This and any other articles and videos about Sleaford Mods likely contains language some readers may find offensive. It's part of the package, folks.
Don't get squeamish on me, because this is fascinating.
Grammar Wanker: Sleaford Mods 2007‑2014 by Jason Williamson – review (The Guardian)
... Among critics in particular, there remains a longing for music that deals in hardened social comment, as evidenced by the feeling of relief bound up in the belated recognition of the Nottingham duo Sleaford Mods. In early 2014, their first notice in the Guardian hailed “the most uncompromising British protest music made in years”, and the fact that the album they released the previous year was titled Austerity Dogs only heightened the sense of the cavalry coming over the hill. Their songs were – and still are – bound up with the arse-end of modern work, the grimmer aspects of weekend hedonism, and a very contemporary awareness of horizons shrinking at speed. Who else in modern English music is doing anything similar?
Jason Williamson speaks of the way he began taking "mental shapshots" of his own failure.
Sleaford Mods: 'Most days I'd only have enough money for a Mars bar and a can of Special Brew' (The Guardian)
... The eureka moment came one morning in spring 2006. "I had no money. I'd just have enough for a Mars bar, most days, and a can of Special Brew. And I wrote a song called Teacher Faces Porn Charges, about going to the shop in my pyjamas, to buy the Mars bar and the can."
A friend, Simon Parfrement, (nicknamed "Parf"), and still an integral part of Sleaford Mods' set-up) suggested combining Williamson's words with a loop lifted from a Roni Size record. "And it worked, straight away," he says. "It was better than anything I'd ever done. I took it home, and I couldn't believe how good it was. That's how Sleaford Mods was born."
The breakthrough in 2013 ...
Sleaford Mods ... AUSTERITY DOGS (The Quietus)
... When I say culture, I don't mean something that can be packaged up and sold back at people so they accept their own inferiority. Austerity Dogs isn't "we're all in this together" claptrap, nor some expensively educated pillock holidaying in other peoples' poverty like they've never heard 'Common People'. Rather, it's soaked in the impossible realities of the everyday, and it reworks that into something truly astonishing. Each song is a stream-of-unconsciousness from the collective dream-time of the dead-end worker who's pissed off with his boss, pissed off with shit drug dealers, pissed off with aggro cunts in clubs, pissed off with "Brian Eno – what the fuck does he know?" It's Chris Morris with a class consciousness, laying bare the surreal tapestry of horrors that face the working class in Britain today.
... and the follow-up in 2014.
Sleaford Mods ... Divide and Exit (Pitchfork)
... A recent tweet from Sleaford Mods succinctly sums up both the position they find themselves in and the feeling they reflect in their music: “This is our time.”
Another album is out in 2014: Key Markets.
Williamson works up a spectacular level of poisoned anger across these 12 songs – about the vapidity and duplicity of modern party politics, and about crap bands, but just as often about unnamed nemeses from his personal life. (NME)
An earlier video concludes. Don't we all know one?
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