Sleaford Mods: Everyone I know back home is racist
The band’s vocalist opens up to Chris Harvey about Brexit ahead of the release of their album ‘Eton Alive’
“Fucking horrible.” In the world of Jason Williamson, the vocal half of Sleaford Mods, these two words belong together. He uses them to describe a lot of things. Right now, though, he’s sitting opposite me in a chic boutique hotel in central London. Williamson caught the train down from Nottingham. First class. It cost him £250.
Can this be the man who raged about a lifetime of being treated like shit in unskilled jobs on the 2013 album Austerity Dogs? “I work my dreams off for two bits of ravioli / And a warm bottle of Smirnoff / Under a manager that doesn’t have a fuckin’ clue,” he ranted on “Fizzy”. The humour belonged to someone staring into a future of more of the same: “You’ve got to be able to sell yourself / So I stuck my life on eBay / £25 mate!”
Sleaford Mods have worked fucking hard to change that picture, though. Their violent sound is so stripped down, it’s perfect. Andrew Fearn provides rudimentary beats, Williamson gets in your face with relentless spokenshouted diatribes. They’ve toured constantly, released four studio albums, one live album and a set of EPs since Williamson first collaborated with Fearn on Wank (2012). Their new album Eton Alive is the first release on their own label, Extreme Eating. It’s a storming return after 2017’s English Tapas. Part progression, part throwback, it has a furious energy that recalls 2014’s Mercury Prize-nominated Divide and Exit, but on some songs, Fearn’s beats have become languorous and Williamson sings. The 48-year-old has been working hard to promote it, too, in a series of very funny Twitter ads. One has him bagging up dogshit as he talks about the release date (23 February, in case you don’t fancy watching).
Success has made Williamson less angry about not having any money, he admits. Now that he lives in middle-class West Bridgford in Nottingham, with his wife Claire and two children Flora, seven, and Beau, three, he’s been asking himself, “Have I become the person that I rail against?” This self-accusatory tone finds its way onto the album in “O.B.C.T.”, in which the singer sees himself driving past an Oliver Bonas shop in a Chelsea tractor. But the aggression is still there, and it comes out when we talk about Brexit, and “what this Leave campaign has done to people’s psychology and how other people see us”. Sleaford Mods grew up in the rabidly Brexit heartland of Lincolnshire: Williamson in Grantham, where 60 per cent of people voted to leave, Fearn in Saxilby (62 per cent). Williamson was in Germany recently, he says, and “they can’t get their heads around it at all – they’re like, ‘Why are you still getting fucked around by a bunch of posh bastards?’”
I reckon there’ll be quite a few riots eventually, when more cuts are made, because the poor are gonna get it in the neck, aren’t they?
The British are “ruled by this idea of cap-doffing and feeling good about cap-doffing”, he continues, “and I think that has been so deep to our lack of revolt”. As a nation, he says, after Brexit, “we’ll just carry on and we’ll moan, you know … I can’t really see the middle classes rising up … they will try to make the best of it, whatever that may be.”
That said, he can see that emotions are starting to boil up. “I reckon there’ll be quite a few riots eventually, when more cuts are made, because the poor are gonna get it in the neck, aren’t they? Somewhere along the line you’re gonna get someone on an estate just kicking off, and it’s gonna do it like it did in Tottenham.”
He thinks a lot of Leave voters had a “fuck the EU” attitude, because “they haven’t got an option to go over to Spain or Germany to work, these things are completely fucking unimaginable, you know, so no wonder they were alienated from it”. He continues: “It’s a mindset people in small towns and a lot of working class people have, people who don’t leave the local area, these people live hard lives. This idea of a smaller world, of globalisation, of Europe, it’s just, ‘what the fuck’s that?’, it’s a million miles away from them. So when you’ve got someone like Johnson or Farage, who really did strike a chord with a lot of people because of the nationalism thing, of being patriotic, it’s basic maths, innit – ‘yeah, I fuckin’ love England’.”
Where does he think the violent strain of racism associated with the Leave side of the argument comes from? “It was always there. Everyone in Grantham who I know is racist and that’s a thread that’s gone through and it’s been suppressed. In the cities there is multiculturalism, people are a lot more open minded, but in the small towns, fucking forget it, you know.”
Williamson doesn’t swear quite as much in his songs these days, either, but the vitriol in his lyrics