By John O’Neil
The Sunday night after Record Store Day 2014, I was unwinding after the long weekend, doomscrolling the socials. My friend Gerard put a Youtube video on his page from the Rough Trade store in London. Out on the sidewalk on RSD itself, an “unknown” band is performing a song, which the video starts in the midst of. Suddenly the set is interrupted by a member of the audience attempting to take the microphone from the singer. The man from the crowd appears to be intoxicated. The band stops while the interloper is hustled away. The singer turns to the other person standing next to him and says “FIZZY,” and off we go into another song. It’s a banger, an incredible riff, and the singer delivers the first lines: “The c**t with the gut/and the Buzz Lightyear ‘aircut/calling all the workers ‘plebes’/you better think about your future/you better think about your neck/you better think about your shit hairdo…”
My god. I’m staggered. And hooked. I watch the video over and over again. It’s real. I have an immediate visceral response. It’s immediate, tuneful and so brash and funny. I can’t believe how good it is. The singer has charisma, and the man next to him bops around, mouthing words when he feels like it, gets delivered a beverage, vapes and appears to be doing nothing. They are a band, but they upend the whole concept of a band. The man bopping around is in charge of a laptop, and he starts and stops the backing tracks for the vocalist, a man with a smart haircut, fit clothes and a bundle of idiosyncrasies. I immediately start the search for more.
I learn that the group, Sleaford Mods, consists of two English men: Jason Williamson, the vocalist, and Andrew Fearn, the sound sculptor and studio master who builds the tracks. And they have been at it for a while. They are about to release their second album, and to tease it, they release a single, “Tied Up in Nottz,” and produce a video that features slices of English life and the band pantomiming the song while riding around in a double-decker bus. The song is funny, profane and intensely catchy. I’m getting into it deeper and deeper.
I’ve always been partial to the UK bands, which is probably because of my Scotch-Irish heritage, the wry sarcasm and suspicion of my betters that comes from a working-class background, and a well-tuned bullshit detector. When I was a young man I adored the Jam, and I recognize the through line here, the unapologetic focus on everyday English life, and the yearning to break free of it at the same time.
I’m searching for the records. There is a first album, Austerity Dogs, which I can’t find on physical, but find out on the internet. It’s awesome, a great beginning, but Divide and Exit, the second album, which comes out soon after I become aware of the band, ups the ante considerably.
The songs are razor sharp, repetitive yet complex, with Andrew’s layers of sound surrounding the relentless bark of Jason’s biting and hilarious hectoring vocals. Every song kills. They just keep coming at you. The lyrics can be hard to parse at first, loaded with English slang and the singer’s wordplay. I’ve been surprised by the lyric sheet, because I’ve been completely wrong about what is being said. That has not lessened my enjoyment of the songs one iota. I go to the songs, and let them come to me on their own terms.
I can’t stop listening to the band. In June, my friend and coworker Chad and I travel to Rochester, New York, for our record store coalition convention, and we are rooming together. Every night after our work and social obligations are over, we head to the room with beers in tow, and I indoctrinate Chad to the Mods. “Nottz” becomes the theme of the trip. I’m totally obnoxious and fevered about the band. I ask about them in every store we go into. No one in Rochester has heard of them, much less stocked the records. I know. I asked about them everywhere we went.
I’m finding out more and more about the band as I go along. They are old for a new band. Jason had actually lived in San Francisco around the turn of the century and played guitar in bands. Bands that failed. He moves back to England, gets married, has a child, works in claustrophobic working-class jobs, and in his spare time listens to the Wu-Tang Clan records. An idea starts to form in his mind about the music he wanted to make.
The Sleaford Mods begin with Jason constructing backing tapes himself, and vocalizing over the top of it. Tapes. Primitive, he says. I think you can find it out in the world/web if you look. I haven’t. At some point he meets or records with, or crashes into Andrew, who comes aboard and ups the game intensely. In reading the comments on the videos, a lot of derision is aimed toward Andrew by people who think he’s just some clown dancing around on stage doing nothing. This endears them to me even more. They get up the nose of people, and don’t apologize for it. They are who they are, they do what they do, and you can take it, or leave it.
The decade since Divide and Exit has found the Mods taking the same sound template into the world, expanding the sound and continuing to progress, collaborations with the Prodigy, Billy Nomates, Amy Taylor (Amyl and the Sniffers,) Florence Shaw (Dry Cleaning,) Perry Farrell(!) and the Pet Shop Boys!!! The songs achieve the seemingly impossible result of remaining recognizably Sleaford Mods, and expanding their sound at the same time. The resolutely provincial English slang is hard to penetrate by us outsiders, and the band is unapologetic about it. They are presenting their world, and inviting you in, like the Kinks did in the 60s, the Jam did in the 70s and the great rap groups of the 80s, 90s and beyond did, like Run-D.M.C. with Hollis, Queens, the NWA crew and Ice Cube with South Central LA, Biggie with Brooklyn and the Wu-Tang with their mythical world inspired by “Eastern philosophy picked up from kung fu movies, Five-Percent Nation teachings picked up on the New York streets, and comic books”. (Pfeifle, Sam. “Days of the Wu — The RZA looks inside the Clan”. The Boston Phoenix. Stephen M. Mindich.)
You are welcome to observe the world as presented by the artist, listen to the story and see yourself in the songs. Even though it’s “not for you” per se, the general experience is universal, and pondering the life portrayed in the songs is a good way to get outside yourself and see things from a different perspective. Me? I find it memorable and endlessly entertaining, and I’m along for the ride, and the tunes, as long as they want to keep it going.