Jason Williamson: the working-class hero who made his own cage
The Sleaford Mods frontman on class, controversy, and why success still feels like a mistake
Short mod cut, random tattoos and a skull that sits closer to Neanderthal than Clooney. It is the kind of image you usually associate with a local lad in a rundown social club. In fact, it’s the lead singer of one of the most successful post-punk bands in the last five years. It’s Jason Williamson. Brutish, hard-spoken, and some people’s face of the modern working class.
Perhaps this comes from the 55-year-old’s husky Nottingham intonation. “It’s not an accent that has authority,” he says with a tone of acceptance, “so you always kind of feel like you’re on the back foot, fighting upwards.” Williamson may feel on the back foot, but in the media, he has become one of the voices of the working class, a voice sitting in a bright orange Stone Island jacket, a pair of three-quarter-length shorts and some overpriced climbing shoes. Post-punk at its finest: a middle-aged man trying to keep up with the trends of the day.
That’s why I’m meeting Williamson where trendy dads and pretentious twenty-year-olds come to hang out and preach how they “really know music”. It’s Rough Trade East, Shoreditch, a vinyl shop tucked off Brick Lane in an old industrial building. The only industrial part of it now is a couple of avant-garde LPs you ought to find in the experimental section.
Yet it’s the place where the Nottingham lads of Sleaford Mods are holding their fan Q&A. The fans are a mix of middle-aged men in Stone Island getting their limited-edition vinyl’s signed by Williamson, and the beatniks of today getting their fix of insider knowledge, all of them expecting Williamson to have something to say about the state of the world.
Alternative music once saw working-class lads doing next to anything to catch acts like the Specials and The Jam, who represented their culture and place in society. The irony is that now these kids are drinking fermented IPAs, have grown old, and their hero is a sober mod with crayon-coloured tattoos.
Williamson’s politically active lyricism has seeped into political conversations, even if he resents it. “You have to release a fucking statement every time there’s any kind of political connotation near you,” he exclaims with a sigh as the wrinkles on his forehead uncrease. Every interview the band did when they first came up would be about Brexit or Corbyn. The label of being working class began to come as a partner to the music.
“It’s not a political manifesto. I mean, to be honest, we did run with the working-class thing, predominantly, because of the fucking art. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.” But for Williamson it “just comes out to bite you on the arse”.
When touring in Madrid in 2023, a fan threw a Palestine flag onto the stage, causing the duo to end the gig early. It led to wide backlash online as the band, known for being a political force, openly shied away from taking a stance on the subject. Speaking on the issue to Clash, Williamson said:“Don’t be asking me to pick sides for something I ain’t got any real idea about, at a gig. I’m a singer. My job is music.”
It’s a strange thing, success, when you’ve spent most of your life convinced it will never come. “I still can’t believe it,” Williamson says with a beaming smile, like a child picking his favourite sweets.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Growing up in Grantham to a working-class family, the arts weren’t something you stumbled into, they were what other people did. People with different voices. He auditioned for drama schools and watched the places go to someone else every time. “They were well spoken… they really had really nice voices… they were just very confident.”
Instead came twenty years of unfulfilling jobs, substance abuse, and mornings spent fearing the sunlight coming through the curtain. In the gaps he made his own trip-hop cassettes, he couldn’t afford to buy music, so he made his own. The monotony broke when he formed Sleaford Mods. “I never thought it would happen.”
Even then it nearly didn’t. The singer got so drunk the night before a gig in Brighton that he couldn’t perform. His partner Andrew just handed out CDs to the crowd instead. Now ten years sober, performance has become the place to put it all, the aggressive tics, flailing arms, the hand constantly flicking over his Lego-looking haircut while his tattooed legs scatter across the stage. “It’s a performance piece”, a moment when the man Williamson is fighting against can come out.
Tonight though, the stage is quieter. A white light beams on his square face as someone in the crowd asks what gives him hope. For a man who has been in the depths of self-doubt, battling drug addiction, unemployment and controversy, the answer is telling. “Just myself.”