Sleaford Mods: ‘You got the impression you’re even more out on your own’

Spare Ribs was recorded in July 2020 as the UK was emerging from its first Covid lockdown, and resentment was simmering around the country for the Government’s handling of the pandemic.

Never one to skirt current affairs, vocalist Jason Williamson says “about three quarters” of the album’s lyrics were then fresh off the page.

“Some of the songs centre on it – Top Room, Out There. A lot of the songs talked about the here and now, but those two songs especially talked about the reaction to lockdown and the feelings that it got,” he says.

“Like every record we do, it’s pretty much hot off the press in whatever, so regardless of the pandemic, the way the world was or is currently, there’s enough there to be going on with.”

After more than a decade of Conservative rule, the 49-year-old, who voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum, admits to feeling a sense of despair about the state of Brexit Britain. “But there’s a little bit of relief,” he adds.

“Someone once said about a shark attack, it wasn’t actual biting or the contact with the fish that did that, it was the waiting for it, it was knowing it was coming, and I think that’s the same with Brexit. It’s been this anticipation which is largely been really bleak, and I think with the outcome, at least then there might be some kind of transparency as to where we stand.”

As for the impact of the pandemic and a recurring cycle of lockdowns, Williamson says he can see their emotional toll “just in the way people are” in his home city, Nottingham.

“Everyone’s in a bad mood,” he says. “Everyone’s kicking off with each other online and out in the streets it’s quite tense.

“Even around here,” he says, glancing through his window, “which is a kind of sleepy, aspirational, middle-class area, you still feel that. There’s a just a blanket of confusion and frustration, misinformation and blame. I think they’re the main conductors really.”

The seeming expendability of human life is a prominent theme in Spare Ribs. “You just got that impression that we are just thrown about, aren’t we?” Williamson says. “We’re at the mercy of the financial system, obviously – we all know this – but even more so when it comes to a disaster or a crisis which isn’t fabricated. You got the impression you’re even more out on your own, it’s basically sink or swim.”

The song Shortcummings directly addresses the shadowy role in government of the Prime Minister’s former special adviser, Dominic Cummings. Its lyrics, however, pre-date Cummings’ infamous trip to County Durham during the first lockdown.

“He was a fixture from the election campaign onwards,” Williamson says. “He’d been bombing about as Michael Gove’s assistant etcetera, so he was there. It was just the arrogance that seeped through when the election campaign was going on, you’d get a couple of reporters trying to interview him and he was obviously very remote and aloof and aggressive. It wasn’t good, you could still get a good idea of this guy, so I started to think about what he was and what he stood for, I tried to read up on some of the notes he had written on his blog. It’s just the same old same old, isn’t it?”

Amid the politics, though, there’s also a distinctly more personal song – Mork and Mindy, which reflects on Williamson’s upbringing on a working-class housing estate. The singer says he had been mentally transported back to his youth after getting a back injury. “That was related to a condition I was born with – a rare form of spina bifida – and an operation I had when I was about 13 to try and rectify it,” he says. “It was a success, but that area of my back is quite sensitive and so when I sustained the injury over the summer, it took me back to being a kid again, it got me thinking about all of those things. So my childhood memories surrounding it started to seep into the songs a lot more.

“It’s always been there – the kind of imagery, the kids’ programmes, food related to being a kid – all of that has always been there, but I started to think about it a little bit more with this album, and I think that’s present in songs like Fish Cakes and Mork and Mindy especially.”

He doesn’t however see direct parallels between his 80s childhood and now. “I’ve got kids now but you’re also forever comparing your childhood with theirs,” he says. “You know what it’s like now to have two vulnerable little kids who have only got you as their protection, so that also played a part in it.

“As regards the parallels, you see your parents in yourself, you can’t help it. So when you are either telling your kids off or if you’re just merely talking to them, you can feel your mother and your father in you, there’s that as well, so I suppose all of that was a bit of a hot pot.”

Lockdown, he says, made him more reflective as a writer. He is unsure if that will continue, but concedes: “As I get older I think regardless of a lockdown, you tend to feel more isolated because you are not that young whippersnapper out the back. A lot of modern culture is centred around youthfulness, the idea of being mobile and young, so that’s something that will probably re-emerge.”

The video for Mork and Mindy was directed by Ben Wheatley, in whose film Rebecca Williamson also appeared. The cameo, the singer says, came about because Wheatley is a fan of the band. “Ben just asked me if I wanted to do it and I said yes straight away. I then popped the question of him directing the Mork and Mindy video afterwards.”

He says he would “like to do more” acting. “I’ve been trying to audition for parts but it’s so hard, you never get them, but I like that. ‘OK, I’ll try harder next time’.”

Billy Nomates and Amy Taylor of the Australian punk band Amyl and the Sniffers make guest appearances on this record. Williamson says it felt important to include women’s voices. “We wanted to have a female presence in it,” he says. “As a band, we’ve always tried to include more women in whatever we do, whether that is support acts or whatever. I think it’s important to try and break the mould of just referring to male acts all the time or listening to male-orientated music. I’m trying now to break out of that; it’s working a little bit, definitely.”

Having recently performed on US television, it seems Sleaford Mods are finally starting to make an impression in the States – almost 30 years after Williamson attempted to form a band on the West Coast. “It’s been hard with America because you’ve got to concentrate on it,” he says. “There’s no point in touring the whole place if nobody’s going to pick up on you. You need PR, someone out their fronting it, and you need good tunes. I think the tunes have got better perhaps for that market, but God knows. We’re trying our hardest to make some kind of indentation there, without a doubt.”

A high profile endorsement from Robbie Williams might help the cause. Williamson says the pair “got talking” a while back. “He’s a nice bloke, I think he’s just interested in music,” he says. “What can you say? He does what he does, it’s not what I’d do, but the thing you start to learn in this business is that not everybody is the person you think they are. He’s a good bloke, really, so it’s nice to have that kind of support.”

To fill time during lockdown Williamson has been doing a series of humorous interviews on his YouTube channel. “Anything to make people laugh,” he says. “We do another thing called Baking Daddy which is me acting overly sexual and baking all these basic cakes – again that’s brilliant, that’s got a lot more people into it. It’s just trying to think of other ways to promote records when it come to the time when you’re releasing something. Especially within this lockdown era, people need cheering up, don’t they?”

Spare Ribs is out on Friday, January 15. www.sleafordmods.com