Noel Gallagher hates them. Evidently they’re doing something right, and there’s certainly no love lost. But why does Noel hate Sleaford Mods? Because they’re not rock ‘n’ roll. it’s true: Sleaford Mods’ exist as the antidote to the pretence, the theatre, the cliché and convention and all the baggage of rock ‘n’ roll. What they do is strip away all the crap and tell it straight, raw and unsanitised. Ironically, they’re the true voice of the working class that Oasis claim to represent. They swear a lot. But that doesn’t mean they’re inarticulate, and if anything, Sleaford Mods say more in a single two-minute stream of sociopolitical polemic than Oasis managed during the entire course of their career.
Credit to them for having Salford poet / spoken word performer JB Barrington support instead of some generic singer-songwriter or laptop DJ. And credit to JB for keeping the crowd’s attention. Sharp, funny, engaging and energetic, he’s the John Cooper Clarke for the new generation and proof positive that literature is the new rock ‘n’ roll.
Linear successors to The Fall, serving searing assaults over simple, repetitive backings, Sleaford Mods are essentially a high-octane spoken word act with beats, and also call to mind a hip-hop Whitehouse (minus the psychoanalysis, serial killers and S&M) in that they’re brutally confrontational and uncompromisingly confrontational in the way they batter the audience with a relentless barrage of bile.
As a reviewer, it’s almost impossible to write about Sleaford Mods without recourse to their splenetic vitriol, their wide-ranging cultural references and the sheer audacity of their minimalist stage show.
But then, it doesn’t seem entirely fitting to apply such hypotaxis to an act who take the stage and begin their set sneering into the mic, ‘bunch of cunts!’ It’s not an attack on the audience, but the opening line and refrain from ‘Bunch of Cunts’, from last year’s ‘Tiswas’ EP. But on the subject, their audience consists almost exclusively of fucking giants. And they all want to stand in front of me, seemingly the only person in the room who’s under six feet fucking three. Some of the twats think it’s a good idea to heckle or throw drinks, but Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn are unphased. It’s probably all in a day’s work and they do indeed divide long before they exit (which happens after two encores), with countless verses concluded with sneers and snarls of ‘bollocks’ and ‘fuck off!’.
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And whereas most laptop musicians will gurn and hover over their kit, Fearn doesn’t try to kid us that he’s doing anything more than pressing the ‘start’ button as he stands, grinning and nodding along to the simple drum and bass backing, beer in one hand, other hand in pocket of tracksuit bottoms.
The genius is the simplicity, and herein lies much of the Mods’ appeal and they scrape through the silage beneath the underbelly of modern Britain with tracks like ‘Jobseeker’, ‘Tiswas’, ‘Tied Up in Nottz’ and ‘Jolly Fucker’. Anaemic and anodyne it isn’t: mass-produced and neatly packaged it certainly is not. Sleaford Mods are surely one of the most important acts going right now. You can’t get much further from piss-weak indie, pop or Mumford and Sons than this. Don’t like it? Fuck off!
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