Alone in Blackpool, waiting for Mods Scott King Imagine a northern accent. A man half-shouting over the looped guitar Sports, shoplifting, ram-raiding, three for a fiver, discount supermarket riff from the version of Jonathan Richman’s Roadrunner: poetry of Sleaford Mods?

Chop Chop Chop ... fucking bummers ... She insists I go meet her fam- As I look back now, I can see that certain madness had taken hold. ily for Christmas ... at some crap 21st. in some shit club ... so I went ... Something strange had happened to me - something that I thought it was terrible. Bunch of thick bastards eating cheap party food ... she’s would never happen again - I had become a fan. bouncing around flirting with everybody, jiggling her knobbly knees to Jay-Z and Beyonce. *** Gripped, at least in part, by a need to understand my own behaviour, I I laughed out loud when I first heard it. I was immediately transported begin making notes on the band: “Anyone can be a Sex Pistol”, “Our back to Goole in the late-eighties, back to any working man’s club, greatest weapon against the Mumfordisation of Britain”, “X-Factor back to any stiff-egg-sandwich-birthday-party and a world of orange- gone disastrously and brilliantly fucking wrong”, “Sleaford Mods: the skinned-back-combed-hairspray-lasses. I identified. But as the song Sex Pistols meets X Factor. The X-Pistols”. goes on, deeper into the realms of bad breath junkie drug dealers and their screaming kids, everything becomes darker and more desperate. My need to categorise the group is pathetic, really. Why can’t I just It’s still funny, really funny, but I’m painfully aware of laughing at enjoy them? Obviously, it’s because I am a male fan of rock and pop; I someone else’s sink-estate, piss-hole misery: by the end of the song, I can’t just enjoy any band. I need to label groups, put it them in boxes, no longer identify. In fact, I’m not even that sure I should be laughing. then file them away - and I’m not alone. Previous reviewers have at- tempted to do the same, the general consensus being that Sleaford Mods *** are ‘the bastard children of The Fall’, or ‘extras from a Shane Mead- It wasn’t Chop, Chop, Chop that got me hooked on Sleaford Mods, but ows film’. Inevitably someone describes them as ‘ that was the song that swung it for me - the song that sealed my faith on steroids’ (this ‘on steroids’ or ‘on acid’ affix always riles me: ‘like in them: an eight minute mini-drama, an update on the classic BBC Timothy Leary on acid’). More imaginative reviewers will have you sit-com formula where - like so many of Sleaford Mods’ lyrics - the believe that Sleaford Mods are ‘meets’ Wu-Tang tragedy and humour both spring from the same source: entrapment. Clan. Interesting, funny, but also untrue. Several notebooks already full of supposition; I’m determined that it’s now my turn at to commit some I play YouTube clips of the band over and over throughout early Sep- Sleaford-theories to print. tember. I am transfixed - as much by the grim world the band describe, by these other lives, as by the gurning, hooligan-looking singer and I pitch my idea to this magazine. It’s never easy. The publisher makes the wobbly legged, junkie-looking computer player. Like Chop Chop me meet him several times, forcing me to explain why he should give a Chop, all of their songs are a window into lives that are much more dozen potentially high revenue advertising pages over to a little known desperate than mine. I mean, sitting hear in leafy Highbury, what would band from . I bang my fist on the table in the organic coffee I write my white-rap about? The middle-aged IVF lawyer new mums, shop: “BECAUSE THIS IS ART”, I tell him, and eventually he agrees. latte-jogging their twins around the park - or - New-Media-Matt and I can have as many pages as I like for my feature.” There is a condition his mates, still in training kit, watching football in the local pub over an though” he says, “We want you to speak to the singer - Jason is it? - art- orange juice and a ‘locally sourced’ Sunday Roast? ist to artist. That is the story - and we want to know why you, a grown man, are behaving like a teenage girl. Can you write about that?” *** Nobody asks me to, nor probably even wants me to, but I appoint my- *** self as this band’s unofficial marketing wing. I work tirelessly and for Sleaford Mods love Twitter. Jason, uses it like a public note-pad. Half free. My Twitter campaign begins on 19th. September 2013. “Sleaford thoughts, proto-lyrics and bad feelings all go straight on to Twitter: no Mods are the best band in Britain” - that’s the message. I’m not the first editing, no deleting and no apologies. ‘Am fucked’, ‘Tied up in Nottz’, person to realise this of course, I’m just very vocal about it. Everyday, ‘Fuck off’. Twitter is part of the very idea of Sleaford Mods - it pro- sometimes three or four times a day, I Tweet a variation on this message vides immediate one-to-one communication with an audience - and its and support the sentiment with a YouTube link of the band playing live. through Twitter that I establish a friendship of sorts with the Jason. It’s I am relentless. not difficult - they don’t keep their distance from me or any other fan. There’s an endless two-way communication between band and audi- In the coming weeks, realising the limitations of Twitter - that it is per- ence and this - it seems - is the backbone of Sleaford Mods. The record- sonal but not that personal - I step up my campaign to include e-mails. I ings are the same: maximum truth with minimum beats. It all makes send e-mails to almost everyone I know and repeat the message. ; some sense - in a way - no barrier between the band and the audience. I dwell people even reply. I then expand my e-mail campaign to include people on this fact a lot - I ruminate on it - the pros and the cons. that I don’t know - I apologise for ‘cold-calling’ but explain that it is worth it, and essential that they look at the link below: “Sleaford Mods Late one night, via email, I offer Jason some advice - I suggest that Track 1” I say. “Amazing. The best band in Britain”. he might want stand back a bit: not let everyone in, not be seen to be too accessible - unintentionally, unwittingly, but undeniably - I am, of Looking back now, I can see why I sent out dozens of e-mails to well- course, suggesting that he starts to act a bit more like a rock’n’ roll star. known journalists like Miranda Sawyer (who I don’t know) or Alexis Petridis (who I know a bit). I hoped that they, like me, would be instant- *** ly converted - and - they’re influential, so it made sense. I was hoping In mid-December, Sleaford Mods are playing a short tour of the north. that they’d write about the band, introduce them to a national audi- I make up my mind to go to one of these gigs. The 16th December is ence, give them a leg-up. That said, I have no idea why I sent the same Blackpool. I can’t get the thought out of my head. Sleaford Mods make e-mail to Alain de Botton; or why I should have his email address. Did songs about the minimum wage and crap . Blackpool is officially I really believe that this bald-pated, patterned knitwear fanatic boffin - Britain’s second poorest town. I’ll go up to there. I’ll write about the born into almost unimaginable wealth - would really understand the JD long boozy neon nights and even longer dull grey days. It’s perfect.

OR GREY SEA MEETS NEON NIGHTS?? I arrive in Blackpool the night before the band are due to play. I’ve Tower and the Winter Gardens (both closed). I’ve wandered up and convinced myself that this is essential: if I travel up on the Saturday down the backstreets photographing the lunatic B&Bs; I’ve photo- night, I’ll have the whole of Sunday to take photographs in daylight. I graphed the dog shit, the spew and the semi-defunct rock shops. Now have a vision of sorts. Blackpool is the working class death of the what do I do? Time has almost stood still and every ten minutes seems North. A safety valve invented by Victorian industrialists to pacify the to take two hours. I’ve even contemplated all-day drinking, but was put workforces of Lancashire’s cotton mills. Blackpool is where Norman off by a non-legged man parked outside Wetherspoons. I sit on a bench Tebbit made his infamous ‘get on yer bike and look for work’ speech in high up in the town and flick back through my photographs - they’re all the aftermath of widespread urban rioting in 1981: it’s where the Tories terrible - predictable clichés of Northern misery - they look like Morris- used go to publicly fuck and kick the working classes and where the sey’s holiday snaps. I seriously consider giving up and just going back working classes still go to publicly fuck and kick each other. to bed. But then, then, I notice that at least half of my pictures have Blackpool Tower in the background - and this gives me an idea. It’s only five minutes walk from Blackpool North station to the Metro- pole Hotel. Five long minutes of near-naked hen nights and mus- For the next three hours, I am the happiest man in Lancashire. I’ve de- cle-bound, plucked eye browed puking gangs of lads. I thought I’d love cided to photograph Blackpool Tower from every point that it becomes all this, but I’m completely sober, so the mass-drunkenness makes me visible in a half mile, half radius as I walk up through the town: the very nervous. I feel like Squadron Leader Bunty Smythe on a success- tower always the same size and in the same place in every shot. I know ful home run from Colditz when I finally open the door to my comfy exactly what I’m doing. My idea is a composite of many influences double room. I would love to go for a drink somewhere, but I’m put (John Baldessari, Guy Debord and Victor Burgin to name three), but off as much by the cabaret grannies that fill the hotel bar downstairs as ultimately, absolutely, it is mine: I am making original ART. Not only I am by the teenage gangs outside. I’m torn - to drink or to stay in? I that, I’ve found an objective way to document the daylight misery of decide to stay in; that it’s the right thing to do. I fiddle with the portable Blackpool without having to seek it out: the redbrick chip shop terrac- TV long enough to realise that it doesn’t have BBC 4 ... long enough to es are all essential but ultimately incidental. I’ve applied the essence realise that I’m going to miss the last episodes of Borgen. As I lay on of Conceptual art’s objectivity to a grotty social-realism, and I’m very the bed, I am acutely aware of how much I must have changed since I pleased with myself. I even have a title “Majestic Karaoke Nihilism”. last came here in 1991. Go to Blackpool on a Saturday night and shout at the telly because it refuses to let me watch a subtitled Danish political I finish the Blackpool tower photographs at a quarter past one. I’ve drama? Fucking hell. I’m sort of ashamed of myself. But - the truth is - I eaten nothing but a few tinned tomatoes, I’ve been awake for nine hours really do want to get up early, I really do want to study Blackpool in the and have walked a dozen miles, I really should go to sleep or at least eat cold light of day: the Saturday night’s Sunday morning. something - but now on a high and excited about the band’s arrival - I decide that I’ve earnt a drink. *** I had planned to get up early, but not this early. I’ve been pacing my *** room, smoking, since 4am - all the best hotels here advertise ‘smoking I visit several pubs around the market square - mainly because I’m be- rooms’ - some even boast ‘smoking throughout’. By the time I go down ing pursued by an gigantic pensioner from Salford who calls himself for breakfast four hours later, I feel like I’ve been up all night; but it’s Rockin’ Pete - he attached himself to me in The Cedar Tavern after a beautiful winter’s morning. As I sit amongst my friendly - if largely I kindly bought him a packet of peanuts. I keep making my excuses obese, ancient or disabled fellow diners - I couldn’t be happier. I fiddle and trying to say goodbye to Rockin’ Pete - hoping to shake off his with my camera and make a list of today’s goals: photograph B&Bs, pint poncing and cigarette scrounging - but every time I turn around, backstreet misery, Blackpool Tower, Winter Gardens, dog shit etc. I realise that he’s followed me into the next pub. It’s partly because of this game of cat‘n’mouse with Rockin’ Pete that I end up drinking so So, with this as my agenda, I set out. First, a two-mile hike down the much so quickly. As soon as he launches into another long-winded joke seafront, just for pleasure. It’s fantastic - the gale force fresh air sweep- or spontaneously bursts into more a cappela versions of Motorhead and ing over the the Irish Sea and straight down my throat - a stark contrast ’s greatest hits, I immediately guzzle down my pint and to this morning’s chain-smoking in my overheated room. I love the slip off to the next pub. Eventually, and only through a series of cunning British seaside, all of it, at anytime of year. It’s the sense of communal and complex toilet/cash-machine manoeuvres, do I finally manage to nostalgia perhaps, shared memories in towns that never really change - give Rockin’ Pete the slip. or maybe its the teenage scooter rallies - slow adventures to Yarmouth, Morecambe or Skegness and that very first sense of freedom. Whatever By three o’clock, after two hours of drinking, I find myself sitting alone it is, I’m never happier than when in a seaside town and I just walk and near the toilets in a town-centre karaoke bar. I can’t say that I wish walk, immediately forgetting about my misery-agenda. As I walk, I also Rockin’ Pete was here, but I definitely wish that someone was here. The remember how much I enjoy being alone in strange places - how much novelty of solo-boozing has worn off and I am - by about thirty years it’s part of the job of being an artist. If you’re lucky enough to have a - the youngest person in this pub. An endless queue of pensioners take show in New York, Zurich or Berlin it’s almost impossible not to meet it in turns to murder classic Christmas songs. One of these songs will someone that you know, not to arrange a drink in a bar - but should haunt me for weeks: Arthur, in trilby, carrier bags in hand, steps up on to you find yourself exhibiting in Breda, Friborg, Dunkirk or Dundee, the the carpeted stage and in a mid-pitched, yet murderous monotone, war- opposite applies: there’s no chance at all of bumping into someone you bles “Giddy up, giddy up, giddy up, Let’s go, let’s look at the show ... know and anyone you do meet, you’ll most likely never see again. I’m Come on, it’s lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with yoooooo”. excited to be all alone - it’s alone in these strange towns, sat in a bar The OAP talent show is fucking torture and it goes on and on. over a notebook - with hours if not days to kill, that I find myself to be at my most creative - separated from real life and with no one to talk Because I have nobody to talk to - because I have nothing else to do - I to - I become an endless font of ideas, and I love it. make notes into my phone: ‘In the Industrial Revolution’s Graveyard everyone insists on entertaining you ALL of the time. They refuse NOT After two hours I am absolutely bored shitless. Its only just gone ten to entertain you. Blackpool is an X-Factor death camp, its karaoke co- o’clock and the band don’t get here till four. I’ve already been to the medians, the Sonderkommando’. At four o’clock Jason sends me a text. Thank God! They should be here trived, that doesn’t feel ‘natural’. He’s referring of course, to not ‘play- by now - I immediately perk up - I can’t wait to see him. The text reads: ing the game’ or not ‘playing a game’. If it seems right for the singer to “Sorry. Running late. There by 7pm”. I am beside myself with misery. book his own gigs or to reply to almost everyone who contacts him via Facebook or Twitter - then that’s what he’ll do - he’s not prepared to What am I going to do for the next three hours? Too drunk and listless ‘act the star’, not prepared to pretend to be someone else. “Fuck it”, he to bother going back to the hotel, I elect instead to stay in the geriatric says in conclusion “People seem to be picking up on what we do now, karaoke pub. If I stop drinking bitter and start drinking double vodkas because of the state of the country, the state of the world. But what we with Red Bull, that’ll lift my mood - I’ll be chemically energised - ready do is not worthy of mythologising ... its crap in some ways and just not to interview the band and enjoy the gig. I drink and fill two notebooks worthy - in a few years time people might start laughing at us. But I with increasingly fantastical yet illegible ideas. I don’t remember tell- don’t care, this is what I do. It’s what we do”. ing Jason which pub I was in - but I must have done. - because when he finally appears, hovering over me a few hours later, I’ve never been He’s right of course. I got it all wrong by suggesting they should change so grateful to see anyone ever. their ways - the beauty of this band is their honesty: their very point is furious, cruel and hilarious truth. I’m completely pissed by now. We need to find a quiet pub to do the interview - but there’s no such thing around here - instead we find a Andrew joins us briefly and I have a question for him. “What are you table at the back of a horrible sports bar - all big screens and booming hoping to achieve with Sleaford Mods?” - “Just to keep going really. football commentary - still, it’s much quieter that the Christmas kara- That’s the main thing. Keep doing what we’re doing”. It’s a good an- oke place. The interview is a wobbly effort at first - I ask Jason a few swer, and really, the only ‘artist to artist’ answer that I need. Isn’t that ‘starter questions’ - like John Humphreys does on Mastermind. Jason is all any artist wants - just to be able to keep doing what they’re doing? polite. He tells that that Friday night’s gig in was pretty quiet - but how he was pleased with their performance, and that’s always the Before we leave for the gig, I remember that I have one last point to main thing. I tell him that I have mates who were at he Glasgow gig and make - I can’t resist - I might slur it, but it seems very clear to me: “Are how much they enjoyed it - and how I’ve even got friends in Berlin who Sleaford Mods a form of Karaoke then?” Jason looks at me suspicious- are still talking about the show Sleaford Mods played there in August. ly - thinks for a moment, then answers “No”. Unperturbed, I say “Not even Majestic Karaoke Nihilism?” He tells me to ‘fuck off’. “That’s great” I can see that he’s trying to think of the correct way to phrase this “It’s brilliant - but I’d like to make an impression in my own *** country. All the people I’ve been brought up with, the bands that I’ve The gig venue - Scrooges - is a Dickens-themed discount disco above a loved, have always been big in their own country ... I’m not a fucking sauna on a street that’s lined with brothels. It’s perfect: horrible artexed patriot by any means but, it’s important to me”. I know what he means walls, fake Tudor beams, stained carpets and Christmas tat everywhere. - he’s talking about The Jam maybe or the Sex Pistols - or - I’m pre- I love it, it’s a total shit-hole and best of all there is NO STAGE. There’s suming that he is - he might be talking about Wu-Tang Clan, I don’t ask only about thirty people in the place, but the band are fantastic. Face him. Then he adds, “But Europe’s done me and Andrew a lot of favours. to face with the audience in this nasty club, in this sad-fun-town, they People take us seriously there - they don’t just think I’m some mad twat make absolute sense. There is something thrilling about seeing a band shouting in a club”. Sleaford Mods are playing dozens of dates through- with no stage - a band on a carpet - a band with who you’re face to face. out Europe in 2014 - but, I ask him - is it likely that people know what You’re forced to recognise the bravery of what they’re doing - in Black- he’s talking about, the slang words and his pronounced accent “I think pool, in Nottingham, in Newcastle - Jason is shouting about the misery they just like the energy” he tells me “and, some of its melodic and peo- of low-pay and cultural disappointment - he’s offering you or me - not ple will always respond to a succession of fucking melodies ... a tune ... a mirror - but a portrait of his own life - couple it with Andrew’s now if it’s arranged right. That‘s international isn’t it? “ original (no samples) and increasingly heavy music and well - it’s just beautiful. I only wish I wasn’t so drunk, because all the details are just I try and steer the conversation a bit - it is my job, after all - “Are you a blur. Just a feeling. two different people then? One on stage and one off?” I’m referring to how polite he is in person, how this is a marked contrast to the lyrics or I don’t remember leaving Scrooges. But I do remember talking into my his performance. “No. It’s just me!” he laughs “Well, on stage - it’s just recording device as I walked along the seafront, back to my hotel - past me, but with the blood boiling anger. If I behaved like that off-stage, I the staring gangs of lads and the scantily clad, pissed-up lasses. Accord- wouldn’t get away with it would I? I’d be fucking locked-up”. ing to my spoken notes:

That’s an interesting update on The Notion of Authenticity. “Jason is - as they used to say - 4 REAL. He works in a call-centre - his Johnny Rotten’s whole non-act was always about being the same on fury is fucking righteous - HE IS NOT A CUNT - I AM ALSO 4 REAL stage as he was off it - that’s what we all believed, that is why we be- ... and not a cunt. He is just being. I love Jerry Lee Lewis and Little lieved. I put this to Jason and he agrees - but says he will just be himself Richard and Nick Sanderson and ... I don’t fucking know - maybe he is whatever “Even if that makes me a two-faced bastard when I go on domesticated or frustrated by day - BUT - like all great rock’n’roll sing- stage, slagging everyone off. ”. We talk at length about if this is ‘acting’ ers: by night, he howls a the moon ... Super-size Funghi, please mate”. or not, about if a performance can ever really end. Even Shaun Ryder, in recent years, has said that he played-up to his image, that he let the *** press believe what they wanted to believe. I do remember eating a scalding, spongy pizza as I leant on a dustbin outside my hotel. I don’t remember going to bed. I wake up at ten the I remind Jason about the e-mail that I sent him a few weeks ago - the next morning, fully clothed and on the floor. My pizza box is my pillow. one where I’d suggested that he might become a little less accessible, I find my phone and flick through the pictures I took last night. Every a bit more aloof. He’s obviously thought about this quite a lot and he’s single one is out of focus. It doesn’t matter. I got the feeling. I then send ready for me this time: “With respect” he says “That’s complete bol- an e-mail to a man that I shall never meet: “You should have been here locks”. He says it’d be wrong for him to do anything that feels con- last night Alain. Sleaford Mods: Best Band in Britain”. “Majestic Karoke Nihilism (Study of Blackpool Tower)”. Scott King, 2014. Courtesy Herald St. .