Two oikish 40-somethings with a laptop shouldn’t be the most (only?) vibrant force in white English music, but this is Brexit Britain. Normal rules stopped applying ages ago. And thank God we do have Williamson and Fearn and their grimy, spit-flinging, punk-rap disaffection, because England’s musical glory has gone AWOL along with its lost political marbles. People continue to bury their heads in a musical desert of gap yah strummers and plummy voiced divas to escape the socio-economic drought others of that ilk have visited on them. But James Bay and Ellie Goulding will not save us from the apocalypse. Nor might Sleaford Mods, but at least with them, we’ll go down with our eyes open.
Any notion that the Mods are one trick ponies whose asteroidal musical impact is set to dissipate is dispelled by the barrage of new material on show tonight. The next album ought to be a stonker. The Mods have traded a fraction of their edge for some rounder, groovier hooks. It’s marginally less brutal, but for a big pay-off. Some new tracks are almost melodic. The sound of cicadas can be heard on one. Sleaford Mods go Club Tropicana.
There’s still no want of lyrical targets either. Brilliantly, they take a sharp swipe at pension-pilfering yacht-botherer Phillip Green in new track BHS. Elsewhere the disillusionment is more generic, but no less grippingly nihilistic, as with I Can Tell off the new EP: ‘I just hope everything gets pulled apart and pushed, pulled apart and bust’. It’s difficult to get the full gob-and-sweat-drenched value out of this in a cavern like the ABC, and to get maximum enjoyment out of Fearn’s half-arsed lager-in-hand bopalong – the greatest on-stage schtick since Bez – you need the sticky carpet, flashing fruity and dubious odours of a backstreet boozer. But you can’t have everything, I suppose.
The “Boris on a bike” line from Face to Faces gets enthusiastically cheered, but with tonight’s focus on the new, it’s the encore before the crowd get thrown the really juicy bones. ‘Twenty years and I still can’t do a fucking encore,’ says Williamson, after not really staying off stage long enough for the crowd to do the clamouring thing. Jobseeker, Tied Up In Nottz and Tweet Tweet Tweet might be an unlikely set of anthemic closers by normal standards, but in these unlikely times, they are a proper fucking encore.
Future generations (if there are any) will want a musical record of our times, and Sleaford Mods will be it, the only band chronicling the car crash that is our country, and doing so as fellow passengers, not rubber-necking observers. It’s not pretty. Life’s not pretty.