“Weak Become Heroes” by The Streets

"Weak Become Heroes" is Mike Skinner's rave memoir, the third single the Streets pulled from their debut, Original Pirate Material, released on 679 Artists in July 2002. Skinner wrote, arranged, produced and mixed it himself, and it looks back on his own nights in rave culture in the middle of the 1990s.

He tips his hat to Nicky Holloway and Danny Rampling as the men who got it all started, and he has insisted the song is set in 1995, not the fabled 1989 everyone assumes, since the rush was the same whichever year you caught it. He also nods to the 1994 law, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, seen as clamping down on raves, and Zadie Smith saw the song's European Bob, a burnt-out raver turned sage, as the archetype of a generation.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.