Tom Wilson's online emporium of fun

The Other Britain

From the way it's portrayed in the media, it's hardly surprising that most people think that Britain is a land of milk and honey, worth strapping yourself onto the underside of an Eurostar train to get into. The usual British tourist trail often leaves you with a similar impression. After visiting Oxford , central London , Bath and Stratford-upon-Avon , you're sure to be left with the comforting impression that England is still full of tweed-wearing gentlemen who live in sedate villages of the kind depicted on souvenir biscuit-tins.

If only the UK were actually like this, I might have felt less of the urge to leave the place. Behind the ‘Cool-Britannia' façade lies a divided nation, one in which social inequality is amongst the highest in Europe . A recent study revealed that the whole bottom half of the population owns a mere 6% of the wealth. Britain until recently had the highest rate of child poverty in Europe and still boasts the highest rate of teenage pregnancies, a sure sign of depravation and low opportunities. Provincial Britain is a tremendously depressing place to grow up.

It was last year that the British media latched onto a new stereotype in British society, one that has developed against this desperate social background. It has its roots in the beer-drinking, quasi-hooligan Brit that we're already familiar with thanks to international football matches. It's something of an updated version of the ‘Lad' culture that developed around lowest-common denominator men's magazines like Loaded and FHM. 2004 was the year in which the ‘Chav' forced itself onto the popular consciousness.

Where I grew up, instead of ‘Chavs', we called them ‘Townies'. Elsewhere they're known by a variety of names - Kevs, Scallies, Neds – though the idea remains the same. These terms describe a new social underclass, a sub-culture of the urban poor, easily identified by their fondness for sportswear (the Kappa label is a favourite), Burberry baseball caps, gold jewellery (preferably fake) and hanging out at shopping centres, drinking cheap cider late at night and intimidating passers by. They save up for holidays in Ibiza, take a wide range of recreational drugs and drive customised VW golf cars with loud sound-systems. If you thought that ‘Baiati de Cartier' were restricted to Romania , think again…

In terms of music, there is one undisputed King of Chav - Mike Skinner, aka The Streets. The Mercury Music Prize-nominated artist makes records that provide the soundtrack to a lifestyle that's familiar all across provincial Britain , the areas that were left behind as prosperity drained into the metropolises. Against a musical backdrop that combines hip-hop, drum ‘n' bass and the London sound of UK Garage, Skinner spins elaborate narratives about taking bad pills, casual sex, package holidays in Ibiza , fights in kebab shops and gambling at the bookies.

With his genuine lyrical talent and louche rap-delivery, Skinner's second album as The Streets met with much critical acclaim. Heavyweight thinkers from the literary world even went so far as to compare him to Dostoyevsky or Samuel Pepys for his ability to construct an accurate snapshot of the times we're living in. The idea of a relatively uncultured working class voice, delivered from the bottom of society and accurately depicting ‘the way things are', has always been some kind of artistic ideal - Shakespeare is just one obvious example. The untrained proletarian thinker is especially attractive to critics, especially given the fact that they themselves are drawn from impeccably middle class backgrounds. It is this gritty ‘authenticity' of Skinner's work which has led to it being so highly praised.

Skinner is, however, as hated as he is admired. With Chav culture having become a politically-correct way for the London-based media to make fun of poor people, he's become the figurehead of a movement that stands for all of Britain 's current ills. For anyone who's had to grow up surrounded by the cultural wilderness that is Chav-culture, as opposed to having the luxury of surveying it as a ‘social phenomena' from the comfortable distance of a luxury London apartment, the kind of things Skinner sings about can appear depressingly familiar. I spent my youth trying to avoid the very characters Skinner sings about. It's exactly this kind of mockery of all things Chav that the group ‘Goldie Lookin' Chain' are all about.

Based in the drab Welsh town of Newport , their whole act is based around parodying exactly the kind of ‘Geezer' lifestyle that Skinner glamorises. And from the very start, it appears as though they're taking the piss. In imitation of the Chav uniform, they wear the cheap nylon tracksuits, fake gold chains and sing about smoking huge quantities of the cheapest, nastiest weed available. Their nine-strong membership includes rappers with names like ‘Adam Hussain', their debut album was wryly entitled ‘Greatest Hits', and one of their singles is called ‘Your Mother's got a Penis'. In one particularly successful piece of self-publicity, they managed to convince a number of UK newspapers that they were currently collaborating with pop starlet Charlotte Church, and moreover that she was dating one of the band. Like the similarly tongue-in-cheek British heavy metal group The Darkness, it's difficult to tell where the irony stops.

The GLC, as they're known, are selling Chav culture from the other side of the tracks. Their whole performance is every bit as much about being an outsider in the forgotten provinces as The Streets are. As a depiction of life in modern Britain , it's every bit as relevant as anything Mike Skinner has done. Only it's a hell of a lot funnier.