Sleaford Mods: Divide and Exit – Album Review and Interview

Sleaford Mods: Divide and Exit

Rough Trade

Out 26th July (pre-order here)

LP/CD/DL

As Sleaford Mods prepare to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their 2014 album Divide and Exit, an interview with Jason Williamson of the band took place, musing upon and illuminating Louder Than War’s Ryan Walker about the idea of reissues as a psychological process to clear the cultural cache around a specific piece of work while confirming it’s undoubted position among the greats of the entire punk spectrum.

The idea of ambition is not ambition. Ambition is ambition.

When discussing the arc/art of Sleaford Mods – there is no ‘a band like’.

In a similar way that happens when discussing ‘bands/artists like’ (oops) The Sex Pistols or The Specials or Joy Division or The Jam or Big Black or Aphex Twin, if there does indeed exist a commonality between those groups and Sleaford Mods; something shared in the process of shaking up and shattering apart culture, a national recharge with a ripple effect with multiple, life-changing and affirming symptoms in its wake, then it’s the absence of a reference – nothing before quite like it and nothing afterwards quite like it.

Divide and Exit. An album from 2014 by Sleaford Mods (Jason Williamson: words and Andrew Fearn: music) is a prime example of something that dismantled what came before it in order to pave its own way forward. A reissue of the album featuring new artwork by Cold War Steve, linear notes and a couple of unreleased tracks is less about looking back at past glories; but in a dignified manner succeeds in still keeping the forward-facing nature of Sleaford Mods despite the retrospective nature of the reissue concept form.

Both before and after Divide and Exit, it’s been quite the journey. Massive shows. Records on Harbinger Sound. A fan in Iggy Pop. A UK record store chart-topping album. Pet Shop Boys covers. A best of. Fabulously ridiculous collaborations (from Orbital to Amen Dune, Prodigy and Jane’s Addiction). Since its release in 2014, Sleaford Mods have established themselves as a genuine proposition that, for a time, called for the boycott on the tiresome, typecast cut of popstar, an elegantly wasted cult of one. This abolishment of the rock god, this lampooned annihilation of the fairytale-cocooned comic book character was intensified alongside a nasty political climate – mass unemployment and homelessness, austerity Britain, Tory Sith Lords running amok with Brexit’s bad breath coursing throughout the social-media fuelled fires of the UK. Divide and Exit stole what it saw from the streets. Spat it into something real. The loop and the rant kept everything firmly glued into the grooves of the tune. A spin-cycle of frantic rhythms and jaunty basslines – a mirror to the monotonous phases of daily life in meaningless office jobs in miserable conditions.

Has anything changed?

”Lots of things have changed. We changed managers. I stopped drinking. We became more professional. From 2017 onwards it started to change” Williamson says. ”It took a while to adjust to being sober all the time. It still doesn’t feel right. It takes a while. That changed a lot of things. Bigger success changes things. People change. People’s opinions of you change. It’s been a bit of a journey since they definitely”.

It took time. It always takes time. As is often the case with classic albums, although Divide and Exit is getting the reissue treatment, the facelift that many classic albums eventually receive, either lauded or laughed at the time of release, suspicious of what it was and perhaps still is, deemed too weird and ‘what the fuck?’ for the angle of attack, the incision into the bloodstream to be appreciated, critically acclaimed or critically panned, but critical nonetheless in creating something new, making something significant happen, something unavoidable and symbolic of its surroundings, it took until 2017 for the people to play catch up regarding its influence. But once time has finally unfolded and wrapped around the heads of whoever should come into contact with the album that lands in the lap of the moment, the aftermath is quite unlike anything else.

”I think we’ve never aligned to one ideology, apart from being just humanists and disconnected from things in a lot of respects. I think it took people to catch up with that. A lot of people still haven’t I think. Some people get it and some people don’t. You get what you want out of a band. For the most part, people largely aren’t bothered, they just enjoy the music. It still feels like yesterday” says Williamson. ”Particularly with Divide and Exit, it’s representative of basically what people are saying about on Twitter, even now. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about the English government. It’s like anything. Obviously, the music influences. God knows…leagues of people since. You can’t argue with it. It’s got a lot of holes in it for me, personally but a whole body of work it’s there”.

Despite needing context to create the work, universal truths are contained within classics and carry on throughout the ages long after the moment has gone. They don’t die. They exist regardless of the time it was made. They kick their way out of the pressure cooker of culture. It survives against the tides. Working itself into the ebbs and flows of whatever comes next. Unsettles then nests. Agravates from the insides like a nostril scab itching to be picked. One moment dormant. The next moment dynamite. Even if people want them to lose – they win.

”I think so. I’d like to think it would. Particularly Divide and Exit. If any of the albums survive that would be one of them, definitely” states Williamson. ”It’s a tough one. We’ve done so much over the last ten years. Sometimes it’s a bit like ‘have we done too much?’ But the way the music industry is now, the only money you can make is from touring. So we just release music every two years, not so that we could go out and tour, because we wanted to do a record, but it felt that being on tour was the only thing”.

At the time of Divide and Exit’s release – the top 30 rock and indie tracks streamed contained more than enough targets for Sleaford Mods to take aim at. Are they a band that wants to rip apart rock or indie music? No. Is the list the definitive one? No. If anything – it’s a list from a mainstream site that caters to a specific kind of audience member where the bands published in this list are the optimal example of a contemporary version of ‘rockstar’. A list that can’t seem to function or breathe in the brand of pop oxygen it was birthed in. A general list that doesn’t seem to reflect or represent anything apart from itself and the distant, fossilized stereotypes of a certain Americanised glamour, all glossy and doctored. There was, and still is, an alternative modem to this list that contains far greater examples of rock and indie music (but not to the extremes they were the most streamed/saturated to the farthest removed poles of banality).

It’s this idiom, this iteration, this cut of nauseating plasticity, not even an honourable ghost of rock or pop but just a fart bubble on a stagnant jacuzzi the likes of this list often bathe in that the duo had a problem with: Arctic Monkeys, Kings of Leon, Coldplay, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, the 1975, Foals, Foster the People, etc (one can say ‘etc’ as the reader without much knowledge, or even interest in music could conjecture the next name in the list and, based on those previous examples, guess correctly who comes next).

What was in they wanted to out. The retrograde rockstar was an undead corpse drinking from shallow waters and Sleaford Mods shot it. But…people need their idols for reasons unique to them. It doesn’t have to be as deep as the desire, the desperation for a laptop and a rant to gallop out of the dark ages circa 2014’s mock-rock hotspot, the s’mores-on-a-campfire playlist to cause a collapse in the expectations of what punk was still capable of to be considered worthy of someone’s time. It can just be pop. It can just be a song. It can just be a haircut. And just because a group like Sleafords want to eschew all that well-tested species of music and finally put it to bed, it is still someone’s entry point into the world of music regardless.

Right?

”Yeah, it was done by then. They were even trying to hedge their bets up until 2018 I think. Without mentioning any names. It was sterile. It wasn’t saying anything about anybody. I hated it with a passion. And still do” Williamson tells me. ”But I’m aware that people need to earn a living. After being in the business for ten years you can kind of understand why people repeat themselves. You can understand why people hide behind one formula. Financially, it’s what brings money through the door”.

”I’ve said from day one you can always find a different angle within the area of the ground that you’ve marked out. I found a lot of these people really lazy. Reliant on machismo and laddism and misogyny to a certain degree but we’re all guilty of that I guess” he adds. ”Those things. Just thick cunts. Fuelled by booze and bullshit. I hated it with a passion and still do. I don’t know how people can behave like that past the point of realisation. And anyone that says that they don’t realise of just can’t see a different horizon these days are lying”.

Sleaford Mods were a band that, although operating with a minimal set-up (still minimal) didn’t let Divide and Exit define them. They have a formula – but it fails to be exhausting. The irony being that bands who possess avalanches worth of vintage equipment, attics full of their uncle’s records and boundless buckets full of studio time can remain in the same lane for as long as they live, eternally bowling strike after strike (then split, spares and gutter balls if you’re a band complacent within certain parameters demarcated by the standards of the posters of Robert Plant’s chest still pinned to your wall). They move on as post-Divide and Exit albums (English Tapas, Eton Rifles and so on) have proved in all their depth and detail. The essence of the thing is still intact.

If anything a reissue is a pointless piece of work as the songs are untouchable. The album remains a remarkable, deconstructive scar on the side of a society. A society that still shivers when the skeletal dance, somnambulant bass keys, industrial flashes and spectral, multi-storey car park atmospherics of You’re Brave shuffles into view. It shivers just as hard when the heavy, iron-and-tar rhythmic judder of Middle Men melts all unfortunate enough to cross its path with Williamson’s train-carriage graffiti lyrics: a distinct English street punk rap constantly trying catching itself up, then getting ahead, catching itself by surprise, the body trying to equalise the pace of the motorised mouth, palpitating, inhaling sawdust and soot, spitting out bile and brine, wank and spume. It shivers just as wildly when the piledriver-into-gasworks texture, agitated bass grumble and rhythmic spins of The Corgi or the rudimentary, boring arcade game punk-hop of Strike Force slowly sears into your skull.

Those kinds of things never change. Like Too Much Too Young never changes. Or Meat Is Murder never changes. Or She Is Beyond Good And Evil never changes. Or At Home He’s A Tourist never changes. Yet the environment around it, subject to change as though exposed to a batch of radionuclides causing vomiting and nausea to what it has come into contact with, does indeed, change. A reissue can help us reevaluate its impact. Unlock and excavate missing pieces and interesting details. Commemorate a moment in time that thawed through the traps that time likes to freeze around all things of a certain period.

”With Divide and Exit it was like ‘Oh fuck, this is great’. So we ran with that formula for Key Markets. But it had changed. What we realised was that we didn’t have to solely create this new approach with each album. Time and experience would do about 60 per cent of that for us. The other 40 per cent was just being conscious of whatever was inspiring us at the time” Williamson says. ”The thing about Andrew is that he doesn’t listen to music much, but he gets his inspiration from what he sees around him. Little noises. If he does listen to music it’s just so niche and fucking random. When those things come together, it creates something quite original. I don’t think he’s conscious of it. It’s always fresh. You can’t touch it. I know it’s not everyone’s bag or what people are into. But whenever he sends stuff, you can’t touch it”.

It was this subconscious mindset of mimicking or mining for sounds in their surroundings that enabled Sleaford Mods to firmly insert themselves into the psychological spectrum of the national pull-tab. To some degree they accomplished this feeling on the album before Divide and Exit, the second album with Andrew on board after his debut with Wank in 2012: Austerity Dogs from a year later. But this process of sucking on, and in, their surroundings, musically and lyrically, enabled the group to spit back out what people were perceiving as the cruel work of a waking nightmare, too cruel to be an illusion, too raw to be anything except real, an endless film of post-industrial dystopia they were being dragged through by the ankles and encapsulate the despairing imagination of the masses experiencing a ubiquitously bleak and increasingly existential foise gras.

”I think what happened with Divide and Exit was what happens with all great rock ‘n’ roll albums or whatever is that it was a meeting of everything that all came to a head together at that one time. For that one year, we were on top of the pile. For that one year, we were peerless. It was right. It didn’t have any contemporaries. We were at the top” says Williamson. ”I keep saying the top – it’s not about that…but I think it is. It’s every musician’s dream to have an album that completely captures people’s imaginations of that time. It talks about things culturally, and socially, it was original. The uniforms that we wear, the style of music we play etc. etc. All of this came together in Divide and Exit”.

Classic albums given the reissue treatment inspire people. For better or worse, the album, although peerless in all its seismic might, a lightning bolt from the second highest peak on Mount Olympus can destroy as well birth a whole culture of bands in its wake. Dr Frankenstein creates the monster and then has a hard time coming to terms with what he has built: the pioneer of a new life, the exploration of unknown powers, the deepest mysteries of creation.

”Fucking hell big time. I think that was the biggest hurdle. That and my own ego but the two things are combined really. When I started getting sober it was too much. When all of these bands started coming out and taking it to a more middle-off-the-road area, I found it greatly insulting. It worried me as I didn’t want it to cheapen what we were doing. Constantly people said to me time and time again you’ve got nothing to do with any of these bands, they don’t sound like you, but I disagree you know. You don’t necessarily have to take the aesthetic, you can just take one little bit of it and give that to an unknowing crowd and there’s your idea gone” he says. ”But at the same time, that’s happened time and time again throughout the history of music. Someone once said to me, you don’t ever want to be the mouse that got the cheese. Because everyone else just walks all over you and gets through the hole in the wall. Fuck knows. I still have a problem with it. I’ve learned not to take it so seriously. You’ve gotta switch off sometimes or you’ll go fucking mad”.

”To be honest we had no peers, or at least nobody we felt close with until about 2016/17. A few things happened and I didn’t feel like we were on top anymore. A part of it is my own ego. And also living with the fact that your star eventually fades” he adds. ”Not that we’re one of these middle-of-the-road big bands, but we were at the top for a bit and you’ve got to deal with that. But by then I was sober. But if I was still pissed, it would’ve been worse”.

Alcohol can be a wonderful way to anaesthetise yourself from the other stuff that could potentially eat you alive. If drink still be involved, the perceptions of Sleaford Mods as a band of piss heads or hard men from Grantham, the ‘old man shouts at cloud’ perception would be unfortunate enough to have come true. ”People think I’m a cunt anyway. People think Andrew’s a cunt and he’s never done anything to anyone. We haven’t largely as a band not changed or compromised. Other than in a sense of what people might deem corporate or whatever. But apart from that, we’ve not changed. It’s integral. It’s honest” Williamson states. ”You don’t need booze or the right thing to have been said or to punch someone to be labelled a cunt”.

Armed to the teeth with what, at the time of writing Sleaford Mods is a feature of their career they’re not shy to, hits, singles and bangers of a coherent variety (including the NME flat session video for Tiswas, another ‘borrowed bus’ video for Tied Up In Nottz, Middle Men, Under the Plastic and NCT, Tweet Tweet Tweet, Liveable Shit, The Corgi) Divide and Exit differed from Austerity Dogs (Donkey, Fizzy, McFlurry). It seemed to shift the precision of the group a few stronger inches forward into a pop song of a sort in a way that the debut did…but differently.

”I think Austerity Dogs was like a box of cakes, but each cake was different. Every cake looked and tasted differently. With Divide and Exit, it was a box of the same cake and it was fucking lovely. It was uniform and accessible. Each track was bang, bang, bang. It’s where the rant was more established” Williamson says of the albums’ sense of coherency and distinguishing features. ”On Austerity Dogs, there were some slow tracks but on Divide and Exit it was just rant, rant, rant, apart from the Corgi or Tiswas. The formula was a lot more established and prominent I think”.

Although the established formula defied expectations (despite William’s belief that it would be big, that it would be the best thing around since the carpets were ripped up from the floors of Year Zero and exposed the years of broken skin below it) for the albums released after Divide and Exit, it didn’t trip up over its own tied-together drive nor tire itself out before people had a chance in hell to bark ‘defeated!’ Rather, Key Markets, English Tapas, Eton Alive, Spare Ribs, and the last, UK Grim, only expand upon previous works, concentrated pieces of an increasingly colourful, even flamboyant pop bounce, yet a pop still strong enough to slice apart stone slabs and swallow them easier than a capsule of paracetamol.

”I ran with it for Key Markets as well, yeah. But Andrew’s music was slightly different. He hadn’t written hardly anything for it really. He made music up on the spot with some of it. Some of it was some old stuff from back in the day he unearthed again. So it was a mixture of that. I went with the rant again” Wiliamson tells me. ”By the time we got to English Tapas I was a little bit conscious that we needed to change it up a bit. We did so many demos that didn’t see the light of day. We just experimented and experimented and it slowly started to change from then on”.

”I couldn’t believe it. I just kept on listening to it over and over again…on my iPod. Just over and over. Couldn’t believe it. More so than Austerity Dogs. From then on every time we did the albums, they were so coherent and flowed really nicely” he adds. ”When we wrote Tied Up in Nottz I couldn’t believe it and thought ‘this is it’. This is going places. It really did blow up. It’s there. At the time I was bowled over by it. At the time I didn’t think in ten years time it’s going to be a classic or whatever. STILL don’t believe we are like that. I’m unsure if we’re that kind of band. It does stand up”.

Point to prove?

”There’s always a point to prove. I think so. I think there always will be. Even if people totally forget us, I’ll still feel like I have to make a point. Whatever that is. It’s a struggle because you don’t want to turn it into a crusade of something selfish and meaningless and full of your own insecurity, but the same rules still apply. It’s just full of cunts this game. It’s just so full of idealist bastards. People have just not got a clue. That on its own is definitely worth trying to make a point” he concludes.

Not just pre-Divide and Exit, but pre-Andrew joining Jason to make Sleaford Mods the musical tour de force we recognise it as today, the idea of Sleaford Mods playing Glastonbury, supporting the Stone Roses or Blur at Wembley would have been difficult to imagine becoming a reality. Yet Sleaford Mods, though their size might beg to differ when looked at with untrained eyes and ignorant ears, challenged the commonly understood paradigms of what music could do by snapping it in half with their serrated lyrical and rhythmic pincer (as duos before them also did e.g. Suicide, Pet Shop Boys, Soft Cell), endured those monolithic, eyeball-popping, ball-breaking concerts and survived being a speck on the stage.

And rather than be a servant to the impossible-to-imagine scope of encompassment that comes with stadium territory, rather than be sucked into the vacuum often created when reduces individual bodies to a gigantic, animated amorphous blob, a feverish enmeshment of flesh stacked next to and above each other – Sleaford Mods sent tremors throughout the testicles of London when Tilldipper tears up the seats at their Blur support show. Sleaford Mods: still just the two of them, no albums produced by Steve Albini or Adrian Sherwood (but blimey what a ‘what if?’), a laptop still brought on stage by Andrew soon to depart and enter again (yet gone are the cans and the shaman acid dad dance begins), still positioned on a plinth made from beer crates or a series of stacked boxes, unphased yet still aware of what’s required when dealing with this kind of seismic event in such a coliseum and what’s about to take place within it, decided to dig a few inches deeper into the floor with Tweet Tweet Tweet as a conclusive, supercharged shorting-out of any life that should surround their immensely propulsive and gesticulating generator. It will always be the final word.

”I think there’s something to be said about engaging with people like that. I’ve tried to engage. I’ve apologised to people I’ve been mean to and tried to form some kind of relationship with them or whatever. I think it’s important. Even if you don’t like someone doesn’t mean that you can’t talk to them. Even if you don’t like what they do in terms of creativity doesn’t mean the person is wholly bad. But no, I wouldn’t make those moves. If I wanted to be like that, all I’d have to do is make those kinds of moves. I’m just not into that shit. Andrew would not have it” he says on the required mingling procedures for people who have been grown in the industry’s impenetrable laboratories and exclusive, sacred trend-tents.

Moves made. Moves not made. Strategies imagined. Ideas of how to invade and attack from the inside. Approach with caution or be swallowed as a star and spat out as a wet rat (or the reverse). A venue shaking of thousands who are indifferent to your work is not the same as a venue of half-a-dozen half-cut punters who devote their lives to living within the world of a band. There’s a craft to consider. Nerves can be managed but the size of a space and how a band finds a satisfying way to fill that space is a prospect that needs to be acknowledged, a spectacle in need of addressing or you’ll simply drift and be stamped out by the crowd. Sleaford Mods are a band aware of how to make themselves known to a specific place rather than get lost within the chaos on the other side of it, capable of squashing them like clover mites below the finger of a cruelly curious infant.

”It’s another art in itself. Our manager was saying that we needed to be higher up in festivals. We were still playing quite down the bill from 2017/18. We got a lighting show in. That was weird at first. You just start getting into it. We were no strangers to big shows” Williamson says. ”The stagecraft has started to change since 2019/20. We changed as a band around then. The stagecraft just seemed to change and like the shows at Wembley with the Roses, it takes a long time. You can come and blow up and be talk of the time but you’ve gotta keep going because it’s what you want to do. We’re in the process of maximising Sleaford Mods but in a way that works”.

”We played the 12 Bar Club in London just after the album came out and I remember this guy at the front praying. Talking as if he was praying as if to say something has finally come that sounds decent. That was when I thought ‘this is it’. This is what we have been waiting for as individuals and as people who wanted to make it in music but were obviously aware that we needed to come up with something good. And we’d done it. That was the turning point for me” he says. ”Ironically I completely fucked it up and didn’t go the gig the next day. I can laugh now but it wasn’t very funny at all. It was quite overwhelming. We just didn’t think it would happen”.

Impact not interfered with (as some reissues make the mistake of tampering too much) The artwork for the Divide and Exit reissue has been given a makeover by Cold War Steve (who also did their UK Grim video). The original album art, a photograph of the band by Simon Parfrement (who also shot the cover for the Chubbed Up compilation featuring Jobseeker and Jolly Fucker), is a faded stain in the distance, a scornful photograph bleached by the sun. A posse of mediaeval, hooded monks sacrifice Noel Gallagher’s Epiphone Supernova, the Union Jack being burned alive at the stake as they condemn it into the roaring flames. One can see the blood. Smell the smoke. A white van with a crudely spray-painted St, George’s flag on its side is another absurd anachronism in this visual feast of a battleground fresh with bloodshed. The updated design doesn’t do anything to interrupt the furious, fed-up-beyond-the-point-of-no-return fuck-offness of the original. Its reference to the previous piece of design as a haunting spectre in the corner of the sky, the pair of them looking down on what is taking place, a scene of carnage unfolding with a ‘told you so’ sort of menacing stare to it. The original artwork for Divide and Exit was a classic image. In different ways, Andrew and Jason are the same. Andrew in the sweater, Jason with the buttoned-up white shirt. The haircut. Another image elsewhere of Jason coughing or coping with the cold with his hands wearing finger gloves. It was an introduction to them both.

”It was the Divide and Exit sessions. I told Parf to come round with his camera. He lived around the corner in a flat. He did the shots in Andrew’s living room. He did the one for Chubbed Up. I just thought ‘that’s fucking brilliant, that’s it’. We had a piss around the corner which is the back cover. We went to a pub around the corner and a cig at the back of the pub which is where he shot the front cover” explains Williamson. ”There’s a few other shots related to that session splashed over other stuff. It was exciting. Terry Hall got me on Twitter and said do you want to come and support us? I couldn’t believe it. It was fucking mad”.

It sounds like they were listening to nothing at the time. It was so new. So utterly immediate and new. And despite putting myself at risk of the Paul Weller brigade spanking me to death with their paisley-patterned Tootal scarves, it was, and still is, an experiment utterly mod. They emerged like the Terminator, a mass of naked rage, a big bang, baked by years of drugs and failed attempts to infiltrate some sort of accomplished, musical territory previous to Divide and Exit. People mentioned the likes of the impact of the Sex Pistols and the Jam and the Specials and the Streets (one could also argue Throbbing Gristle, LFO and the Smiths) as a sort of zeitgeist zapping subcultural moment when talking about the impact of Sleaford Mods. Correct or crass?

”It’s mind-blowing. Am I of the same ilk as them? I think so. Now? Fucking easy. Are we up there with them? Yeah. We’ve done 7 albums. All of them are good. With Eton Alive people were like ‘there’s some weaker stuff on there’…but I don’t know.‘ All of them are good. We’re playing to the same size of crowd as these people did back in their heyday. We’re a proper English band that didn’t go down too well in the States like a lot of these bands…The Specials, the Jam certainly” Williamson states on his association with figures, even heroes of his of legendary status. ”We are a band of our surroundings. I don’t walk ‘round shouting it out. Some of these people I’m indifferent to anyway. Terry Hall aside, God rest his soul, you have problems with all these people. The people that you consider your heroes, as you grow older you start to have different opinions about them. We worked hard. I think we’ve got a rightful place with these people”.

Divide and Exit seemed to arrive at a time as though people were waiting for it to descend. They reacted to it like an answered prayer. It ran deep and resonated wide. A battery for the flashlight in a moment where the skies stretched in a thick lace of monochrome and darkened all below it. Out of nowhere, the crater it punched into the planet was mighty.

”I think socially and politically, society from around the mid-noughties was starting to sour. By the time we’d done Austerity dogs the coalition had been in for a year or so, causing all kinds of upset” Williamson explains. ”By the time Divide and Exit came out, the benefit modifications came out and bedroom tax, all of those things that a lot of people depended on in society changed. I think it all married itself to that moment. I think that’s why that album had such a lift-off really. I think it will grow gracefully”.

Although celebrating its tenth birthday, it feels like twenty years ago when Divide and Exit came out. Born on the cusp of societal collapse and the idea of beginning anew out of the chokeholding embers of that previous guard and insidious political regime. It feels old and new, and therefore – is impossible to age, impossible to stagnate. The overarching forecast, politically, socially, and culturally, of one place can be transposed over to multiple locations. Brexit happened. Its stench still lingering. Covid happened. Its cloud still ravaging across the globe, an unwanted guest, a ghost one can still feel and we are still in some of the shadow of. Class divide within the neoliberal vivariums. Social media fiends and the trolls under its invisible bridges. Ideology-broken Britain and its associated austerity golems and Tory mongrels.

Sleaford Mods, a band that isn’t political, but prefers honesty through the opening up a personalised channel for a discourse to take place that exists (or once more severely existed) influenced, even inebriated and inhibited under a politically-crippling system as both prophets and preachers understand this. They aren’t obliged to sing about being poor anymore. They aren’t obliged to write a tune about Gaza. That doesn’t make them bad people or any less poignant or qualified group to comment on the fact that genocide is barbaric. But they don’t need to wear a badge on their lapel to justify their decisions. Do people have a problem with an honest band…being honest?

”I think people accuse me of making a lot of money out of what I do. And I’m like ‘well yeah’. It’s not like I’ve nicked it. It’s my observation and experience. I’m entitled to make money out of it. I don’t understand. I think because people think we’re a political band and people listened to my messages 10 years ago, 5 years ago, 3 years ago that may contradict with things that I’ve said then I’m this wanker. That I’ve got a responsibility to all things left, or hard left. Which is just nonsense” he says. ”I think it’s just jealousy and needing the clicks more than I do. I’ve been there. Giving it to numerous bands in the confines of the back of a pub on my fucking phone years ago. It doesn’t make it any easier to digest”.

This will keep on accumulating life and be there forever whether people like it or not. Everything and nothing has changed.

~

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All words by Ryan Walker

Photos by Simon Parfrement ©