27 What Willliamson can offer is a real, relatable image. He’s been there, he knows where the bodies are buried. He’s been unemployed, and for a period ending last October, worked as a benefits advisor at the local council. Perhaps Sleaford Mods’ most important statement is still Jobseeker. Having appeared in various forms as far back as 2007’s The Mekon, it grabbed the attention as the second track on the exceptional 2014 singles collection Chubbed Up. The song’s central mantra is worth quoting in its entirety: “Jobseeker / Can of Strongbow, I’m a mess / Desperately clutching onto a leaflet on depression supplied to me by the NHS / It’s anyone’s guess how I got here, anyone’s guess how I’ll go / I suck on a roll-up, pull your jeans up, fuck off. I’m going home” “If you’ve ever been unemployed for any sort of period of time, you never forget it,” says Fearn. The deficiency of selfesteem caused by the system is infectious, dangerously cyclical. The track was written before the contemporary Tory era of grim employment statistics and zero hour contracts. “It was agency work back then,”
“You can read, you can self-educate, that’s all you can do. You can’t fight against this tide in a physical sense, cause you’ll get your fucking arms bitten off”
says Williamson. “That was zero hour contracts by any other name. They’d treat you like cunts and the people who used to run them were fucking cunts.” He fumes, suddenly tics. “I’ll still see one of the cunts about in Notts and give him a look. Driving his BMW around town, fuck off.” So the danger is that now, removed from this daily exposure, Williamson will struggle to evoke it in his words. What hits so hard about Jobseeker is its hyper-specificity: the conversation between the advisor and the embittered subject; the monologue, barked, which references to plunging thermometers into pallets of chicken on delivery. “19.4 top / 18.6 middle … Rob?” One of the artists Sleaford Mods are most frequently compared to is The Streets. When Mike Skinner experienced widespread success, his observational leanings meant third album The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living focused on the trials of new-found fame. He quickly found out it’s difficult to ask for sympathy from an audience who’d give anything to be in your situation. “The spirit will always be there with me,” insists Williamson. “There’s parts of this album which are observations of being in airports and stuff like that, the loneliness of travelling, but the despair will never leave my lyrics. I did 25 years of prodding thermometers into pallets of chicken. I’ve done my time.” Williamson is still sufficiently attached to experience those emotions on a day-to-day basis: the intrusive stares of the police, the feeling of violation and encroachment which exists in the current government, where distrust and intrusion is encouraged; where privacy is a rapidly dissolving concept. “You get to a point where you’re walking down the street and you think, if a fucking copper looks at me I’m gonna tell him. You get that anger and you wanna vent it. Fortunately for us we’ve got this, but a lot of people haven’t, and for a lot of people it goes like that” – he signals a pint being downed – “and like that” – he mimes a bump of powder to the nose – “and a lot of hatred is created because of it. People feel powerless.” Williamson has done his time with that and that. He’s previously stated that at some of his lowest ebbs he was getting through as much as three or four grams a night. Last April, when the Sleaford Mods hype was gathering exponentially with each ferocious gig; each explosive interview; each mention of their name over a drink, Crack sent a writer to review their appearance at Brighton’s Prince Albert. The gig never took place. Williamson had gone missing, last spotted in the aftermath of the band’s show at London’s 12 Bar the previous night. At