review: sleaford mods’ divide and exit and chubbed up: the singles collection¹

The East Midlands accent, lacking urban glamour, lilting lyricism or rustic romanticism, is one of the most unloved in the UK. It is heard so rarely in popular media that it isn’t recognised enough even to be disdained. I must confess that I have a dog in this fight. I grew up in the East Midlands, and when I left university I was described by a sympathetic lecturer as having a “speech and accent problem”. The accent gradually disappeared, as I learned to suppress the lazy Leicestershire consonants and articulate my speech in something closer to so-called received pronunciation — an achievement loaded with ambivalence and shame.

Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson makes no such accommodation to metropolitan manners, and he’s disgusted at those who speak in fake accents, whether they’re imitating someone from East London or “Lou Reeds, G.G. Allin…” The appeal to the local in politics and culture is usually smug and reactionary; a petit-bourgeois ruse to acquire more cultural and actual capital by overpricing the artisnal and the organic (Williamson is wise to this scam too, blasting at “expensive coffee shops full of local art/Fuck off”). But the politics of locality operate differently when it comes to accent. The English bourgeoisie speak in more or less the same accent wherever they come from. The insistence on retaining a regional accent is therefore a challenge to the machineries of class subordination — a refusal to accept being marked as inferior.

Williamson was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire — Sleaford is about twenty miles away — and was involved in the music scene for years, following a familiar provincial trajectory: not making it, but always being lured back at the very point he was about to give up. He was in and out of local groups, followed the dream to San Francisco and London for a while, and ended up back home when it didn’t come off. He tried to go out on his own, but he couldn’t find anything new, until, bored and frustrated in a recording studio, he started ranting over a metal track. He had found his voice, literally. He was inspired by the Wu-Tang Clan, but he didn’t so much repeat their sound as their methodology, forcing listeners to adjust to his accent, idiolect and references. This risked bathos — the East Midlands ain’t New York, and Sleaford Mods would come off as just another comic turn if it weren’t for Williamson’s incendiary intensity. (Which isn’t to deny the mordantly acidic wit that runs through his lines: “Chumbawamba weren’t political?/They were just crap”, isn’t just funny but critically astute.)

Listen to the singles collection, Chubbed Up, next to Divide and Exit, and it’s clear not much has changed in the duo’s sound. The variation is provided by Williamson’s words, the music by Andrew Fearn always fits an (unfussy) formula: pugilistic post-punk bass; functional but unprepossessing beats; occasional cheap keyboard riffs and listless wafts of guitar. It’s digitally manipulated, but conspicuously unpolished — the software is used not to micromanage the sounds but to capture them into a purgatorial loop.

The name Sleaford Mods sounds like vintage graffiti, or something you’d have sewn onto a Union Jack at an England football match three decades ago. On the face of it, they couldn’t be any less mod. Where is the style and the cool in this relentless outpouring of profanity and discontent? But mod was a complex phenomenon, as much about the failure to achieve the glamour of black America as it was about the aspiration towards possessing it. The mods might have loved Miles and Motown but when they made music it sounded like the Who and the Jam — rock born with a plastic spoon in its mouth, stuck in a monochromatic England skulking in the shadows cast by the USA’s Pop Art consumer dreams. The mods worked in office jobs, in semi-skilled occupations and in department stores, longing for a luxury far above their station. But their ambitions weren’t to climb the social ladder of bourgeois respectability — they prefigured instead a world in which style exploded far beyond the narrow calculations of business, and everyday life could become a work of art. As Dick Hebdige wrote in his essay “The Meaning of Mod”: “Every mod was existing in a ghost world of gangsterism, luxurious clubs and beautiful women, even if the reality only amounted to a draughty Parker anorak, a beaten up Vespa, and fish and chips out of a greasy bag.” With Sleaford Mods, the chips and the grease are all that’s left. Factories have closed and trade unions have been subdued. Art schools and the media have rebourgeoisified. University courses have been opened up, but the real graduate jobs are reserved for the same old suspects. The only time you are likely to hear a working-class accent on television is in a poverty porn documentary.

This is Sleaford Mods’ world, but they refuse the place assigned to them by well-meaning metropolitan liberals and by unscrupulous Tories. They won’t play the part of a dumb feckless prole or white, working-class racist (Williamson loathes St George’s flag white van men as much as their Tory overlords). They won’t knuckle down and gratefully accept zero-hours contract jobs, or be content to “rot away in the aisles of Co-Op”, as the single “Jolly Fucker” had it.

If anything, Divide and Exit feels more claustrophobic than its predecessor, Austerity Dogs, with even the tiny dreamy spaces that once opened up on tracks such as “Donkey” eliminated by Williamson’s relentless excremental flow. Excremental is the right word: piss and shit course through Williamson’s rhymes, as if all the psychic and physical effluent abjected by Cameron’s Britain can no longer be contained, and it’s bursting upwards, exploding through all the deodorised digital commercial propaganda, the thin pretences that we’re all in this together and everything’s going to be all right.

What overflows in Williamson’s pottymouth is a seething disaffection incubated on the dole or in dead end jobs and further stoked up by the shop-soiled fantasies of escape pushed by an ailing music business. An early single was called “Jobseeker”: “So Mr Williamson — what have you done to find gainful employment since your last signing on date?/Fuck all!” A fantasy exchange no doubt: here, as often in Sleaford Mods Williamson gives vent to a voice that would otherwise stay locked in his head. Discontent is everywhere in the UK now but for the most part it’s privatised: blunted by alcohol and anti-depressants, or directed into impotent comments box spite and empty social media outrage: “All you Zombies, tweet tweet tweet”.

If Williamson’s anger often seems intransitive — his fuck offs are sheer explosions of exasperation, directed at no one in particular, or at everyone — it’s underscored by a class consciousness painfully aware that there is nothing which could transform disaffection into political action. “Aren’t we all just/Pissing in the flames?” Cameron and the Tories are obviously despised — there’s a particularly memorable nightmare image of the “Prime Minister’s face hanging in the clouds/Like Gary Oldman’s Dracula” — but who can stop them? “Liveable shit/You put up with it”. This is both a taunt directed at the audience and an acknowledgement of Williamson’s own capitulation in doing what’s necessary to survive.

It isn’t always the role of political music to come up with solutions. But nothing could be more urgent than the questions that Sleaford Mods pose: who will make contact with the anger and frustration that Williamson articulates? Who can convert this bad affect into a new political project?