SLEAFORDS ARE DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES

Most people attend the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival with high expectations. Which is, objectively speaking, wild verging on nuts.

Coachella takes place in a desert. Do people not have a working understanding of geography? Have they not seen Chinatown? For something not evil to happen to you once you willingly follow a mob into the wastelands outside of Palm Springs takes a minor miracle. Even Moses had the benefit of a recipe for low-sodium saltines, and the self-esteem that comes with successfully parting a sea, before he tried his hand at putting on a multi-weekend desert festival. Still, despite all such logic, hope springs like water dragged kicking and screaming from the ground, to the tune of 90.4 million gallons a day, to sate the thirst of the more than 120 golf courses in the valley where the festival is held. In turn, Coachella, year after year, draws a veritable hootenanny of Instagram influencees, semipro vapers, token gestures to millennial/Xer indie nostalgia, and 1,001 rappers suckered by Big Guitar into believing that a live band equals authenticity. In the midst of this cross-generational migration, a Corn Dogs Gone Wild kiosk stands, squat and sturdy, like an American Lady Liberty, welcoming all who have $549-$l,609 and the drive to watch YUNGBLUD (pronounced “Young Blood”) perform “I Think I’m Okay” at dusk. Ellis Island never saw the likes of these dreamers.

On the other side of this equation is Sleaford Mods, with your intrepid CREEM reporter in tow, playing Coachella for the first time, chasing their own dreams, and knowing that you can wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which one fills up first. And there’s a market for either.

Sleaford Mods expect a bad time like it’s their job, which it is. A newly lucrative one at that. Nice work if you can get it. And they have, reaching No. 3 on the U.K. pop charts with the release of UK Grim, the duo’s 12th studio album. Which, if you’ve heard a note of the band, is absurd. Or rather it would have been absurd, if the past few years hadn’t seen a hundred thousand speak-singing post-punk bands lousing up the U.K. charts, each one crawling through the Overton window that Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn have smashed.

It should be noted, right off the bat, that the impetus for this profile did not come from the highest of human impulses, either. In fact, the intention was downright petty. When Sleaford Mods announced that they’d be playing Coachella, the CREEM offices were filled with a sour sense of possibility. The English duo, who—since their 2013 album Austerity Dogs—have made their name as two of the sharpest (in both the “smart” and “well suited for cutting” sense) elbows in show business, playing the third most famous (after Glastonbury and Woodstock) festival in the world? The festival that was, on its face, the fake indie embodiment of everything the band had been railing against for more than a decade? How terrible! How delicious! How perfect, in a fashion! Add to that mix a middle-aged caricature of grumpy contrarianism (this writer)? It seemed too good to be true, hopefully. What—with three daffy misanthropes in a sea of weaponized Good Vibes Only—could go right? So, drunk on ill will and the sick urge to never let anyone wearing a shiny backpack Enjoy Things, the CREEM editors took out a second mortgage on their homes and booked this writer two nights in the cheapest hotel in Indio, California, they could find. Considering how much money purchasing the rights to the Grinch’s life story had made the Dr. Seuss estate, $599 a night seemed like a bargain. Of course, if any of us on staff had bothered to finish How the Grinch Stole Christmas, we’d have realized the fatal flaw in the plan. Hearts do, occasionally, grow bigger.

A week before Coachella, Sleaford Mods played Webster Hall, one of the last clubs standing on the island of Manhattan. In an indication of some of Sleaford Mods’ less discussed aspects, Jason Williamson was practically giddy at the idea of playing the same venue that (when it was the Ritz) Guns N’ Roses played. In what seemed like both a good sign and an apt reception for the second of a string of particularly strong recent albums, the crowd was more boisterous and less aggressively middleaged than the last time the Mods had played the city. Not that the crowd was young per se, or that I was on whatever young end of the spectrum was present in the crowd. I ran into a member of Interpol outside the venue and we had a nice conversation about how much we missed our respective dead parents. Inside I was joined by an old high school friend who’d never heard Sleaford Mods. He proclaimed them “quite good!” Considering he’d recently been released from a foreign prison, he wasn’t necessarily a discerning judge. But he’d also seen Agnostic Front at the same venue when he was 13, so it’s not like he was operating from no standards at all. And he was correct. Williamson and Fearn were quite good. They’ve, in recent years, found a sweet spot in their live performance, where they goof off and preen, with Jason in designer shorts, while maintaining the sense of frustrated bile that the songs require to carry over. After the show, my friend and I went backstage, where Williamson greeted us in a towel and Fearn greeted us in his deathless fit of hat, beard, and the coziest of poolside casualwear.

When I first met the band nearly a decade ago, I was a bit frightened of them. Partially out of my own projections (I thought they were former crust punks who’d grown contemptuous of a scene grown soft), and partially because, at that time, they both drank a lot, Jason at least was still doing cocaine, and they were, in fact, kind of scary.

A week after the Webster Hall show, I was happily embedded with the two men, their tour manager Clyde, and sound engineer Raye, while all four made sure I was comfortable as they tried to figure out the rental van’s Bluetooth so Fearn could play the first LFO album off his phone. When that didn’t work, the band beatmaker played some haunted riffage from his phone’s Moog app. Williamson asked what it was, and if it was one of Fearn’s. When Fearn answered in the affirmative, Williamson looked both impressed and proud. The former of which I’d come to understand as, throughout the day, I’d ask about various parts on UK Grim that particularly worked for me, and Fearn would offhandedly give a variation of “Yeah, that was a guitar part I came up with,” or “I just wrote that really quickly, just messing about,” and saying, about the track “Apart From You,” that the piano line “makes me think of the Doors in some ways.” (The piano line sounds nothing like the Doors, thank Christ. As Williamson would later say, “The thing is, with Andrew, he won’t allow himself to do anything terrible. So you kind of love him, really.”) If, as Williamson would also later say, “complacency is a killer—we’re not complacent, I think, because we have to prove ourselves all the time,” then Fearn has a particular knack for maintaining that hunger/anger in an amiable low key. As we drove through the multiple Coachella checkpoints, the band’s vibe was unimpressed, but not without a fair amount of game enthusiasm. It was the band’s first Coachella, but, with both members in their early 50s, and with success having come late, after an almost mythically late start, it would take a more bracing first than this to shake their lovely spring afternoon.

The redemption arc of Sleaford Mods has been in the works for a while, though not without some hiccups (though these hiccups—and the question as to whether any redemption was ever called for—can be ascribed to a basic misunderstanding of Sleaford Mods in general, and Jason Williamson in particular, to be discussed later).

While the basic template of Sleaford Mods—the roughand-ready minimalism and thickly accented working-class brio that, from the start, won over alt-U.K. music journalists, semiretired Britpoppers, and professionally left-field musicians such as Matt Sweeney and Coil’s Drew McDowall—remains intact, there’s been a steady evolution in both sound and attitude. While early albums largely consisted of beats composed with no more ingredients than required to make a gin and tonic, topped with scathing vitriol pulled from Jason Williamson’s spleen and sprayed outward from any available orifice, even 2014’s Divide and Exit gave ample evidence that Andrew Fearn’s tunemongering was anything but accidentally memorable. The duo’s songwriting acumen became more clear in the next few releases, Key Markets (2015), the T.C.R. EP (2016), and English Tapas (2017), with some tracks bearing the anthemic qualities of a proper New Model Army banger, and the latter album’s final song, “I Feel So Wrong,” a soul-sad, new wave barrelhouse number (think “Hey Bulldog” if it had been released on Mute in 1981), being roughly 1,000 times more tuneful than the biggest radio hits of countless artists who’d never once been dismissively compared to the Fall.

More than the musical evolution, a combination of sobriety (quitting both alcohol and cocaine) and lockdown led to an increasing amount of lyrical introspection on Williamson’s part. Thankfully, two things: This introspection wasn’t partnered with any egregious prettifying of the singer’s voice; and this introspection wasn’t conveyed in the way that male singers usually owe up to being bastards, i.e., self-hatred that sounds an awful lot like bragging. Instead, after asking himself (as he told this writer in a 2021 interview), “Am I a wanker?” Williamson used this interrogation to pen a number of utterly exposed and affecting meditations on his childhood and those accompanying traumas (which included the death-at-birth of a sister, his mother’s depression, and his parents’ perpetual fighting).

In UK Grim's “Pit2Pit,” Jason Williamson sings, “My partner thinks I’m being secretive/And I am/I’m so strange.” People (fans, critics, etc.) want the singer to be obsessive about the external world, to be anti-Tory as a brand. Which he is! But he’s also a walking pathology. Half the lyrics on UK Grim could be aphorisms. As with his closest bellowing bellower contemporary, the rapper billy woods, no one (neither critic nor fan) will let the ranter just be sad. Not because his shoelaces were left untied when he was 10, and not because he’s just nondoctrinaire strange. It’s got to always be society.

In an effort to get right with himself, or at the very least switch things up after a long lockdown, Williamson has recently apologized to Idles—the most successful (at least until Yard Act came along) of the shouty professionals who followed in the Mods’ wake—for (regularly) picking fights with that band of sloganeers.

“It was...quite obsessive,” Williamson tells me, picking at his primavera at the $29 brunch joint across the street from the hotel where Sleaford Mods are staying.

“And so I start to think, ‘Why is this?’ I don’t hate this band that much, you know.... I know a lot of it was, I think, jealousy and envy, because they became bigger faster than us. And so I didn’t think that was justified. So I got in touch with him and said, ‘Look, I’m really sorry. I think a lot of this was down to my own jealousy.’ He was alright about it.”

They say you don’t need to apologize for telling the truth, but one of the unfortunate side effects of empathy is that you often do, in fact, find yourself apologizing for true things if you’re burdened with self-knowledge and are aware that maybe it wasn’t the higher impulse of truth-telling that was your impetus for, say, hurting the band Idles’ feelings.

Despite all this personal growth, the week after their NYC show, leading up to the first weekend of Coachella, was low-grade dramatic for Williamson. That previous Tuesday, the singer had woken up in his hotel room to a write-up of that night’s show in Philadelphia, where the writer referred to the Philly band Sheer Mag, who were the opener for the first leg of Sleaford Mods’ U.S. tour, as “sharing a stage with Sleaford Mods.” Taking the phrase to imply that the two bands were co-headlining, Williamson tweeted at the writer to give what was, in his mind, an innocent(ish) correction. While discussing this over a pre-festival brunch, I felt the need to explain, to Jason Williamson, the concept of “unforced error.” Because...good gravy. In the assiduously egalitarian community of indie rock, a correction of this sort, from anyone, about any opening band, is going to be frowned upon. The kids already hate hierarchical systems, and kids of all ages have always loved few things more than calling people cops.

“So I took to him [the reporter], and I said, ‘You know, do you mind changing it, because it’s our tour, you know what I mean?’ And fucking hell," he says with a somewhat rueful laugh. “I went to the gig, saw ’em all [meaning Sheer Mag], nobody said anything. We got on with them, you know? It wasn’t a problem. But then I got back in [meaning to the hotel] and...fucking hell.”

Now, on top of the normal carceral instincts of scene social workers, the reader should consider also just how beloved Sheer Mag is, how seriously the city of Philadelphia takes its indie rock, and how many people continuously have their knives out for Sleaford Mods, a band that has burned more bridges than most hard-touring bands ever cross. Suffice to say, if Jason Williamson, lying in his hotel bed, had been feeling insufficiently a big shot, he sure as shit ensured he’d get a few days of at least one of the trappings of fame. If not quite a Beatles-level scandal, it’s a sure shot that, in 2023, it’s perfectly fine to say your band is bigger than Jesus. But, in the eyes of the indie intelligentsia, only a total slob claims to be bigger than Sheer Mag.

Williamson is still laughing, wide-eyed, as he goes on to describe the “same old wankers, same old DIYs” coming out at the scent of Sleaford blood in the online water, tens of them gleefully sharing screenshots of Williamson’s tweet as evidence of the Mods’ fealty to the police state. This assessment of the teapot tempest might seem dismissive, but it shouldn’t be seen as me falling into “Twitter isn’t real life” canards. Twitter isn’t any less real life than any other bubble, among all the colliding bubbles that make up real life. I’m fine with Sleaford Mods getting clowned on, as I’m fine with Sleaford Mods clowning on the opposition. It’s a dialogue. Which Williamson understands, as far as that goes. I mean, it’s easy for this writer to say, what with hardly anyone accusing me of being a “plastic punk.” Still, Sleaford Mods are blessed to have a team that doesn’t just tell them what they want to hear.

“I’m like, shit," Jason says. “So, the manager gets in touch and she’s like, ‘You’ve caused a bit of a problem with this?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, looks like I have.’ And she says, ‘It’s not a good look, though, is it?’ ‘Oh no,’ I say, ‘not really... but I’m not going to take it down.’ It’s like,” he finally adds, “we’re all afforded a bit of pomposity sometimes, aren’t we?”

It should be noted here that Sleaford Mods’ manager is Jason Williamson’s wife. So the tone of the above conversation is unknowable.

It’s Sleaford Mods’ cross to bear that the duo keep telling their truth, unadorned by ironic distance, about who they are and what their aims are—Jason wants to be famous, Andrew wants to be half famous, neither wants to work a straight job ever again—and people refuse to believe them. And then those people feel betrayed, on a yearly basis, when Sleaford Mods once again reaffirm that they don’t care about indie culture and that the band’s chief issue with popular culture is who gets to be popular (namely, other people) rather than looking to dismantle the system entirely.

Again, the duo never pretended otherwise.

Still, it’s clear that the online conflict does bother Jason. Not as they’re beneath him (though he will imply that), but more that he’s aware that his combatants are echoes of himself as a brawler ten/eight/five years ago. And he’s aware that—unlike, say, a fight with Idles—there’s no winning. Even if he somehow discovered a way to win an argument on the internet, he’d not be the underdog. So, he returns to the topic more than once in our short time together, alternating between minor abashment; acknowledgment that, a few years ago, he’d be the first in line to rag on a band presuming to pull anything resembling rank; and a head at least half full of steam about online warriors, whom he has zero respect for, using him for DIY target practice.

“I LOOK AT PHOTOGRAPHS OF AXL ROSE AT LEAST FIDE OR SIX TIIT1ES A DAY”

-MSOM WILLIdmSOM

“If I want to act like fucking Liberace in my hotel room, on Twitter, to a journalist, you know, I think I’m allowed. I work hard. It doesn’t add to the general evil energy of the planet, does it? It’s just my own little world. There’s nothing wrong or right with that. But your hands are in a storm, because you did that before you. You were part of the detractors.”

The second track on Austerity Dogs is “McFlurry.” The song—with its repetitive bassline, strangely funky trash-bin beat, and lyrics that range from scatological to the primitivist incisiveness of lines like “People look like emails/Wide smiles”—is as good a mission statement as one could hope for from a band as averse to didacticism as Sleaford Mods. It’s PiL’s “Low Life” as performed by cretinous geniuses (or vice versa) who can’t imagine a life that isn’t low and who don’t need any reminders of the limitations of public image. It begins with the lines “Music for the masses/I’m outclassed here, mate.” Which, at the time, was read as “We don’t care about being famous,” but which, in retrospect, was more an acknowledgement of the dim likelihood of success. They never said they didn’t want it.

Even a throwaway line like “Chumbawamba weren’t political/They were just crap” was a massive clue. Anarcho punx would never slander the Ex’s best buddies like that. But we all glossed over the line because it didn’t jibe with our need for a New Fall, New Clash, Last Real Rockers, or whatever other post-boomer romanticism the listener insisted on inflicting/projecting on our heroes. Who kept on saying, again and again, that they really, really enjoyed the music of the Orb and Guns N’ Roses.

“I look at photographs of Axl Rose at least five or six times a day. I’ve got a specific period, know what I mean? Sometimes I waver from that, but I always go back to the same period, which is ’86, ’87.... So, I mean, I’m a glamour shagger. I was after the fame. I just realized that in order to get it, doing some shit Britpop bullshit—that some of the people just were doing tons before—or doing anything unoriginal, was not going to get me there.”

I’d argue that a fair amount of tension, which a band like Sleaford Mods exists within, stems from the cultural change, sometime in the ’90s/early aughts, where the “underground” (or whatever one’s preferred term is) went from being called a “scene” to a “community.” “Scene” is shallow and honest. “Community” codified the lie that smallstakes showbiz is small-stakes by choice, and therefore pure. Ethically sourced guitar rock, by and for members of the community. To be screwed over by a community member is near unthinkable. Would Lowly Worm jockey for larger font size? He would not. Would Postman Pig have his interns leave anonymous comments on Brooklyn Vegan posts about competing artists? Of course not. In true No True Scotsman fashion, anybody who doesn’t adhere to community standards isn’t community. Never mind all those fox editors and cat publicists shaking hands and doing lines at the bar; the “yourself” in “DIY” is expansive and expansiver.

But sure, get mad at Sleaford Mods. (No, seriously, you can totally get mad at Sleaford Mods. They’re big boys.)

Coachella itself presented a problem, and not in the way we’d envisioned. Turns out, despite impressions to the contrary, the festival is neither terrible nor transcendent, neither Woodstock nor Woodstock ’99. Coachella elides even the lazy faint-praise dismissal of a Woodstock ’94 comparison. First off, no mud for miles. Second, even just recalling Woodstock ’94’s lineup while humming a Salt-N-Pepa song would have broken up the medicinal stupor (in both sound and behavior) that the Coachella audience seemed to favor. And thirdly, Woodstock ’94 famously lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, mainly because of people getting in for free. Coachella laughs in the face of the very idea of losing money. And neither ass, gas, nor grass will get a fiscally challenged music fan through the roughly (by my count) 60 or 70 opportunities for one to get one’s wristband scanned. Coachella is an iconic success; a self-perpetuating/mythologizing entertainment machine that utilizes over 700 golf carts. What else there is to say depends on the attendee. The kids looked elated. Ian MacKaye and his family seemed like they were enjoying themselves. Freddie Gibbs looked happy. This writer stayed hydrated and has had worse times. Sleaford Mods, at least on their first weekend, had a perfectly swell Coachella. The staff was lovely. The catering was exceptional (if you’re ever famous, be sure to try the citrus vegan spare ribs). Sleaford Mods saw some pals. We saw some Bjork. We all left before Frank Ocean, and the Frank Ocean online discourse, began.

Coachella is less like an exercise in vaping and more like a country-size challenge to the very idea of making vaping the butt of jokes. Yeah, it’s all a bit hazy, and the giant LEGO statue art does bring to mind a burning man unwilling to commit to the bit, but—like the old-folks tendency to make jokes at the expense of vaping as though sticking up for the tobacco industry was a cool thing to do—if Coachella gives off heavy harmless vibes, how is that in any way an insult? What do you want, Altamont?

Well, sort of. Or at least something. It’s a topic discussed and agreed on by scholars of ennui as diverse in worldview as Trent Reznor and Warren Zevon. Something is better than nothing, and if Coachella ain’t nothing, what I’m afraid it is is...a lot of things. I was expecting a Babylon in the desert; vomiting influencers and Billy Corgans and Mr. and Mrs. Golden Voice themselves picking my pocket and depositing my hard-earned money directly into a giant Jeff Koons-designed piggy bank, rising from the blazing eye of Coachella Mountain and labeled (in blood), “For the GOP lol.” Instead what greeted me was...every other festival I’ve ever been to, but with a bit less shade. Really, Coachella is a lot like...like...Governors Ball. I’m not trying to be mean.

Like the last time I was at Governors Ball, Bjork played, accompanied by the Bjork Philharmonic. Everybody agreed it was brilliant and genius and beautiful and—absent drums— a bit pastoral, but damn and golly, those first three albums sure were something, weren’t they?

The biggest shock of Coachella was the appearance of Ian MacKaye, the (and I don’t use the term lightly) legendary singer of Minor Threat, Egg Hunt, and Fugazi. His presence at the festival was so unexpected that I thought the bald man in the fun hat was a member of the production team who bore an uncanny resemblance to the singer of “Waiting Room.” But turns out MacKaye is a regular attendee, and he was there with his wife (and Evens and Coriky bandmate), Amy Farina, and the couple’s teenage son. MacKaye was celebrating his 61st birthday. When we sang happy birthday to him, I almost mentioned to Williamson how nice it was to share a stage with Minor Threat, but I thought better of it.

Besides being eminently pleasant, MacKaye also served as a living embodiment of the counterpoint, by example, that gives lie to at least 15 percent of the cynicism expressed in this piece—and by the Mods when they don’t feel like walking the Spotify picket line. He is also a big Sleaford Mods fan, which in itself is a solution to some of the ambient tensions surrounding the band. Because MacKaye doesn’t have to see exactly eye to eye with the Mods to appreciate them. The man who sang, “You’d make a great cop,” long before the accusation became a meme, doesn’t need to jump from difference to schism. And to their credit, the Sleaford Mods don’t do that thing where indie acts on the cusp of selling out feel the need to dismiss Fugazi as utopian frippery. Williamson simply says, “The second time [we spent time with MacKaye] was really interesting because I think there were kind of values that we don’t share, that perhaps he does. And that came out in the conversation,” and keeps it moving.

As MacKaye was leaving the Mods’ trailer, Williamson earnestly asked the (inadvertent) inventor of the concept of “straight edge” if he still drank. Ian laughed but answered in equal earnestness, “I never drank! That’s why I’m still here!”

After the door shut, Andrew Fearn practically beamed through his beard, in a beatific state of being extremely tickled by his bandmate’s guileless question. Fearn had also had a fair share of gummies by that point.

fls a kind concession to our best-laid plans, getting out of Coachella was a total pain in the ass. Not that the staff didn’t continue to be incredibly sweet and helpful, but the damn grounds are just so big. And, like the philosopher once said, we were just normal men. We were just innocent men. The sun had set and we were all exhausted. Every back alley led to another strange mini-rave, half full of small half-dancing people wearing sunglasses at night and backpacks the size of cysts. The headliners hadn’t played yet, but I can sense disappointment like a field mouse sensing seismic shifts and I was looking forward to the less lethargic rhythm of road traffic.

In the car, we made up for the pleasantness of what we’d left behind by running down a veritable Spotify playlist of contemporary post-punk bands. Jason talked a bit about their former manager detaching himself from his job, like a boyfriend lacking the guts to end a relationship where affection only goes in one direction. We discussed their performance that day. They were happy with it; satisfied—considering their being complete outliers in the day’s lineup—for a slightly more than half-full tent. We all agreed that festivals in general always feel a bit pointless, but as far as pointlessness goes, Coachella wasn’t so bad. Williamson declared it “fun.”

The high blue and red lights of Coachella passed from view in the car’s rear window. A sprawling spectacle, not terrible. Not much of anything else, either, except well protected. A walled community, if not quite a scene.

flny conversations with either Fearn or Williamson about their respective pasts or youths invariably return to some signifier of the supposed counterculture that they couldn’t afford. For Fearn it was early samplers. For Williamson it was attending festivals or indulging his fashion sense. The latter of which he makes up for now, with a separate Instagram account dedicated to trading and off-loading clothes.

“Yeah, I started buying a lot more, probably secondhand, stuff from the ’90s. I don’t know if I’m subconsciously reminiscing about the times or that I couldn’t afford to buy those clothes. I really do get really switched on by identical pieces. Which I couldn’t buy back in the day, you know, which gives me an immense amount of pleasure to do that now. And they still look great,” he says.

When we talk about post-Sleaford Mod profiteers, the post-punk and semi-Oi! imitators whom the band has given permission to swagger around in rhyming slang like chimney sweep extras in The Limey, I pay the singer what I think of as a compliment when I point out that these bands are basically printing post-punk money by making more accessible, or conventionally “rock,” versions of Williamson’s band. He responds, not defensively exactly, that “perhaps there’s a merit in the more commercial push of what we do. As you said earlier, we can see the appeal in these acts.... Also it’s feasible to now say we are seen as commercial too, in some respects.” He says this without rancor, but I’m still compelled to apologize for implying that there’s a cap on how successful Sleaford Mods might become. In retrospect, I stand by the apology. Sleaford Mods do work hard, and they are better than their imitators, and Fearn just bought his own house for himself and his partner. So why water down the respect, even out of some fealty to punkish anti-success?