FAMILY VALUES: SLEAFORD MODS, BOOTS ‘N ALL part 1
- Bernard Zuel
- 24 hours ago
- 5 min read
BEHIND JASON WILLIAMSON in a narrow but sunlight room of his home in Nottingham, you can see some art, a tour poster for his band, Sleaford Mods – with vocalist Williamson and bandmate Andrew Fearn leaning into each other and looking fit to pull the roof down – and two sets of baby shoes, framed.
It’s a gentle domestic touch, metaphorically miles from the harsher, messier family life of his youth lived literally 25 miles away to the east in Grantham, where his first and in some ways most telling job was in a chicken factory. And possibly incongruous to someone who had stumbled across the oft-brilliant Sleaford Mods on disc or on stage, with Williamson’s barking grabs of unblinking social observation, cutting wit and occasional brutal invective strewn across Fearn’s electronic rock-on-the-bones-of-its-arse sounds.
That’s a combination that’s offered, across a dozen albums, songs perfect to spiral-dance to, as the Mods did, in shorts, t-shirts and jerky/campy/unencumbered manner in Australia two years ago, which we will see again in April. And songs even better to rouse a forgotten lower middle and working class to, as a decade living under Tory austerity and cultural decay encouraged, culminating in their 2023 album, UK Grim, but about to expand further in January’s new album, The Demise Of Planet X.
We’ll dive into that album in part two of this interview, including cameos from unlikely collaborators Aldous Harding and Game Of Throne’s Gwendoline Christie, but today we begin, as Williamson did, with family and class, big dreams of escape/something/anything, and, yes, the Grantham chicken factory.
If I put him on the conveyer belt at the chicken factory tomorrow would muscle memory kick in with the sheers as Williamson jointed the bird?
“It would probably take me about a week to two weeks,” he says. “There was a skill to it but you’d be rotated around so you be pulling chickens on the line, or you be slicing breast meat off the actual carcass. You’d be going around constantly so I imagine it would take up to two or three weeks to get back to speed with it.”
His strongest memory from that job and his teen life in the late 1980s is of stark contrasts.
“I had been rejected from drama schools. I spent a good year trying to get into drama schools and basically I thought I’m not going to spend another year working in a factory trying to get into drama schools,” says Williamson. “I was hoping to get in via a scholarship because I couldn’t afford the course fees, but scholarships were few and far between, and although they encouraged me to come back next year, I was kinda taken with clubbing and ecstasy and speed. I was not too dedicated to the arts.
“It was a bit crushing, it was like, I don’t want to do this for ever, but at the same time I was not disciplined enough to undertake the idea of acting so eventually I went into music.”
How did he learn discipline? How does anyone?
“Well, I think it’s wanting to actually really do it. I don’t think I loved [acting] enough, I was alienated a little bit, I was never any good at the theory side of things, I couldn’t articulate myself very well. The practical side of things – production, acting basically – I was better at, I enjoyed.”
Alienated?
“Everybody at auditions was always quite posh: they were upper-middle-class or higher. You really got the impression this people were born into families that did it. Which isn’t a problem, and there is no reason why I should have felt intimidated by them, apart from the fact that I was a completely experience-less working-class kid.”
In theory, there should be no reason why he should be intimidated, but in practice the intimidation is real, even if self-imposed, as this western Sydney boy who found himself at law school with a bunch of well-connected north shore and eastern suburbs kids who were, whether it was true or not, confident and capable and at ease in this world in a way I never could be, would confirm.
“That’s interesting. Would I, even if I’d gone into drama school, been intimidated by people around me, because how would I be expected to survive?,” Williamson says. “I would have had multiple jobs, most probably, and had no experience. I was not parented in a way that enabled me to stride into independence comfortably. I had lots of problems when I first left home, it was chaos, so yeah, I am with you on that.
“And definitely, the confidence thing with people really intimidated me [he laughs] it was like fucking hell these people are actually happy! Or not, as the case may be. What’s funny now is I see some of these people I knew at auditions, and I see them on TV now, and it’s quite comforting. It’s almost like I know them, you know what I mean?”
With a complicated or unsatisfactory or difficult or however you want to put it, upbringing, one of the goals as an adult often is how do you break that cycle of poor parenting, lack of confidence, generational scars? We try even though we are not certain it is possible to break the cycle, that elements of your past won’t come up again in your current or future thinking or behaviour and be passed on. Is it possible to be better?
“Yeah. I broke the cycle two years ago and the way I did that was I completely cut my family off,” he says, calmly. “I was part of a misery circle where I would feed the trauma, where I would be the rescuer, and where I would be the enabler. That went around between my mother, myself, and my sister, so I broke myself away from that and I’ve not spoken to them for two years and feel a lot better for it.
“So, yes, it’s possible, and I’ve since realised a lot of people do that: it’s not this abnormal occurrence.”
Again, that’s no small thing. Both to do and to emerge from.
“You know, the last thing you want to do is never speak to your family again – that’s just insane, it’s like ‘what?’. These people have fed me and put a roof over my head and without that I would have perished,” Williamson says. “But, that is no reason why I should keep them in my life if they are contributing to the problem. My problem was anxiety and that problem was my general mental health in decline. So yeah, yes to the first part of that.
“To the second part of the question, yes you can change although it does come out when you parent your own kids. You can hear your mother and father in your voice, it’s uncanny, it’s almost like you’ve been possessed. But, I do believe that my children have been parented in a different way because a) I’ve been working on my mental health for nearly 11 years, and b) I broke the cycle.”
I can confirm, at a similarly late stage, that excising a malignant element from your life, even or especially a family member, can make a significant difference to mental health and life.
“I think there is a path for them, but that path isn’t with me on it. If that changes, then great, but I can’t see it changing, and I’m not going to jeopardise my own inner peace for it. Absolutely.”
IN JANUARY’S PART TWO: Jason Williamson on knowing your limits and why disgust was still a valuable tool in making the new album.
The Demise Of Planet X is out January 16.
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