HATE’S TOO EASY SAY SLEAFORD MODS, BUT DISGUST? WE CAN WORK WITH THAT part two
- Bernard Zuel
- 8 hours ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 7 minutes ago
AS HE SURVEYED THE LAND ahead with the imminent release of The Demise Of Planet X, the eighth album from his low-tech/high-impact/rock-skewed-by-electronics two-man band, Sleaford Mods, lyricist/vocalist Jason Williamson knew he had not avoided the personal. Not in this album, not in what had come before.
It was there in the family dynamics of his childhood, of his adulthood and his parenthood. It was there in the long-lived responses to his early exposure to class insecurity and social immobility that fuelled and at the same time stymied his potential as an actor, a musician, and, frankly, a man.
And it careened through his songs just as much as the life which, as he described in the first part of this interview, saw him as “part of a misery circle where I would feed the trauma, where I would be the rescuer, and where I would be the enabler”.
Even so, neither we nor the Nottingham-based Williamson can ignore – or avoid being smacked in the face by - that the personal for him and Mods partner, instrumentalist/noisemaker/producer Andrew Fearn, has made its tortuous path through a particular devolution of Britain. A Britain of crumbling infrastructure and social support, rising opportunism and racism, and a disappearing commitment to the work of government that this one-time benefits adviser saw up close. Drop in on any track on the previous seven albums and you’d know it.
Is the problem for a songwriter like him that there are too many targets, too many obvious ones, too many that don’t ever seem to change, so that he has to think ‘do I want to go there again? What do I have to add?’ now?
“I think there is a lot of all of that in a lot of things, but whatever stimulus comes up on the landscape, whether it be political, whether it will be narratives around war in whatever country, or more importantly how this affects people around you, how they become and what they say I find more interesting than the actual causes of these horrible events,” says Williamson. “So for instance, how much do you go on about Donald Trump? We know Donald Trump is not a very nice guy and for a while I didn’t think I hated him, but I’m starting to think that I extremely dislike him. Will that go to hate? I don’t know.”
What’s wrong with hating him though? Williamson would hardly be alone.
“Hate’s a really severe word: hatred is what you would attach to something personal. Donald Trump has not personally offended me but obviously he is destroying people’s lives at a massive rate and he doesn’t care,” he says. “So yes there is this huge dislike for him but this figure is talked about and analysed and blah blah blah and there’s nothing wrong with saying something about that but it’s got to be fucking good. It’s got to be something that you feel rather than just going on about he’s racist or whatever.”
Looking for something more useful than hating something, is disgust a valuable tool?
“I think disgust is, yeah. But again, I don’t even know if it’s disgust, but it probably is actually. Disappointment? Disgust would probably be the more, harder, extreme end of it. But I’m pretty much disgusted by a lot of things: just by normal people’s attitudes more than anything,” explains Williamson. “But this goes into this idea that a lot of The Demise Of Planet X kinda discusses, the fact that people are just arguing amongst themselves.”
He adds wryly: “Here is me explaining to you that I find it better to criticise those around me than the actual perpetrators. Maybe I’m a victim of my own judgements then.”
Despite many assumptions about his willingness to engage at a visceral level, whether it be on Gaza, Ukraine or feuds with other bands, not to mention the assumption that abrasiveness is the duo’s default setting sonically and musically, Williamson has said that one of the things that is helpful for him in dealing with all this shit, as a regular human, is withdrawing from some of those combative but ultimately pointless interactions.
“Well it’s kind of not [helpful] in a lot of respects because you get a lot of criticism for it. But on the other hand, yes, it has: this is how I make sense of it,” he says. “A friend of mine said the other day, which was a good point, a lot of people have just got very specific opinions at the minute. That kind of really does objectify it, pacifies it, makes it something that I can agree with, but at the same time what pulls you in is this squabble between you and other people isn’t it?
“It’s like, well I’m going to sit back because I can’t make sense of this and there isn’t a lot I can do about it, and if I can make complete sense of it, this isn’t going to be something that you are going to want to listen to.”
And there’s diminishing returns from this in any case, surely.
“I’m sitting back and these people then come in at you and you spend most of the week just hating these people. And it goes back to this word hate, and you do literally hate them. It goes from disgust to hatred to complete and utter abandonment of the idea of them in your life.”
Is humour – an under-recognised element of their songs – an antidote, or at least a balancing, even flavouring of it?
“Yeah, it is. It keeps you from totally drowning,” he says, chuckling as he adds “It keeps you from totally going up your own arse I think. It’s a leveller, humour, even if no one finds it funny apart from you. Which a lot of the time that’s true because a lot of what I sing about is in code that’s almost impossible to decipher.
"The only person who really knows [he laughs] what I’m on about is me. But that really does help. It humanises the subject, it also humanises the general energy, and also yourself I think, in the eyes of yourself.”
Sometimes I think not knowing specifically what he’s talking about in a song helps, makes it funnier.
“I never had a problem with that with the Wu-Tang Clan, especially, or most rappers. Like, right from the off: LL Cool J singing about going back to Cali. Where the fuck, who’s Cali?,” Williamson says. “But for some reason you kind of got it, you related to it. So it has never been an issue for me but I was extremely surprised that it caught on [with Sleaford Mods], that it went somewhere.”
The humour isn’t just in the words, but in the music as well. On the new album, the Gina Was cracks me up with its concoction of downtown New York disco set up alongside a Saturday night chippie and kebab shop, while the slinkiness of Don Draper makes me laugh even before they drop in a Guns ‘n’ Roses reference.
Williamson laughs wheezily at this. “Yes, the music, and I am not being insulting towards Andrew, the music is so shit, it’s just completely shit. And we lifted it from somewhere, rejigged it – I won’t say who because we’ll probably get in trouble – and it was so naff, obvious, cheesy hip-hop shit that’s very old and people have used it time and time again. But it was so shit that it had to be used.
“I think what appeals to me a lot of the time is the un-attractiveness of the music,” he says. “And again I’m not saying that Andrew is crap but he’s got such a genius way of conjuring up music that nobody else is doing, that nobody else would think about doing, but really works.”
The shock sometimes isn’t in the force, it is in the juxtaposition of something ridiculous with something great and something brilliant with something stupid.
“Yeah, it struck me from very early on a compromise is a beautiful thing, or it can be, and this ego – yes we’ve got egos me and Andrew, we are musicians – we kind of put them behind us when we work with each other.”
How did they work musically this time, this far into that partnership? Has there been a shift in the way they contribute ideas to each other?
“Yeah. What happened this time around was we had done about 16 songs in January [2025], from 22 demos I had been working on and five of those eventually made the album. But around that period I was convinced we didn’t have anything so I sent Andrew a few crude acoustic ideas I’d done on the voice recorder on my phone and I just said to him can you turn these into songs,” Williamson says. “He sent me backing tracks and they were brilliant. Then we went into Abbey Road at the start of March and he started to translate some of the other acoustic ideas off the cuff, just in the studio with loads of live instruments, to the point where it almost sounds quite bright.
“Elitist G.O.A.T [which features the decidedly un-Sleaford delicate sound of New Zealander Aldous Harding] is a very colourful song, a real switch for us.”
In terms of contrasting their contributions, how much comes down to the way Fearn understands where’s Williamson’s head is at?
“About 60% I would say, definitely. He knows what I like and he will tailor things in a way that kinda tries to meet that almost. It’s not a total understanding but we’ve also got a very similar aesthetic,” he says. “I think why people think we are post-punk is because of what Andrew brought to its right from the off, this ‘80s sensibility. But we’ve got another track that we haven’t yet released that sounds like The Smiths, guitar wise, and the basslines that he makes obviously do echo that first wave postpunk in the ‘80s.”
One clear contrast on the album of the other voices that have been brought in, something that the pair have done more and more in recent albums. The highest profile contribution is from the actor Gwendoline Christie who is a riot, almost literally, against the warmth of soul/punk vocal duo Big Special in the first single, The Good Life. But Harding [real name Hannah] on Elitist G.O.A.T. is the album’s secret sauce. It is so disarming and shifts the way we interact with the rest of the record.
“Hmm,” he says. “At first I thought it was so harsh [a contrast] it didn’t work, but it does. It’s almost like some bizarre Stereolab type of thing. There could have been nobody else to sing that part apart from her. What it needed was that real silky, soft vocal. I tried it myself and it just didn’t work. For me it’s the best track on there, I’m really proud of that one.”
What is it he looks for in a guest artist, be it Christie or Harding or visual artist Sue Tompkins, who nimbly wanders through No Touch? Is it as simple as someone who can do something he can’t do?
“Yes, that’s it, because the idea is mostly already written. If I can’t sing it, which most of the time I can’t, I know somebody that can. Which is what I really like about collaborations. I’m not scared anymore to reach out to people I don’t know. I’m not scared anymore to say to people, look it’s already written, would you mind? The collaborations on this album seem to me to be like missing strands on the DNA thread. They are just instruments almost.”
It’s interesting that Williamson says he doesn’t feel insecure anymore about asking people to contribute even if he doesn’t know them, because people – whether it’s Damon Albarn, Christie and Robert Downey Jr, or Iggy Pop and, I kid you not, Keith Urban – have been coming out of the woodwork for some years now, some praising them and others putting their hands up and saying please choose me to collaborate.
“Which is really nice isn’t it?,” he says. “I’m kinda very downbeat on myself a lot of the time, and downbeat on Sleaford Mods and thinking that we are not this attractive prospect anymore. This is the eighth album, and I know it rubs a lot of people the wrong way in this country, and you can understand why to a certain degree. But it is always nice when you get people to really jump into the idea.”
The Demise Of Planet X is out January 16.
READ MORE