I love Sleaford Mods. I love everything about them. If you were to ask me which I love more, Sleaford Mods or my mom, I would say Sleaford Mods. Sorry Mom. I love you, I really do. But you’re no Sleaford Mods.
I love that singer-talker (they call that Sprechgesang in Deutsch). Kevin Williamson, a rough and angular-looking working-class fellow, is the kind of fucking cunt who likes to say fucking cunt, and in a wonderful East Midlands accent no less. I love that the duo (Andrew Fearn programs their tracks and stands around in their videos looking cool) originally called themselves That’s Shit, Try Harder. I love that Williamson specializes in diatribes, against this, against that, against everything, it seems, British. I love that both men are in their forties. Success hasn’t come easy for them. Williamson, in particular, took the long and winding road to where he is now, obscenitying away.
I also love that “Mods.” It’s a tribute to Williamson’s early love for bands like The Jam. But what I love more is that Williamson has nothing good to say about The Jams’ Paul Weller, and he’s more than happy to say it in public. He basically thinks the old geezer should hang it up, that he’s just going through the motions and beating a dead Mod horse for the filthy lucre.
But what I love most are their songs. Utterly addictive and stripped to the basics songs like “Bang Someone Out,” “Mork n Mindy,” “Jolly Fucker,” “TCR,” “B.H.S.,” “UK Grim,” “Force 10 from Navarone,” and “Tweet Tweet Tweet.” They’re all poetic prole blasts of pure stream-of-consciousness invective, reminiscent of a less arcane Mark E. Smith.
But I’ll tell you what pisses me off about Sleaford Mods. I was first turned on to them by the video for “Bang Someone Out,” on which Williamson goes full Tourettes. I mean, it’s a tour de force of obscenity, explosive expostulations, and weird mouth noises. It’s a real gob-smacker. But get this—when I turned on the RECORDED version of “Bang Someone Out,” which you can find on their 2018 EP “Sleaford Mods,” it was all gone. The song’s still great, but Williamson is behaving himself. And the sad thing is you won’t find the video version anywhere.
So I thought to myself, where do I find THAT Williamson? Then it came to me. Live! Maybe Williamson goes stark berserker live! So I checked out their only live recording, the 2022 “Live from Nottz Arena” EP. Nottz is shorthand for Nottingham, and Nottingham is the right proper place for Sleaford Mods to do their business, given they have a number called “Tied Up in Nottz,” which I doubt the City Fathers will be naming Nottingham’s Official Song anytime soon. You get six songs, only a couple of which are favorites of mine, so if you really want to hear Sleaford Mods in all their glory, I suggest you check out their full-lengths, 2020’s All That Glue, and 2023’s UK Grim in particular.
They open “Live at Nottz Arena” with “Mork n Mindy,” and they have No Wave/post-punk singer Billy Nomates, who sings on the recorded version, in tow. The beat is slinky hypnotic, and the song has Williamson doing naughty things with his Mork and Mindy dolls. “I make ’em kiss each other when my mum ‘n’ dad go out,” he sings, “No messing, no curtain twitching, no stressing/I don’t hang about, I get ’em down and dirty.” He lives in a depressing cul de sac, and when Nomates comes in she sings, “You’re not from ’round here, crashed landed about a week ago/Yeah, I feel for you, I do,” then swings with the lines,
“You go, too high, too low
It doesn’t make a difference
I know, too high, too low
But the system won’t go.”
It’s a wonderful slice of working-class weirdness, and Williamson does go a bit wilder than he does in the studio, delivering a prolonged scream and, in general, sounding even more acidic than usual.
“Discourse” isn’t as funky as the recorded version with its big bass or as propulsive either, but Williamson, who delivers his words at warp speed, enlivens the affair by tossing in lots of “only on the live version” obscenity and sounding even more disgusted than he does on record. “There’s only one course, discourse” he sings over and over, growing increasingly agitated by the nonce.
“Jolly Fucker” features one hard and fast beat, Williamson spits out his words just as fast, and there are, as always, a lot of words. He opens by saying, “Promote yourself, look like a cunt/Vodka parties, cushioned walls in a shit club,” and ends the first stanza with the great lines “Fish fingers, take the batter off, I can’t believe you had kids, fuck off” then goes into the chorus:
“Jolly fucker
Jolly fucker
Jolly fucker
Mr Jolly Fucker!”
And along the way, you get such great lines as “Blood on the hands of working-class rage” and “Push in, don’t push me, I was here first, you cunt/Can’t you fuckin’ see?” Then throw in Rudyard Kipling, “elitist hippies,” bus cunts, EDL twats, and office turds, and when towards the end Williamson barks out, “I’d better watch my words” all you can think is too late, mate.
Sleaford Mods follow “Jolly Fucker” with a relatively straight-up cover of Yazoo’s synthpop classic “Don’t Go,” and frankly I don’t get the point. Williamson doesn’t mess about with the lyrics, and if he’s trying to convey heartbreak, it isn’t working. Is it a joke? I don’t think so. If it’s a cover you want I would direct you to Sleaford Mod’s 2023 take on “West End Girls.”
Amy Taylor of Australia’s Amyl and the Sniffers join Sleaford Mods on the big-bottomed “Nudge It.” She’s really animated, does some great rapping, and joins Williamson on the repeated lines, “You’re just a mime that’s spraying and praying on walls/And the after-effects are making my skin crawl.” They make for a fine team—problem is the lyrics do nothing for me. Williamson kicks ass and names names while swearing up a storm, but he has nothing to say on “Nudge It” that I find particularly interesting. Still, a great song.
Closer “Tied Up in Nottz” is more like it. The beat’s rapid-fire, there’s a nice bass bottom, and Williamson is at the top of his game from the opening lines, “The smell of piss is so strong/It smells like decent bacon.” I love the way he shouts “It’s the Final Countdown by fuckin’ Journey!” and “I got an armful of decent tunes, mate/But it’s all so fuckin’ boring,” but it’s not until the end that things really go over the top, with Williamson shouting,
“Tied up in Nottz, Shit!
And then the dealer’s tipped up up up up up up up up up up!
(Unintelligible)
Big up the riots!
Smash the window!
Smash the window!
Smash the window!
I said smash the fucking window!”
Like I said before, this is hardly an endorsement of wonderful Nottingham.
Sleaford Mods are one of the coolest bands out there, and Jason Williamson is a force of nature, all invective, biting social commentary, and spite. He specializes in bile, most of it directed at an England where the working class has always gotten either the short end of the stick or been at the receiving end of a copper’s baton. No wonder he wants to smash the window. Not since Mark E. Smith has England had a voice that so gleefully ups the status quo, but none of it would mean much if the band’s songs weren’t so infectious.
That said, I’ll always rue the fact that Williamson has reserved his most manic performance for a music video. The Williamson on that video needs to be unchained, let loose, set free. In the meantime, this fucking cunt will be enjoying the fuck out of the fucking cunt he’s got.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
