Sleaford Mods:Even in the glare of hindsight we never touch the real feeling.

"You're getting salty, you ain't a fish" - OBCT, Sleaford Mods.

People who don't 'get' Sleaford Mods (and, let's be honest, if they don't now they probably never will) fall into two distinct camps. There's that narrowing band of rockist bores who proclaim that anything not played on a guitar isn't 'proper' music and there are those that think that Jason Williamson is an angry, ranting, lunatic. A veins in the forehead bulging Mark E Smith in a bus queue in Nottingham shouting non sequiturs into thin air between glugs of a can of premium strength lager to the worried looks of passers by.

The most elevated of these will even cite some of his more peculiar lyrics ("I’d better get a penny farthing and Marvelous Marvin, slam dunk with a concrete record deal" - McFlurry, "Burnt you Puff Daddy, it maced you bastards. Good. I fucking laugh like fuck at your wannabe labels" - Bronx in a Six) as if to prove he's merely an addled tramp or a poseur of the highest order rather than WB Yeats or William Wordsworth.

But that's not really the point. Music isn't politics. It isn't poetry. It's an art form in its own right and songs shouldn't merely be manifestos set to music. They should paint pictures. Vivid or fantastical it matters not. They should create illusions, send us on journeys into our own minds, twist and contort the ordinary world into the extraordinary and find the magic in the mundane.

Some would say that a bloke shouting in an East Midlands accent over pre-recorded repetitive, brutal, and minimal beats is anything but that (and I also know of longtime fans who have gone off them of late) but I'm still waving the flag for bands like Sleaford Mods and those that came before them. Be it numerous punk, hip-hop, and grime artists or their more obvious forebears like The Streets and Renegade Soundwave.

In Shakespeare's Sister, The Smiths joked that protest singers should come with an acoustic guitar in hand but protest music takes many shapes and forms. The acid house revolution proved words weren't even necessary so Williamson's surreal, sometimes bordering on pure gibberish, turns of phrase shouldn't really be a stumbling block for people. His views on politics, the record industry, and the dire state of Britain today are pretty clear at all times. He just abstracts them to give them menace and edge. Its protest music, but in a highly prismatic form.

Or they are for the most part. Last night at the Hammersmith Apollo they opened with the understated, slowcore, and, most surprisingly, heartfelt ballad (well, almost) When You Come Up To Me. It's a huge outlier in their catalogue but it lit a blue touch paper to an hour and half long firework display of impassioned and angry beats and slanted and enchanted lyrics about Ena Sharples and Ray Reardon (TCR), Stoke on Trent (I Can Tell), and Cornettos (Tarantula Deadly Cargo).

Fizzy's talk of  "warm bottles of Smirnoff", Subtraction's nod to LinkedIn, and the "pub dickheads" in Top It Up all paint a picture of an all too familiar Britain. A place that can be wonderfully heartwarming and utterly frustrating at the same time. When their sights aren't set on the political classes their ire is often directed towards their musical peers. There's an aside about Brit Awards in McFlurry and, in Flipside, Williamson gives it to Blur with both barrels with the hilarious couplet "Graham Coxon looks like a left wing Boris Johnson". Bang Someone Out even has a reference to Donkey Kong which leaves us in no doubt that Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn are men who have been around a bit. Men who have seen a few things.

Standout tunes, as they so often are, came with TCR, BHS, Tied Up In Nottz, Jobseeker, and Kebab Spider and if it was a pity they didn't play Stick In A Five And Go this time that's more than compensated by the fact that Sleaford Mods'  back catalogue is now, ten albums in, as rich as any other band of their era. They've earned the right to play whatever they like. It won't disappoint those on board with their message and it can only disappoint those that aren't!

But it's not about individual songs. Rather the whole package. Ninety minutes of assault probably shouldn't be so damned pleasurable. When I wrote about Sleaford Mods in May this year I praised the "working class anger refracted through the broken lens of the experience of living in the UK in 2019 to reflect a country where the people who sleep in piss stained alley ways are far more worthy of our love and protection than those that hold high office" and when I wrote about them in September 2017 I eulogised about how they could "weave it all together into a diorama of dystopia, disillusion, and drink and drugs fuelled escapism".

Nothing's changed. Sleaford Mods still offer invective, passion, and anger but they also offer fun, tunes, and, let's face it, a chance to get together with good friends for a night out. To, conversely, rant about work and politics at the same time as you forget all about work and politics. Support came from The Viagra Boys (imagine Simple Minds at the exact moment they changed from artful Mitteleuropean new wave Bowie fans into stadium rockers), Horse Meat Disco spinning Sonic Youth's Teenage Riot, and the peerless Stewart Lee riffing on some of his greatest hits in front of an alarmingly brutal backdrop that stood in proud juxtaposition with Hammersmith Apollo's Art Deco stylings.

But the main support, for me, as ever, came from friends, beer, and my unshaking faith in the power of music to create a fairer, more joyful, and more beautiful society. Sleaford Mods ain't full of hate. They're full of love.

Thanks to Shep, Tina, Gary, Stocksy, Ben, Tracy, and Eamon for a great night out. Hope you've recovered from the homemade gin'n'tonic, Ben!