How Sleaford Mods’ one-man Wu-Tang Clan and bard of Broken Britain brought belligerence back, along with himself, from the brink of bitter irrelevance. “It’s my way of getting the last word in,” says Jason Williamson.

Interview by TED KESSLER • Portrait by TOM OLDHAM

Tom Oldham

SLEAFORD MODS’ JASON WILLIAMSON OPENS the door to his Nottingham home sporting a flourspeckled apron, accompanied by a welcoming waft of baking. He’s just conjured up a tray of cinnamonsweet mince pies.

“Paul Hollywood’s recipe,” he says, modestly crediting the portly star of TV’s The Great British Bake Off. “He’s a horrible twat, but he knows how to bake.”

Williamson lives in a handsome terraced house on a wide residential road, with the floodlights of Trent Bridge cricket stadium overlooking his garden. He resides here with his wife Claire, who also manages Sleaford Mods, and their two young children.

“Once, we’d be in the boozer, sneaking in the bogs for lunchtime lines,” he says ruefully, leading us into their smart kitchen extension. “I always imagined it’d be like that doing a MOJO interview, but now…” He places the mince pies on the table, dusting them with icing sugar. They are absolutely delicious.

Nobody is more surprised – nor happier – about Williamson’s changed circumstances over the last decade than the Sleaford Mods singer himself. In 2007 he was a long-serving member of the UK’s unskilled workforce, having spent decades toiling on zero-hour contracts in factories, warehouses, shops and kitchens since leaving school as a teenager. He was 37. His dream of fame, first as a wannabe actor and later as a musician who’d sung with several unheralded groups in the ’90s and ’00s, appeared long dashed. Then, in a flash of despairing inspiration, he hit upon the idea that would save his life: write what you know.

Working initially with an engineer who helped him loop sampled beats, Williamson poured all of his resentment and furious anguish into a series of self-released Sleaford Mods albums that showcased the profane poetry of his East Midlands rant-rap. But it wasn’t until he teamed up with Nottingham beat-maker Andrew Fearn for album number five, Wank, in 2012, that Sleaford Mods started to fashion something truly their own, solidifying their status as a duo with Austerity Dogs in 2013 and then on 2014’s critical breakthrough, Divide And Exit. Sketching a uniquely local and punky kind of spooked hip-hop, Sleaford Mods became the voice of a huge swathe of Britain that felt left behind, the canary in the pre-Brexit coalmine.

They struck a chord. Each of Sleaford Mods’ last three albums have found berths in the UK Top 10, subtly refining their sound with every release. Their twelfth and latest, UK Grim, is perhaps their most polished, a compelling portrait of Britain’s evolving identity crisis chiselled into taut electronic slabs of barbed melody and rhythm. It’s a lesson in controlled fury.

“Personally, I’ve never been happier,” says Williamson, who adds it’s no coincidence he’s been sober for seven years. “But everyone tells me I sound really angry. It’s hard not to, living on this melting tyre of depression.”

He raises a pie to his lips, then pauses. “What have you got for me, then?”

When you were growing up in Grantham, you wanted to be famous didn’t you?

Big time. I saw how people lived in films and thought I’d like my life to be like that, which obviously was a really bad miscalculation. They’re films. There’s a script. It’s not life. I just wanted to escape. I don’t know if that was because of the dreariness of small-town life, but I remember experiencing feelings of extreme boredom from six. You slip into your own fantasy world. I think because my parents were splitting up I felt alienated from the family unit, moving into a different environment with my stepfather who was a completely different person to my dad.