“I didn’t want it to sound like Paul Young…” Jason Williamson speaks to Victoria Segal.
Did you find lockdown a creative time?
“Yes… but I was a bit concerned that I didn’t want to do some kind of obvious lockdown bullshit. (Shouts) ‘Oh Pandemic! We’re all going to die. Virus!’ and all this bullshit. There’s two songs on there that talk about it a bit but I really struggled with it – have I done the right thing by doing that? But then there was a selfish side of me that wanted to have an album in the collection that marked the time – ‘Oh yeah, we released that then’.”
What inspired you to write about your childhood on Fishcakes and Mork N Mindy?
“I injured my back over the lockdown. Gyms closed, so I was in the garden, going like the clappers, trying to make up for exercise I would have done at the gym, and obviously I haven’t got any of the apparatus. I had an operation on my back when I was a kid – I was born with a kind of mild form of spina bifida where the nerves in my back were all tangled up and a little bit dodgy. When I was about 10 or 11, it got to the point where I couldn’t walk so I went to the hospital and this crack team of surgeons sorted it out… But every now and then I get an injury because it’s quite a sensitive area. Especially this time round, I was full of codeine and every painkiller going and I started thinking about childhood. I spoke to one of the surgeons at Queen’s Med [Medical Centre] in Nottingham, and he knew the guy who did the operation so it was quite emotional, and I started thinking about my childhood and where I lived and I started exploring that a bit more.”
Did writing about that give you any worries?
“I didn’t want it to sound like that Paul Young song – Love Of The Common People. Actually, that was a cover wasn’t it? I didn’t want to do a cheesy (sings), ‘Oh, we were poor but we were happy.’ But I started thinking about the times when I was a kid, having secondhand Christmas presents or going to the chip shop for my birthday because my mum couldn’t afford to do anything really special. The chip shop was great anyway. I sometimes worry that perhaps I’ve overplayed it and it’s a bit of a sob story, and I didn’t want it to come across like that. I wanted to try and get that idea of being eight years old in Grantham in 1978.”
How about Mork N Mindy?
“Mork N Mindy was based more on when I was about 14, 15, and my mum remarried. My stepfather was fucking brilliant; proper professional builder. He’d got this business up and running in Grantham and got a lot of work, so he’d built himself this new house and we moved in. It was a really big house but he’d built it in the middle of an estate that we lived on anyway. So you’d look out of your lovely double-glazed window with your Tudor lead design on it and there’d be the next-door neighbours at the back door arguing. It was just the boredom of it, and the isolation.”