Midway through Sleaford Mods’ set, Jason Williamson inquires after the audience’s welfare in time-honoured style. Or at least, his inquiry begins in time-honoured style: “Are you having a good time?” The crowd cheers. “I never used to ask before because I wasn’t fucking bothered,” he adds. “But now the cunt’s paying my fucking mortgage, I’ve got to keep the customer satisfied.” It’s a remark that tells you something about the position that Sleaford Mods currently find themselves in.
You can see how the sound of Williamson venting his spleen against partner Andrew Fearn’s punishingly sparse rhythm tracks might have turned them into a critical cause celebre. For one thing, music critics love to write about stuff that appears to reflect the state of the nation and comes laden with arcane pop cultural references, and for another, Williamson’s lyrics are extremely witty. Tonight, the audience cheer not just songs but specific lines, not least Face to Face’s rumination on the mayor of London: “Boris on a bike? Quick, knock the cunt over.”
But what’s happened to Sleaford Mods in the last 12 months is something quite beyond critical acclaim. Their latest album, Key Markets, entered the charts at No 11: the least commercial record to have breached the top 20 in recent memory. Previous visits to Brighton found them playing in the back rooms of pubs, which, it could be argued, are the natural habitat for their embittered, frequently drink-sodden tales of anger and despair. Now, they’re performing in the kind of venue that also plays host to the Brighton Early Music festival and Jay Rayner’s My Dining Hell.
It’s simultaneously cheering and odd, but it seems a far less unlikely state of affairs when you see them live. Williamson jokes about the duo’s lack of stagecraft: a booking agent recently suggested they get some added visual interest in, “so we bought a fucking fan” he says, switching said fan on. “It’s got four settings,” he adds. In fact, Williamson is about as compelling a live performer as music currently has to offer. Watching him dripping sweat, moving as if suffering from a series of tics, you’re struck by the fact that you hardly ever see anyone on stage this possessed by what they’re doing: you see a lot of people striking earnest poses they appear to have studied in a book on how to be an angst-ridden rock star, but nothing this charismatic and frenzied. And for all the suggestions that Sleaford Mods work from a wilfully limited musical template, there’s enough variation in what they do to keep shifting the mood that emanates from the stage. It’s alternately tense, menacing, funny and cathartic: four adjectives that don’t get used that often to describe live gigs, and evidence that, mainstream acceptance or not, Sleaford Mods still do something no one else currently does.
- At Cambridge Junction, 8 October. Box office: 01223 511 511. Then touring.
.jpg?w=600)
