Background
Skinner has stated that his main early influences were from the United States, in particular Wu-Tang Clan MCs such as Raekwon and GZA, as well as east coast rapper Nas's album Illmatic. However, Skinner attributes the album as emerging from the UK Garage scene of the late 1990s. His stance when making the album was to combine the UK Garage sound with a lyrical content about "all the little adventures you go on" rather than the style of UK hip hop, which he accused of being "someone from Reading pretending to be Biggie or Q-Tip".
Journalist Simon Reynolds identified the album's lyrical content as capturing UK Garage's "submerged reality" as a genre not based in nightclubs. Outside of London in the late 1990s, UK Garage was rarely played in clubs but was instead found on pirate radio stations, reflected by the albums title.
Read more about this topic: Original Pirate Material
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“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)