Songfacts®:

• The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living found The Streets, aka Mike Skinner, disturbed by fame and the loss of his father on a coke-snorting, hard-gambling meltdown. This song with Skinner's usual lyrical honesty, finds him illustrating graphically the psychotic mental state he fell in from his use of cocaine. However he admitted to The Guardian August 29, 2008 that this track and the rest of the album did not make pleasant listening. Said Skinner: "I realized shortly afterwards that people don't want to know that s--t. Subconsciously we're all fully aware of how evil we can be, which is why we don't need songs on the radio reminding us of that. I was seeking some kind of truth with that album and I got to the point where I realized that we don't want the truth. We want to be redirected. For 10,000 years of civilization we've been trying to get away from the fact that we're f--king monkeys."
• Babyshambles frontman Pete Docherty featured on a re-mix of this track.
• Skinner was asked by Q magazine November 2008 if the lyric "I daren't say that my manager got lairy and smacked me" was something that actually happened. Skinner replied that it did, adding that his manager is, "a right football supporter when he wants to be." He continued: "The thing is he doesn't really drink, so no one else's ever seen him drunk. But I have. I've had him on my floor in Stockwell. That sounds really bad. The reason he punched me was over a table football thing… And I threw his wallet out of the window."