SLEAFORD MODS RULE
On 8th June 2013, at 8.39pm, Sonic Youth bassist and art-punk royalty Kim Gordon Tweeted three simple words to her followers: ‘Sleaford Mods rule.’ The seal of outsider approval was Retweeted 39 times and liked 18. Ever the early adopter, Gordon was a good two years ahead of the pack in anointing the pleasingly unpleasant Nottingham duo her patronage. Last year, Sleaford Mods became an unlikely mainstream concern.
Sleaford Mods are frequently dubbed ‘the angriest band in Britain’. On account of the song ‘Rupert Trousers’ on their last album Key Markets, a sneering invective on the Bullingdon political classes, they earned the title “the ‘Kill Boris’ band” in the Daily Mail, after a lyric suggested knocking the blustering London Mayor off one of his rented blue bicycles. “The self-styled ‘punk voice of the underclass features 50 different iterations of the ‘F’ and ‘C’ words,” the national barometer of Middle England counted, before suggesting that the BBC’s decision to televise their Glastonbury appearance would have serious consequences for the license fee renewal. Look, you don’t get that with Ed Sheeran. In a British musical climate demarked mostly by comfort and prestige, where our biggest rock outfit are still the nice boy public school palliative Coldplay, Sleaford Mods recall a time when music acted as an incisive agent of social change.