Grammar Wanker: Sleaford Mods 2007‑2014 by Jason Williamson – review
Drug comedowns and fist fights – an angry and uncompromising collection of lyrics. Who else in modern English music is doing anything quite like this?
• This article contains language some readers may find offensive
Contrary to what you may have heard, rock music is not quite dead. Its foreground is often dominated by people of pensionable age, hot new acts often arrive when they are in their mid-30s – or even older – and musicians are no longer expected to reflect the social and political currents of their age. But there are arguably more of them around than ever before, and a lot of them are very artistically accomplished. Last month, for example, I bought the new album by a talented group from Sweden called the Amazing – which, like so much modern rock, offers an amorphous air of yearning, redemption, and sadness, while coming very close to meaning nothing at all. But in that record, and others, I have learned to quite like the sense of vacancy. Indeed, after years of expecting guitar-toting herberts to have read Marx and have something to say about the developing world, dropping those expectations feels surprisingly liberating.
And yet, and yet. 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?
To call Sleaford Mods “rock” may seem misplaced: they do not use guitars, and their live performances are built around a solitary laptop. But their 40-something lyricist and ranter Jason Williamson is the product of a rock background, and their debt to punk, in particular, is obvious. What’s more, the bracingly sparse arrangements over which he spits out his words – programmed drums, bass and not much more, composed by his creative partner Andrew Fearn – sometimes sound like the basis of rock’s last stand: as if the only way it can possibly leave behind its mountain of baggage is by being stripped down to its merest essence.
Grammar Wanker, published before Christmas in a limited edition of 500 copies but now granted a “standard hardback” edition, puts the focus on Williamson’s words, and the world they portray. On close inspection, these 66 sets of lyrics are not really works of protest. For a start, many of them are funny. Second, for all that there is the occasional mention of politics, they deal in something different: a relentless social realism in which there is an absence of value judgments and any alternatives being proposed.
A little later, with echoes of their fellow East Midlander Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night & Sunday Morning, there comes this: “That’s the trouble with people like you and me / we get stressed out about pallets and fucking nothingness /cos that’s all we got / we walk around all our fucking lives telling bosses / and anyone else to fuck off /Fistfight after fistfight after fight / until all we got left is a forty minute break / cos everybody’s too scared to tell us /we’re only allowed twenty.”
There is similar sadness in the words that seem to shine a light on Williamson’s own thoughts, often by describing drug comedowns: “Impending angina destinies / the regret of 14 years wasted / I cry my fucking eyes out / cos yesterday, I really miss my bastard yesterdays.” More broadly, he is good at evoking the condition of a generation that will not give up the chemical recklessness it discovered in the late 1980s and early 90s, something examined in a very bleak piece titled “Graham”: “Loads of old people necking pills / ecstasy has truly taken its toll on some of these faces / the fucking eyes have hills.” He also repeatedly nails the sense of popular culture being reduced to endless retrofied options that always come with the tang of disappointment: “I fuckin’ hate Northern Soul / it’s like Motown’s on the dole.”
Williamson’s latest work differs from the earlier stuff in the book in that it is more clipped and chaotic (the pieces in the last quarter often read a bit like cut-ups), sometimes sacrificing narrative in favour of mood and a sense of place. As with a lot of printed lyrics, his most recent pieces tend to prove that reproduction on the page is often beside the point: the best way to absorb this stuff is to play it loud, and use the written word to keep up. But every now and again, as in “Tied Up in Nottz”, the words work as poetry: “The smell of piss is so strong it smells like decent bacon / Kevin’s getting footloose on the overspill / under the piss-station / two pints destroyer / on the cobbled floors / no amount of whatever is gunna / chirp the chip up.”
It sounds like a flash of the modern English condition, but that is only half the point. To watch Williamson deliver these lyrics on stage is to not only get a sense of 21st-century life, but people whose drive to say something about it sets them apart from 99% of modern musicians. To go back into the mists of rock history, the sensibility that defines Grammar Wanker is redolent of what Tony Wilson famously said about Joy Division, complete with the obligatory swear word: “Every other band was on stage because they wanted to be rock stars. This band was on stage because they had no fucking choice.”
• Grammar Wanker is published by Bracketpress.
And yet, and yet. 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?
To call Sleaford Mods “rock” may seem misplaced: they do not use guitars, and their live performances are built around a solitary laptop. But their 40-something lyricist and ranter Jason Williamson is the product of a rock background, and their debt to punk, in particular, is obvious. What’s more, the bracingly sparse arrangements over which he spits out his words – programmed drums, bass and not much more, composed by his creative partner Andrew Fearn – sometimes sound like the basis of rock’s last stand: as if the only way it can possibly leave behind its mountain of baggage is by being stripped down to its merest essence.
Grammar Wanker, published before Christmas in a limited edition of 500 copies but now granted a “standard hardback” edition, puts the focus on Williamson’s words, and the world they portray. On close inspection, these 66 sets of lyrics are not really works of protest. For a start, many of them are funny. Second, for all that there is the occasional mention of politics, they deal in something different: a relentless social realism in which there is an absence of value judgments and any alternatives being proposed.
A little later, with echoes of their fellow East Midlander Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night & Sunday Morning, there comes this: “That’s the trouble with people like you and me / we get stressed out about pallets and fucking nothingness /cos that’s all we got / we walk around all our fucking lives telling bosses / and anyone else to fuck off /Fistfight after fistfight after fight / until all we got left is a forty minute break / cos everybody’s too scared to tell us /we’re only allowed twenty.”
There is similar sadness in the words that seem to shine a light on Williamson’s own thoughts, often by describing drug comedowns: “Impending angina destinies / the regret of 14 years wasted / I cry my fucking eyes out / cos yesterday, I really miss my bastard yesterdays.” More broadly, he is good at evoking the condition of a generation that will not give up the chemical recklessness it discovered in the late 1980s and early 90s, something examined in a very bleak piece titled “Graham”: “Loads of old people necking pills / ecstasy has truly taken its toll on some of these faces / the fucking eyes have hills.” He also repeatedly nails the sense of popular culture being reduced to endless retrofied options that always come with the tang of disappointment: “I fuckin’ hate Northern Soul / it’s like Motown’s on the dole.”
Williamson’s latest work differs from the earlier stuff in the book in that it is more clipped and chaotic (the pieces in the last quarter often read a bit like cut-ups), sometimes sacrificing narrative in favour of mood and a sense of place. As with a lot of printed lyrics, his most recent pieces tend to prove that reproduction on the page is often beside the point: the best way to absorb this stuff is to play it loud, and use the written word to keep up. But every now and again, as in “Tied Up in Nottz”, the words work as poetry: “The smell of piss is so strong it smells like decent bacon / Kevin’s getting footloose on the overspill / under the piss-station / two pints destroyer / on the cobbled floors / no amount of whatever is gunna / chirp the chip up.”
It sounds like a flash of the modern English condition, but that is only half the point. To watch Williamson deliver these lyrics on stage is to not only get a sense of 21st-century life, but people whose drive to say something about it sets them apart from 99% of modern musicians. To go back into the mists of rock history, the sensibility that defines Grammar Wanker is redolent of what Tony Wilson famously said about Joy Division, complete with the obligatory swear word: “Every other band was on stage because they wanted to be rock stars. This band was on stage because they had no fucking choice.”
• Grammar Wanker is published by Bracketpress.
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