SLEAFORD MODS
Jason Williamson of Sleaford Mods talks new music, wine versus lager and metaphorical slot-car racing.
A year on from their last release, Nottingham’s avenging spokesmen for the aggravated and alienated come back speeding. But what’s this about existential toy racetracks, wine appreciation and the seal of approval from a legend of punk rock?
When Iggy Pop played Sleaford Mods on his BBC6 show in August, he had some heady words for the nation’s premier grit-hop sans-culottes, calling them, “undoubtedly, absolutely, definitely the world’s greatest rock’n’roll band.” “It’s mega isn’t it?” says the group’s tic’ing lyrical agitator Jason Williamson. “That really chuffed me up. Quite surreal. We played the same festival in Helsinki and he came to watch us, which blew me away. It’s like Elvis tipping up, a proper titan, you know. I didn’t wanna overuse that quote but I’m sorry, there’s some things you’ve got to fucking brag about.” Iggy should also dig Sleaford Mods’ new track T.C.R., a Roadrunner-like brainwormer that uses the kids’ slot racing toy popular in the ’70s and ’80s as a metaphor for life’s “rotating dross” – in this case attempting to stifle “this boredom that you create in your own mind” with habitual pub visits. “I find it really interesting, the social habits of people my age, which are pretty much the same as people who are 25 or whatever,” says Williamson, who actually owned a Scalextric set as a lad. “Because we’ve been brought up with that rave culture, it’s perfectly acceptable to go out and buy alcohol and drugs. I found myself getting into messes much more easily than I did when I was younger. There’s a lot of exploring about that on the new album.” The EP also addresses his new taste for drinking rioja at home (“the belly was coming out, and I thought, I’ll move on to wine, this stupid logic”), and another change involves the group’s signing to Rough Trade, with whom they’ll be releasing a new album in early 2017. Recorded in three weeks at Steve Mackey from Pulp’s studio in West Hampstead, the LP promises, says Williamson, “more of the same but better. I don’t wanna say ‘the usual’ ’cos we’re not plodding along with the same fucking formula, but you can’t stray too much can you? I’ve got a lot of stick this year, people saying, ‘What are you going to write about now?’ It’s like, what we’ve always written about. It’s not a political mandate, it’s just that the last few years life has become very political – there’s the general right-wing mood, paranoia, the idea of an immigrant, these realities and observations – and if I’ve got a really good angle with it, then the music stays alive.” As for signing to Rough Trade, he says, “I wasn’t really that keen to be honest, I thought, We don’t need to. But they leave us alone, and we wanted to try and get the music out there to a bigger audience, and they’ve got a bit of muscle and they’ll put the tunes into the US market. I sound like a bit of a businessman here, but after three years in the game [since 2013’s breakthrough Austerity Dogs] you get a bit of a taste for it.” With a UK tour that ends at London’s Roundhouse on November 10, their infiltration into the mainstream is continuing. But Williamson, who’s currently enjoying NY gangster hip-hop, Jackson C. Frank and, oddly, Drake, insists he’s taking nothing for granted. “At the start of each album we’re just looking at each other going, Oh shit, have we still got anything for it? After a while it sort of exposes itself to us,” he says. “It could fall on its arse so easily, because it is literally nothing, it’s just a backing track and a vocal. If you don’t treat it properly it could fall into a parody or into an absolutely ineffective project… but it still hasn’t.”
T.C.R. is out on October 14. Sleaford Mods’ UK tour begins on October 19.