, Mike said: "Noel Gallagher has always just stood there and sung a song, and I think you can take that right through to middle age. He’s so graceful, isn’t he?
"Whereas Damon Albarn, say, needs to stop, ‘cos his kind of music is… ‘I’m a bit mad!’ Eurgh, it just doesn’t work. And unfortunately my music is, ‘I’m a bit mad.’ So no. No regrets at all."
Mike started winding down his musical career after he was diagnosed with ME – a condition of which the main symptom is severe fatigue and malaise following mental or physical activity – which he says made him initially retract away not just from the music industry, but also from modern life for 18 months.
He added to the Guardian newspaper: "It was a weird one. I don’t know what I had and no one really knows. And I think it’s still there a little bit in me. But is it ME? I’ve got no idea. But I had to stop working ‘cos that was definitely making me worse. So I switched everything off, I switched off the email and put the phone in the bin, and I just – well, I watched ‘James Bond’ and ‘The Sopranos’."
Mike Skinner’s memoir of his music career, ‘The Story of the Streets’, is published on 29 March.