“SYD REMINDS ME OF A YOUNG PAUL WELLER, KICKING OUT IN THE CITY. IT’S QUITE ASTONISHING.”
AWEEK LATER, MOJO HEADS TO TODMORDEN to meet Minsky-Sargeant in his studio. Based in a former industrial premises, it’s a working environment with a no-fat set-up of analogue synths, computers and vinyl. A bulging record bag in the corner contains the 1986
House Sound Of Chicago compilation, Altern 8’s Activ 8 and the latest remaster of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, among other eclectic selections from a recent DJ set at the nearby Golden Lion pub. Touchingly, his mum Helen works next door. A feminist artist who explores the maternal world in a variety of media, she gave Syd the pendant he wears around his neck: a small yellow acid house smiley with a sad face (the happy version is on the reverse).
Born in London, he lived in King’s Cross before moving to Prestwich, home of The Fall’s Mark E Smith. “Both my parents are artistic, but I wouldn’t say they’re hip, exactly,” says MinskySargeant. “They’re fairly normal people really.” That said, he grew up without a television and with restricted access to gaming and computers, and from the age of five was recording his own voiceand-guitar compositions.
This was a useful fall-back later, in Todmorden, when he found himself with an acute case of alienation. “I hated school,” he says. “I was fairly awkward, I still am, a bit, and didn’t have particularly fond memories of growing up. But there’s not really a sob story. It was what it was.”
He studied guitar and then songwriting at Manchester’s BIMM Institute, where he “just about” completed the course. He and fellow students Giulia Bonometti (AKA Julia Bardo, vocals and guitar) and Jake Bogacki (drums) formed Working Men’s Club as 2017 turned into 2018, and were signed to Manchester’s Melodic label after a gig to an audience of 10 at Oldham Street’s Night & Day Café. Debut single Bad Blood, a scratchy indie-dancer with percussive vocals, followed in February 2019. “There was a fairly large element of naivety in that formative period,” he says. “It was just a name, and then we actually started being seen as a band.”
The name, redolent of mid-20th century English working-class culture, is a loaded thing. As someone who admits, “I’d say I’m middle class, the life I live now,” does he see any contradictions in it? Flicking a switch, repeatedly, on a nearby Klarks Teknik compressor unit – rather how Mark E Smith would shake a matchbox if a question was irritating him – he retorts, “I’m not gonna change the fucking name.”
There was a similar refusal to bend or yield when Working Men’s Club’s founding line-up floundered. “It was the session for Teeth,” says Sheffield producer Ross Orton, who’s also worked with Arctic Monkeys, Amyl And The Sniffers, Yard Act and The Fall, as well as co-helming Working Men’s Club’s two LPs. “It wasn’t the happiest vibes. Julia was on the verge of leaving to pursue her solo thing, and young Jake was ver y much, ‘I want to be in a punk band.’ And young Syd was like, ‘I want to be more electronic.’”
“I wouldn’t discredit anyone who’s been involved in this band,” says Minsky-Sargeant. “But it was best that everyone went their separate ways. Bands – they are fucking terrible things. Brilliant things, and terrible.”
Does a band need a dictator, wonders MOJO? “There’s got to be,” he explains, “some form of nihilistic presence somewhere, constantly.”
THE ORIGINAL FORMATION OF WORKING MEN’S Club actually ended five days before their first headline gig in London, at the Lexington in Islington in September 2019. Minsky-Sargeant says he was adamant that gigging and recording schedules should be honoured.
“I mean, I was panicked and scared and nervous but we got through it,” he says. With former Moonlandingz member O’Connor plus Rob Graham of Drenge (guitar) joining MinskySargeant and bassist Liam Ogburn, operations were resumed,
and the debut album was recorded with Orton in Sheffield.
“He wasn’t really using synths then, so f would do the programming stuff,” notes Orton. “Now he’s overtaken me with all that. He’s got an in-built mechanism that’s like a nuclear reactor. His ideas are just gushing.”
A breakthrough for the band may have come sooner, had the first LP’s textured, dynamic rave-rock not been released between lockdowns in 2020. Yet to listeners attuned during those days of tedium and isolation, the album was an electric-shock reminder of the chaotic and often destructive impulses that drive life. Encapsulated by Tomorrow’s cheery chorus – “You’re my sunshine, suicide, break my mind” – here was trauma, loathing and death, to a disco beat.
Fear Fear is a refinement of that fusion of glowing synth-punk energy with feelings of entrapment and impending doom, reflecting how time warps and life escapes when months go by slowly. Particularly haunting is Widow, sparked by a random encounter with a stranger struggling with the death of their partner. “Lust was easy, until you died,” sings Minsky-Sargeant. “Now I fuck inside my head but not outside.”
“That song, the way it deals with love and loss, it’s like a wise 30-plus-year-old wrote it,” says Orton. “He’s not embarrassed at all to explain his shit in his music – you can hear the darkness. When someone does come forward with a bit of an attitude like that, it’s scary.”
“It’s kind of therapy, making music, to get something off my chest or chill myself out,” says Minsky-Sargeant, who declines to name influential lyricists, but does admit to liking the words to Aphex Twin’s infamously puerile Milkman. “There is a lot more conscious thinking on this album than the last one, and when I’m making a song I’m not lying. It’s genuine for me.”
The therapeutic honesty will continue on a third album MinskySargeant is already working on, which he’s sharing with trusted associates. “It’s very acoustic-y, a complete split from what he’s doing with Working Men’s Club,” says Williamson, who adds he and Minsky-Sargeant are due to discuss a possible collaboration. “He’s got a lot of good taste, he’s quite defiant, he’s not a wanker… we need that in music in our country. What me and Syd clicked on was this idea of trying to run away from your ego. Up until about three or four years ago I was vehemently opposed to anybody I didn’t like, but he’s got this intelligence already – like, who am I to slag people off?”
BACK IN WEST YORKS, THE AFTERNOON ROLLS ON. Fish and chips are eaten. Minsky-Sargeant says he finds the peace of Todmorden conducive to creativity, and stresses the importance of listening to albums from start to finish. “I’ve struggled to fit in, but one of the things I’ve grown up to realise is, perhaps I don’t really like fitting in,” he says. “I feel more comfortable in an outsider’s environment.”
When talk turns to his love of Detroit techno insurrectionists Underground Resistance (see sidebar), he expresses admiration for their initial refusal to be photographed without masks and efforts to build a body of work free from the complications of personality. “I get people wanting to know the character of who’s portraying the song,” he says, “but I think the music speaks for itself.”
Has Working Men’s Club already brought more fame than he’d prefer?
“I think if I could backtrack,” he says, “I probably would choose to be anonymous.”
With that, he pumps up You Don’t Want None Of This, a 2020 track by Michigan electro veterans Aux88. As the vocoder-laced sound of this Kraftwerk-indebted mind-and-body music swells, he looks around his bunker – here a beer bottle, there a bass guitar, there a Nerf gun bullet – and smiles.