Within minutes of me meeting Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn on the streets of Nottingham, a man walks past and screams, “You’re a paedo!” into his phone before slamming it onto the pavement and running off. It feels like a scene from a Sleaford Mods song. Williamson and Fearn formed Sleaford Mods in 2013 after years of thwarted ambitions, and they did it by combining Williamson’s surrealistic kitchen sink monologues, like an episode of Coronation Street written by Samuel Beckett, with Fearn’s harsh electronic loops, stripping the artistic process to its bare bones in the process.
“This is your classic hippy shop,” says Fearn, 54, as we pass a place called Ice Nine that sells crystals, bongs and other accessories to the alternative lifestyle. “You would come to a place like this if you didn’t fit in. Nottingham was a melting pot where everyone got along, as long as you weren’t a ‘trendy’.”
Sleaford Mods’ approach of peeling back the layers of British life to see what festering wound lies underneath certainly wouldn’t go down well with the average trendy, but it has proved a surprise success: their unlikely formula of Williamson unleashing furious monologues while Fearn hits the space bar of a laptop and shuffles about a bit has filled arenas and led to Top Ten albums. Now comes The Demise of Planet X, which features among its guests the actress Gwendoline Christie, screaming at the top of her voice on a song called The Good Life. I’ve come to Sleaford Mods’ home town to understand how this strange brew was formed.
“This is Jamcafé,” Williamson says, pointing to a tiny bar on Heathcoat Street. Around the corner is the 10,000-capacity Motorpoint Arena, which the duo filled in 2021. “In 2006 the Jamcafé was one of the only places that would have me perform with a backing track. That was a few years before I got a job as a housing officer for Beeston council.”
“I remember coming here to see Jason. He finished the last song, threw the microphone in the air, and marched off down the street,” says Fearn, who spent years making electronic music on his own while doing odd jobs, including a stint of cold-calling people to sell them fitness membership discounts. “It all went from there.”
Most bands find success in their mid-twenties. Williamson and Fearn were stuck in the daily grind until well into their forties. “We were always ambitious,” Williamson says as we continue our tour. “Even when there was no sign that we would ever make it.”
Sleaford Mods in Abbey Road Studios with actor Gwendoline Christie — whose laugh opens the new album
KI PRICE
“It’s a case of believing in yourself and not worrying what anyone thinks,” adds Fearn, the more zen-like of the two. “We were inspired by the noise scene in Nottingham, which wasn’t made for the wider world. One guy used to make 15 minutes of pure noise while handing out plastic bags.”
Williamson was also inspired by a less obscure source: television talent shows. “These kids would come on The X Factor and do Angels by Robbie Williams and there was no band, just the music coming through a speaker. And I thought: let’s do that. I was sick of being in bands, sick of the guitarist going off to get his car fixed halfway through the rehearsal, so when I met Andrew it was like meeting Obi-Wan Kenobi in the desert: a revelation.”
Williamson wrote one Sleaford Mods classic, Jobseeker, during his lunch break at a frozen chicken factory. Another, Tied Up In Nottz, finds him raging about popular brands of breakfast cereal. “I just knew I couldn’t do the same old Britpop thing,” he says of the subject matter. “I remember hearing the Stereophonics doing Handbags and Gladrags and thinking: this is the end. That realisation, combined with influences from the Wu-Tang Clan and the Streets, listening to people in pubs, and making music on a sofa with a laptop felt so much more modern than some bloke with an Epiphone guitar, singing about the sunshine.”
Sleaford Mods’ real trick has been to take the formula and run with it, so much so that famous actresses are now queueing up to work with them. How did Christie come on board? “She followed us on Instagram,” Williamson says. “She’s from a different world.”
“She’s jet-setting all over the place, but when she came and spent a day in the studio she was totally into it,” Fearn adds. “I binge-watched Game of Thrones and thought: who the hell is this? She’s captivating.”
“My laugh opens the new album,” Christie confirms of her part on The Demise of Planet X. “In my most listless moments an impossible fantasy of mine was to be on a Sleaford Mods record, so few things have made me happier.”
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Christie was in Romania, filming the Netflix show Wednesday, when Russia invaded Ukraine. “It was terrifying, even just to be so geographically close, but listening to Sleaford Mods got me up in the morning, made me able to smile. They inspired me to take my life more seriously and, conversely, more lightly. These men are a blast.”
That’s an aspect of Sleaford Mods that often gets lost: the humour. The title track of The Demise of Planet X may be a state-of-the nation rant, but it is set to the theme tune of The Magic Roundabout. “Gina’s going to spread it round the shops that I’ve got a wiener,” Williamson frets on Gina Was, a childhood memory of a local girl pulling down his trousers and mocking the size of his genitalia. It is both painful and absurd.
“That’s always been important: to say something meaningful,” Williamson says as we come into a crowded café, where half the clientele appear to know who he is. “You get all these wankers giving it the big one on social media, but their music is bubblegum bullshit. Why aren’t they documenting the times?”
Williamson: “When I met Andrew it was like meeting Obi-Wan Kenobi in the desert: a revelation”
JIM DYSON/GETTY IMAGES
As Sleaford Mods do on Flood the Zone, a portrait of Trump’s excesses set to a cheery fairground melody, and on Megaton, an overview of fashionable attitudes to modern warfare. “Why is no one talking about Ukraine any more? It’s weird,” Williamson says. “Megaton is about my fatigue with ‘I know better than you’ politics, calling people gammons and so on. There is a new generation who may have good intentions, but they’re using [global politics] as a look on social media. I realised it after Madrid, when I was getting messages that were horrible, completely unhinged.”
He’s talking about a concert in November 2023, which Williamson cut short after an audience member kept throwing a Palestinian flag on stage. “I said, I don’t know enough about it, I don’t want to centre myself in it, and after that we had an onslaught. I thought: hold on, you were down the pub six months ago and now you’re an expert [in Middle Eastern politics]. One guy was trolling me from a homeless shelter. It bothered me, but at the same time it was a taste of my own medicine.”
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Williamson, once a witty if overly scabrous social media enthusiast, has left all that behind. “It used to be playful. But now people are aiming for the cancellation, waiting for their enemy to be shut down and have their careers ended. It is quite dark.”
Arguably, it doesn’t work for Williamson to be taking a pop at successful musicians now that he’s one himself. “True. Back in the day, when I was slagging off Kasabian, I was really angry at their diluted, Easy Rider approach to indie rock. No disrespect to Kasabian or anything …”
Fearn, left: “We were inspired by the noise scene in Nottingham”
ANDREW FOX FOR THE TIMES
Perish the thought. “But I was no one back then and now I’m quite famous,” he continues. “I still get angry. I get angry at bands who want to look good in photographs rather than show the reality. But Claire, my wife and our manager, told me I had to stop slagging everyone off because it was getting boring. That’s what The Good Life is about.”
These days, when he’s not on tour, Fearn leads a quiet life in Burton-on-Trent. Williamson lives in Nottingham with his wife and children, and can afford to indulge a love of Japanese casual wear. He has since accepted that his tendency to attack other bands in public — the Bristol punks Idles got it in the neck, leading their singer Joe Talbot to contact Sleaford Mods and ask what their problem was — is down to insecurity.
“I’ve done therapy. It goes back to childhood, of not feeling seen …”
He thinks about it for a while.
“But there’s still a part of me that really f***ing hates all the other bands.”
The Demise of Planet X by Sleaford Mods (Rough Trade) is out on Jan 16