We last heard from Birmingham’s favourite dead-pan poet back in 2011: Mike Skinner hung up the microphone as The Streets with ‘Computers and Blues’, a paean to his early days; now the band has been reunited for an unexpected tour, to sing the old songs again. It’s hard to deny that a revisit of the early-noughties feels pretty appealing: it’s easy to forget about the refreshing slap to the face we all got from ‘Original Pirate Material’ and concept-album extraordinaire ‘A Grand Don’t Come For Free’. Skinner has a magical ability to take bare-bones material and the minutiae of life, and come out with anxious, philosophical, hilarious tales. His affable everyman status, and rough-edged musical awkwardness is the real illusion, drawing us in, celebrating the mundane, before we realise the truth: Skinner is a crafty bastard. If one thing can bring us together for an evening in 2018, surely The Streets are a good gambit.

Thu 19 Apr at O2 Academy 2, 16-18 Horse Fair, Birmingham B1 1DB, 7.30pm, £44. seetickets.com