Boris Johnson. Nigel Farage. Jacob Rees-Mogg. Liz Truss. Matt Hancock. Piers Morgan. Jeremy Clarkson. Priti Patel… The list goes on, a grotesque cast of the privileged and entitled who ooze across the husked-out landscape of modern Britain in this powerful video by the artist Cold War Steve (Christopher Spencer) for the title track of the Sleaford Mods’ new album UK Grim.
Even though the song doesn’t name check them all, they are perfectly placed in this clever visual, verbal and musical frontline report from, well, UK Grim. Overall, it’s not so much a personal attack on individuals as an account of a broken society and the system that facilitates it.
It’s a visceral expression of rage and despair that helps to articulate what many might be feeling about living in a country where the rich are richer than they have ever been, while somewhere down the road people queue up to feed their families at food banks. Crucially, as always with the Sleaford Mods, there’s an undercurrent of dark humour that somehow provides a bit of yin for the yang of it all.
There’s an excellent recent interview with the band in The Guardian that is worth a read, and the conversation below, in which Cold War Steve and the Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn discuss the video, is also really interesting.
Bardo Burner 