‘I’ve money in the bank, so can’t write another Jobseeker’
Despite a ‘hits’ album, Mods are still the angriest pair in music
Neither nostalgia nor reflectiveness have been hallmarks of the work of Sleaford Mods. The duo from the English midlands might have just released a career ‘best of’ All That Glue and founding member Jason Williamson is marking his 50th birthday this year, but Williamson says the 22 songs on the album ‘acts as an introduction for people who aren’t familiar with us.’
‘I can write about all these things and they still sound as vital as the early stuff’
‘I think it was on the cards for a while,’ he says.
‘I’ve not really thought too much about hitting 50 to be honest. It’s more to mark where Sleaford Mods are and where we’ve come from musically.’
Williamson formed Sleaford Mods in 2007 with Simon Parfrement, who chose to take a role in the visual presentation of the band in 2012 and was replaced by Andrew Fearn.
It is Fearn who provides the musical loops for Williamson to articulate his feelings on the minutiae of existence at the edge of society in 21st-century Britain, often in the grittiest of terms.
I last I spoke to Williamson in the days before the 2017 UK election that kept Theresa
May in power with the support of the DUP. A Tory landslide had appeared on the cards and Williamson was fearful, to say the least.
‘I was bracing myself for political terror and ultimately that’s what we got,’ he says.
‘That’s what we’ve experienced with the government in Britain. Now we have the coronavirus, but no one saw that coming.
‘There have been other disasters, the Grenfell Tower fire for example. It’s been a week in, week out slaughter of the poor.
‘Through all this, I’ve thought of what it is to be English and the way we’ve treated other countries, particularly your country.
‘Brexit has done that. This idea of being proud; proud about what? I feel guilt, English guilt. People talk about white guilt this is English guilt.’
I ask him what he thinks of when he sees a Union Jack or a flag of St. George flying, does he feel any pride in either of them?
‘It doesn’t say anything
about me other than my accent and where I live. They’re representations of aggression on a battlefield.’
I tell him that some in this country refer to the Union Jack as the butcher’s apron and it got him thinking.
‘I’ve delved into it – the relationship between Britain and
Ireland – it’s quite unsettling. The Butcher’s Apron. That (would be) quite a good song title.’
In songs such as Jobseeker,
No One’s Bothered and B.H.S. Williamson is at his most incisive but he is also aware that a run of five UK top ten albums and the financial rewards that brought has removed him from the experiences that informed those earlier songs.
‘I’ve got to be aware that I am slightly shielded (now) because I’ve got money in the bank. I’ve got to be careful not to write another song like Jobseeker in the situation I’m in now,’ he says.
A lot of what has driven Sleaford Mods is pointing up the unreasonable attitudes of some people. The petty-mindedness, the bitterness, the resentment, the jealousy.
‘I’m a big critic of other bands. If something isn’t true to what it says it is then it makes me mad. I get depressed and down and those things I can put into songs. I’m by no means rich, so I’ve found an arena where I can write about all those things and they can still sound as vital as the early stuff.’
Williamson was a passionate supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party but voices disillusionment with how that project ended.
In an example of what could be termed socialist distancing, he’s unsure where his political loyalties now lie, since Keir Starmer’s election as leader of the British Labour party
‘No, but I’ve not really thought about him. I’ve not thought about the Labour Party at all,’ he says.
‘Revelations are coming out now that Labour centrists were trying to sabotage Corbyn’s bid to be prime minister.
‘I’ve become really disillusioned with Labour. I don’t know who I’ll vote for next time… I’ll probably still vote for Labour but I don’t know.’
He is more definite about the future of Sleaford Mods and regardless of money in the bank, he says they are still defined by their roots.
‘What I write about, the message and the fact that we are a working-class band gives us an international passport to how we relate to other people, people from your country, to any country we’ve been to.
‘It’s a certain lingo that almost anyone can understand.’ nSleaford Mods – All That Glue is out now
‘It’s a certain lingo that almost anyone can understand’