Sleaford Mods review – a bracing stream of class consciousness

Across town at the Royal Albert Hall, the Last Night of the Proms is under way. In the basement of London’s 100 Club – a famous venue in the annals of punk, granted “special status” by Westminster council before Covid struck – a man from Nottinghamshire is, not for the first time, at the end of his tether.

“Fuck England! Fuck my country!” he bellows to an empty venue, “Lob it in the bin!” Singer Jason Williamson doesn’t recognise his homeland any more. BHS has gone down. The “rich list” grows ever bigger. “In the snakes and ladders,” people like him, he snarls, “are the Baldricks, son, and Blackadders.”

There have been many reactions to the divisions of the last decade, to the erosion of everything from basic civility to the welfare state, but few bands have been as excoriating on the awfulness of it all as Sleaford Mods. Their rise has, in some ways, been in inverse proportion to Britain’s downward-punching trend. Neither from Sleaford, nor strictly mods – although you can hear Paul Weller of the Jam in Williamson’s delivery – the duo released their latest album, All That Glue, in May. A compilation of the electronic punk outfit’s main bullet points, plus rarities, it swims with bile, surreal turns of phrase, squawking and sly musicality.

The bin, and the Baldricks, though, are key: Sleaford Mods are a splenetically English phenomenon, given to clipped East Midlands vowels, Anglo-Saxon expletives and kebab references. They provide a radically alternative vision of nativism, or perhaps, a strain of dismayed patriotism – in sharp relief tonight, and most nights, to that in the Albert Hall.

Despite the duo’s love of US hip-hop, and the US tour the band were supposed to embark upon this autumn instead of this livestream, Williamson would probably rather defecate in his own sock – as one of his songs recounts – than sing of “throwing” something “in the trash”. In the breathtaking division of people into “somewheres” and “nowheres” popularised by Theresa May at the 2016 Conservative party conference, Williamson – and his composer colleague Andrew Fearn – are definitely “somewheres” (from Grantham and Saxilby respectively, although Williamson now lives in an uneventful part of Nottingham). Those roots continue to lend their critiques of Brexit and austerity a gravitas born of intimacy with Leaverland’s discontents.

But class is also something of an open wound. Sleaford Mods are locked in a war of words with Bristol band Idles, chiefly over whether the latter are middle-class types impersonating angry working-class people. It’s funny, but sad, too. “We ushered in a new way for indie bands to sing and approach music and now we regret it,” runs Sleaford Mods’ Twitter bio. (That Twitter account was suspended for a time recently because Williamson called Jacob Rees-Mogg the C-word.)

Key too to the appeal of Sleaford Mods is how Williamson says out loud the things people would like to say but would get sacked for if they did. On Fizzy, a track originally from 2013’s Austerity Dogs, Williamson gleefully addresses a manager. “Do you want me to tell what I think about you, cunt? I don’t think that’s a very good idea – do you? You pockmarked four-eyed shit-fitted shirt, white Converse and a taste for young girls.”

If it were possible for music to be sarcastic, Fearn’s tinny sounds would be just that. His beats cock a snook at pretension, while communicating urgency. Kazoos, weird noises and surprising little countermelodies crop up tonight where you least expect them, as on one of tonight’s newer songs, I Don’t Rate You.

As is the way of Sleaford Mods gigs, Fearn presses a button at the start, then spends the gig holding a drink and bobbing about, a laid-back yin to Williamson’s dyspeptic yang – his idleness an implicit takedown of electronic artists fervently “playing” while unleashing digital files. Fearn recently told Computer Music magazine that the laptops Sleaford Mods use live aren’t internet-enabled. That seems more likely to be true than Wiliamson’s quip tonight that 80,000 people are watching.

This livestream should have coincided with the release of All That Glue, but Williamson hurt his back. He seems fine now, but one of the singer’s many tics finds him strutting, puff-chested, holding his lumbar curve, a bit like a camp pigeon hiding a crafty cigarette behind his back.

Tonight’s show may lack warm bodies – it’s so quiet you can hear the base of the microphone stand rattle as Williamson puts it down at the end of Second – but he’s is in full flow from the off, whacking himself in the head on Blog Maggot, veins bulging by Kebab Spider, short hair soaked by Second.

This narked everyman drama remains cathartic to watch, but the fortysomething former benefits officer is full of eccentricities too. His word-association games recall Shaun Ryder’s deranged poetics; there is just a touch of Jarvis Cocker, too, in his mannered between-song emcee persona.

Just as intriguing is the series of guttural noises, repetitions and crowing that accompany Williamson’s effusions. “Vuh-vuh-vuh-vuh-vuh-vuh-vuh!” he offers at the start of Blog Maggot.

Near the end of Tweet Tweet Tweet, a song about Ukip and the limited usefulness of Twitter to solve anything, he caws like a crow. Studies have indicated that a foul mouth can indicate verbal fluency, rather than a poverty of vocabulary, but sometimes words fail Williamson too.