Friday night/Saturday morning, 02:14, Piata Romana. I've had 14 beers, three pills and I think I'm going to be sick - perhaps there's something up with my kebab. I spot two girls outside the fast food, but though they don't seem to be impressed with my chunky gold sovereign rings and fake Burberry-check baseball cap. I was hoping to start a fight in the queue for a kebab but forgot that Romanian clubs don't shut at 02:00 like in Britain , so I've found myself all on my own. And instead of razzing around the streets of Hackney in my Vauxhall Nova, (customised with blacked out windows and furry dice), it looks like I'm going to have to make do with a ride home in a Dacia taxi.

What did I learn during my evening's entertainment? That you can't live the Mike Skinner lifestyle in Romania . It's a world of late-night kebab shops and bookies; of days sat home, stoned, watching the TV; of fights in nightclubs and playing fruit machines in pubs. It's this lobster-red, beer-bloated underbelly of England , usually disguised by the 'Cool Britannia' myth, which Mike Skinner, better known as the Mercury Music Prize winning artist 'The Streets', has exposed.

Growing up both Birmingham and London provided Skinner with his distinctive half-Cockney drawl, which he uses to deliver his razor-sharp dissection of a lifestyle familiar to anyone who's lived in the UK . Improbable as it might sound, his lyrics have been compared to the work of literary heavyweights such as Dostoevsky and Pepys. Unlike Dostoevsky, however, Skinner writes about pulling girls, taking bad pills and dreaming of holiday in Ibiza . He writes about how the vast majority of people in Britain actually live.

There are many misconceptions about Britain . Few realise that it is a country where you can't set out of your house without bumping into a homeless person; where the public transport infrastructure has literally collapsed; where hospitals and schools are understaffed and under siege; and where a huge proportion of the population form a cultural, educational and financial underclass.

Trapped in part-time, low paid and unskilled jobs, these are people living for the weekend. The hedonism of club culture comes as an antidote to an increasingly competitive society that makes everyone feel like a bit of a looser. High expectations and conspicuous consumption means that everyone's major preoccupation is maintaining the appearances of a high-expenditure lifestyle while surviving on a shoestring budget. It's this culturally vacuous backdrop of daytime TV and football that The Streets manage to make a kind of poetry out of.

Musically, Skinners narratives are set against beats that take in the whole landscape of contemporary 'urban' (i.e. black) music as inspiration. Everything from Hip-Hop and drum and bass to the London sound of UK Garage goes into the mix. However, unlike the gangster swagger of the 'urban' scene, its Skinner's vulnerability and honesty that makes his music worth listening to. This is a man who summed it all up on his first album with the quip, "You think I'm ghetto? Stop dreaming."