We have arrived in March and artist number 16 on the poster, and it is celebrated with a GREAT RELEASE of the rare – so rare that festival organisers have hired self-appointed superfan Jonas Skybakmoen (Johndoe) as a guest writer to explain why this is likely to be this years best concert in Central Norway!
SLEAFORD MODS: The very best crap band
Jonas Skybakmoen (Johndoe)
“It’s comedy, it’s inadequate, it’s ignorant, and above all, it’s shit.” With this sentence, the duo Sleaford Mods released the album «English tapas» a few years ago. English tapas? Yes, a pub owner had advertised for this: Half a scotch egg, a cup of potato chips, a pickle and a small pork pie.
The watery mixture of meat and fryer, served as if it were the equivalent of the Spaniards’ elegant small dishes, became a picture of the British mental state in the period after the Brexit election: Here we get it alone! This is just as good! England is big! But most of all, SLEAFORD MODS objected, it’s crap.
Who are the SLEAFORD MODS? Unlike Brexit, an unlikely success: Two men in their 50s from Nottingham, who last year played for a sold-out Hammersmith Apollo in the capital, London. Never has the bar sold so much beer. Never have the beer bellies strutted with the same pride. And no one had ever thought that this could happen.
For years, vocalist Jason Williamson tried to make a career as a guitarist and songwriter in the gold-plated British music industry. In the end, he gave up and wrote furious tirades about applying for a job (but ended up masturbating at home), the strong smell of piss in the pub and that everyone is “a bunch of cunts” anyway.
Andrew Fearn had played in a punk band that never made it – in a fit of creativity he started to cut the demo recordings into small pieces and glue them together again. And when SLEAFORD MODS today can write “sold out” on the concert posters at home and abroad, it is always Fearn who enters the stage first.
There he balances his PC on top of two empty beer crates, sips a Stella and presses “play”. Then comes Willamson, who talks more than he sings, shouts more than he raps.
His intense movements, the occasional laugh-out-loud dance and the compulsive tics – for a period he so often got behind his ear that it resembled a scene from “The Cuckoo’s Nest” – go together with the monotonous music into a higher unit that can only be described as great art.
Or the absolute shit – But this is what you realise when the middle-aged guys go on stage, where they reinvent punk with their simple, almost stupid appearance: It’s everything else that is shit. It is the miserable government’s cut in aid to those who need it most. It is the long-haired rockers who dream of the 70s and play blues on fuzz guitar. It’s the pissed off weather, because it’s raining all the time?
I think SLEAFORD MODSwill fit quite well in Trondheim!