Britain’s Sleaford Mods take no prisoners
Sleaford Mods, it would seem fair to say, are most definitely one of those groups who divide people like no other. To their detractors (and there are many, particularly among Britain’s minor rock aristocracy), they’re an aural abomination, an affront to musical decency. Two shady-looking chancers with no apparent musical talent, one of whom—looking like an extremely low-rent speed dealer—supplies absurdly minimalist beats, while the other is a non-stop barrage of physical and verbal tics, a twitching, splenetic lunatic who spits and spews out vitriolic rage like a tramp with Tourette’s. “Call this music?” goes the collective cry of horror. It’s like punk never happened.
To their fans, however (and they are legion, including the disparate likes of Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner and late cultural theorist Mark Fisher), they’re a revelation: a snarling, uncompromising, profound and gloriously profane rebuttal to the underlying disillusionment of Austerity Britain. They are the scabrous antithesis of the execrable likes of Mumford And Sons, Ed Sheehan and a billion-and-one X-Factor has-beens. They are anti-mediocrity writ large. Take, for example, the title of their new album, English Tapas. It was inspired by a pub menu that keyboards/beats supplier Andrew Fearn had spotted.
“And it was fucking awful,” laughs frontman Jason Williamson on the phone from his home in Nottingham. “You know, something like half a scotch egg, a cup of chips, some pickle, a sausage roll. And it just seemed typical of how the English tend to do things that are outside of their culture. You know, they go, ‘Oh yeah, we can do this, no problem, mate!’
“And it usually ends up horrible and really banal. It really kind of sums up the current state of this place, ignorance and people kind of making do psychologically, and also what they like, whether it be the arts or whatever. The ignorance of it all—and there’s a lot of that in this country at the moment.”
English Tapas continues from the likes of Divide And Exit and Key Markets, homing in on life in 21st-century Britain. They present a bleak vision undercut by mordant, pitch-black humor. This isn’t the romanticized U.K. of erstwhile Britpop, rather a Great Britain of gray skies and grayer faces, inhabited by those who (to quote movie director and screenplay writer Bruce Robinson), are “shat on by Tories, shoveled up by Labour.” It’s a land filled by the ever-present threat of casual violence and depressing chain establishments. Williamson articulates—better than anyone else—the anger and frustration of the millions at the arse-end of society, the ones who suffer through shitty jobs, no security and diminished expectations, who live only to get utterly hammered at the weekends. It’s an all-too-familiar world to both Fearn and Williamson, having lived through years of dead-end jobs and thwarted musical ambitions. It’s also led to large sections of the broadsheet press adopting/proclaiming Williamson as some gutterpunk Baudelaire, the unofficial poet laureate of the underclass. But it’s a role that Williamson feels distinctly ill at ease with.
“Yeah, I kind of went along with that for a bit when we started, the whole underclass/working-class thing,” he says. “But badly paid jobs and no prospects; that’s spread everywhere across society. It’s not just the working classes now, it touches everyone. And my songs come from personal struggle and also what I see around me. I consider myself to have come from a working-class background, but the class thing: You’ve got to watch out for that. It can become a trap.”
Meanwhile, Sleaford Mods continue to define their sound—brutal, beyond minimalist and frequently hilarious. Inspired initially by the Streets’ Original Pirate Material and the Wu-Tang Clan, they genuinely sound little like anyone else. Critics frequently refer to the “Northern crap talks back” ethos of the early Fall, or the hyper-kinetic verbal assault of punk poet John Cooper Clarke, both of whom Williamson claims never to have listened to. There are echoes—for the more “culturally” aligned—of the early work of Midlands-based filmmaker Shane Meadows, or the urban demotic of Scottish writers James Kelman or (early) Irvine Welsh. It’s the language of pubs and clubs and dead-end bookies. It’s music that’s come from years of pent-up frustration and fuck-ups. But when pressed on the band’s seeming singularity of sound, Williamson sounds vaguely bemused.
“To me it’s just like a traditional song or hip-hop track, but it really does seem to fuck some people’s heads,” he says. “I mean, I really did, for years, want to be part of that big genre club, you know, like in a really classic-rock band. But I never was, I never was. I dunno—it’s like I always thought I’d like to be able to influence other people to get up and do the same thing, but that kind of backfired on me, ’cause whenever I’d hear other people do something like us, I’d go right up the fucking wall!”
After unbridled, uproarious laughter, Williamson concludes, “So I’m a real selfish cunt! I mean, what a fucking wanker!”
—Neil Ferguson
