Where I'm Coming From

Sleaford Mods

I grew up in England, leaving for Canada when I was 16 years old. I went to school a couple of villages over from Garsington, just outside Oxford, where I lived in a routine semi backing onto farmland. There was your usual sprawling school but also an old converted manor house for those of us in the upper years. We had to cross a moat to get from one building to the other. We wore a uniform of grey and black, and a tie of grey and teal. My family was pretty hard-up, and the knee of my pants was darned over and again, but there is the odd glossy photo still kicking around, and if you saw that in isolation you might imagine an entirely different story.

I rode back to the school with David Treacher some Sundays. We’d play tennis all afternoon on a bedraggled court surrounded by tall browning cedars. Patches of yellow lichen softened the asphalt beyond the baselines. We talked about girls and about music. We had no ambitions that I recall, beyond breaking each other’s serve. Home again, I snuck off after dinner to smoke menthol cigarettes and to steal hazelnuts from the Pratelli orchard on the other side of the main road. Around these mild highlights a life somehow sorted itself out.

Weekdays for a while, a stand-in French teacher (Mr Young had broken his leg skiing in Scotland) used to jog past us, hurrying between classes. She was a sight in her Harris tweed suit and white joggers. If you did well in her classes she’d reward you with a new Parker ballpoint set into a plastic presentation case. She attached French tourism posters to the wall with brass flat-headed pins and a hammer she kept in her purse. We knew her to be odd, but those were nice pens and it was only temporary, so we didn’t ask questions. 

One Monday morning the police were at her desk instead of her. She’d gone, apparently, to a downtown jeweller’s over the weekend to steal another week’s worth of pens. The clerk had challenged her and so she pulled out her hammer and beat the woman to death. There was an hour of questioning but I don’t think more than half of us surrendered our pens.

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A few years ago I tried to look up David Treacher. If I’ve got the right guy, he’s a cardiac surgeon now, still in England. If we were still friends and playing tennis I’d probably ask him about my sometime irregular heartbeat rather than whether I should ask Zoe Thomas out, and I suppose, given where I’ve ended up, he might ask me whether it made sense to add an addition on the back of his country place.

Another friend, Martin Robinson, lived near the school in a big fancy house like something out of a magazine and I remember a few of us in his palatial bedroom listening to the Sex Pistols’ album back in ’77, trying to convince ourselves that we liked punk as much as Martin clearly did. My tastes back then (I was 13) were not fully formed. I loved David Bowie and Genesis, and I liked Wings and Queen and Judas Priest too. Neil Saint was big into Rush. At home my parents listened to Bread and Johnny Mathis, and an appalling Greek singer named Demis Roussos. I’d hide away in my room with a salvaged reel-to reel, playing Supertramp until the brown tape twisted suddenly one day, like toffee, and the sound wound down into nothing.

When we arrived in Canada and I found myself mostly alone, even at school, I drifted more devotedly to punk music. I bought records by The Clash and The Undertones at the Square One shopping centre in Mississauga. I wore out my Buzzcocks records, and when they broke up I listened to Magazine, and then Japan, Joy Division and then New Order. Siouxsie and The Banshees were mainstays one fall. The first three albums from Echo & The Bunnymen are still on repeat some days.

I was trying to stay in touch with what I’d left behind, I think. I wanted a connection. I imagined, thanks to John Donne, that my relationship with home would “endure not yet / A breach, but an expansion, /Like gold to airy thinness beat.” Even as I lost touch with my friends - it was so much work, and there was so much waiting (phone calls were expensive, the postal service was so damned slow, and email didn’t exist) - music could shrink at least the mental space between me and that tennis court, those lost friends.

And why am I telling you all this? Well, because in some ways not much has changed. I stopped pining for the fjords a long while back, but I still start most days with a long peek at The Guardian and the football scores, the record reviews. This last week was a good one. Spurs beat Sheffield Utd (as they should have) and both Sleaford Mods and Shame released new albums.

I saw Shame at the Horseshoe in Toronto back in the summer of 2019. And I was due to see Sleaford Mods at the Danforth, end of last summer. That show, of course, was called off.

Shame are young and snotty, precocious schoolmates and utterly compelling. The lead singer removes his shirt as early in a show as is decent, and my feeling is that The Horseshoe might last a few years longer thanks to all the energy he left on the floor.

Sleaford Mods are from Nottingham and the duo must both be pushing fifty. They make electronic punk songs that are wordy and often very funny, concerned usually with lousy politicians and the hard life forced on the people who in many cases elected them. There is no one else making music quite like them.

This week it is no exaggeration to say that Shame and Sleaford Mods are equal components in the glue that holds me together. Their new albums have opened up some light-speed road not travelled much recently, a route back for me into the soft green hills south of Oxford, still teeming in my mind’s eye with both teenage innocence and the occasional ghastly crime.

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Here’s a link to a track off the new Sleaford Mods’ album. (Apologies for the ad)

And here’s a new one from Shame. (Ditto)