Pete Doherty, who we suppose knows a thing or two about prangin' out, joins Mike Skinner for this gritty foray into the world of drug dependency. And he raps.
Different enough from the original version, the first track of The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living, Prangin' Out relies on a great big hook to hold together a narco-narration made up of Skinner and Doherty's contrasting vocal styles. The Streets main man is hard-hitting, confident, bold; the Babyshamble sounds slurry and addled by comparison, his plummy vowels offsetting Skinner's familiar lisp-laden glottal stops.
But are we supposed to feel sorry for them? Is it a warning, shining slight on the corpulent underbelly of the sex'n'drugs'n'rock'n'roll myth? Skinner's always at his best as a social commentator, and here he picks apart a lifestyle perceived to be a never-ending whirl of glamour and girls. That there's a dark side to it all isn't a surprise of course, but if you want to listen to two drug users tell of how "this ain't even funny", this is about as "real" as music gets.
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