In the late 1980s, fresh from being kicked out of school, Sleaford Mods frontman Jason Williamson dreamed of becoming an actor. He was looking for a way to escape the narrow-minded confines of his home town, Grantham – and treading the boards seemed like the best possible way.
“Essentially I just wanted to be famous,” he says now, “but then I started to fall in love with the process of it all.”
Williamson had always enjoyed “shouting about” in school productions and Christmas plays, “but obviously the schools I went to didn’t really concentrate on that sort of stuff”. His dad told him that applying for theatre studies at Grantham College “wasn’t really the thing you do” so he found himself working in a chicken factory instead. After eventually returning to school to study drama up to A-level, Williamson began applying to various acting schools. The string of rejections that followed left him feeling “broken”.
Yet almost 40 years on – and over a decade since Williamson did find fame through Sleaford Mods – his stage dreams are set to be realised. Williamson will be appearing in Edgecity: Monologues from the Street at Newcastle’s Live theatre this month. “There’s no rehearsing,” says Williamson. “I’m just going on stage each night and reading from paper, which should be interesting.”
Is he feeling nervous?
“I will be on the night,” he admits. Williamson has done a little bit of screen acting in recent years, with cameos in Landscapers and Peaky Blinders, but this is different. “I worry about my eyes. I can’t read stuff that’s right in front of me so I’ll probably trip over something. That might add to it, though.”
It should help that the pieces Williamson will be performing are not wildly different to the lyrics he spits out for Sleaford Mods. They’ve been written by gobscure, an outsider poet and playwright from the north-east of England whose experiences of being homeless, disabled and sectioned inform all six of Edgecity’s monologues. The three selected for Williamson to perform are mini-explosions of fragmentary language – full of vivid imagery, historical references, non sequiturs and amusing wordplay. As one section of Die Like Chekhov reads: “a minister for death metal to be appointed and given responsibility for playlists in westminster dining rooms / national no poetry day, silent film of poet laureate picking litter on the m62 / child seeing any adult wearing a tie gets to cut it off … carefully.”
“It’s full of a kind of nonsense, but without it being nonsense,” says Williamson. “There are lines like ‘lily white spray across glass’ which perfectly describes a sign outside a model agency. And I love that the UK is pronounced ‘yuck’. Lots of stuff really rang true. There’s a desperation in it and a hopelessness that really reminded me of early Sleafords. If anything it’s a lot darker.”
Williamson was once labelled “the bard of broken Britain” for his lyrics, which captured the disillusioned national mood during peak Tory austerity years. (Their track Jobseeker contained the winning line: “So, Mr Williamson, what have you done in order to find gainful employment since your last signing-on date?’ ‘Fuck all, I sat around the house wanking.’”) It’s a label that could be applied to gobscure, too, whose work addresses the bureaucracy, hypocrisy and short-termism that has plagued Britain over the previous decades.
The playwright, who is in their late 50s, describes their fragmentary style as “broken word” – although the three pieces not being performed by Williamson have stronger narrative threads. Cocoon follows a homeless narrator as they break into a library to sleep upon a pillow of literature, whereas Yu Cant Start Revolutions Sitting on Yr Arse is full of scenarios taken from gobscure’s own life during periods of homelessness, such as the time they were refused assistance because they were wearing “designer” shoes. “I had this one pair of shoes, which I had bought for a tenner down in Leeds market,” says gobscure. “They were completely knackered but the social worker interviewing us fixated on them. They decided that because we had these shoes, we weren’t eligible for help. The result of not getting that help was that a lot of bad stuff happened to us, which ended up costing the state a fortune.”
gobscure, who often uses plural pronouns to reflect their “broken mind”, has spent time in psychiatric hospitals (the Edgecity script refers to it frequently as “sick-chiatry”) – and blames the enforced medication regime in such places for a plethora of health issues. “How long have you got? We’ve had heart attacks, I can’t process oxygen properly, the long term consequence is basically that our health is fucked.”
One thing striking about the Edgecity script is the importance placed on literature – there are references to Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Dickens’ Bleak House. gobscure recalls a story from 20 years ago, in which they’d been sectioned and then discharged to the street. “We went to a homeless hostel, with a broken arm in a sling, and the so-called support worker there actually said to us: ‘What do you need books for? You’re homeless.’”
These pieces might dream big, but they certainly don’t shy away from the grimmer realities of homelessness; in Yu Cant Start Revolutions Sitting on Yr Arse, one passage deals with the hassle of needing the toilet with no fixed abode (“used to crap in carrier-bags in our garage tie the shit/e tight inside another carrier. a third in summer”). “It’s a very real thing,” says gobscure. “I know plastic is evil. Unfortunately, if you are homeless, plastic is incredibly useful. And those cheap flimsy biodegradable bags … you want sturdy ones, you know?”
Was it hard to write while under the pressures of homelessness? “No, no, no, no … that was the easiest thing in the world. It’s just having a pen, or a knackered mini-disc recorder that someone was throwing out. It was just little notes or scraps. And, you know, sometimes we couldn’t understand what we were saying. But it didn’t have to make sense. Words was the thing that kept us going. It was everything else that was hard.”
Williamson experienced his own brush with homelessness when he was younger – “only for three or four months sofa surfing, that was as close as I got,” he says, “but it got quite tight, it was horrible, a nightmare to be honest.”
These days he volunteers at the Friary in West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire, a charity aiming to end homelessness locally, although he says direct experience isn’t really what drew him to the script. “I’m more drawn to the idea of anyone that just bleeds on to paper,” he says. “I love this kind of first-hand stuff. You can tell straight away that it’s original and it’s real.”
gobscure has spent a life writing, but it’s only in the last few years that their work has gained serious recognition, thanks in no small part to an artist’s residency at Live, which is one of the few theatres in England outside of London that focuses purely on new work. Live’s artistic director Jack McNamara says that gobscure is “one of the most genuinely radical north-east writers I have come across”.
I get a good example of their creative process right at the end of the interview, when gobscure pulls out a piece of tape that says “fragile” on it. Through a series of folds in the word, they transform the meaning: from “fragile” to “agile” and then to a snippet of French (“le”). Finally, gobscure lands on “frag” – fragging being a term used to describe blowing up a fellow soldier or commander with a fragmentation grenade.
“I’m not advocating violence,” they say. “It’s just showing that language is alive. It’s not nailed down. It keeps mutating and changing. So break the binaries!”