He tried as part of a band, learnt to write songs, lived in Brixton for a time, moved to Nottingham, played acoustic guitar, moved on to electronica. He set out with the idea that you had to be famous by 24 or it was too late. I can get pissed and stoned, I don’t have to be so disciplined.” (That’s all changed, by the way: Williamson has stopped drinking and taking drugs in the past few years.) I could sing, so I thought, I’m laughing, music’ll be easy. Abandoning plans to be an actor, and inspired by The Stone Roses, Paul Weller and Britpop, he thought, ‘F**k this, I’m gonna join a band. He tried to get into drama schools, but “it was just a no-go”. In between, still nursing dreams of Hollywood, he went back to college for three years to take GCSEs and a theatre studies A-level. It introduced him to unskilled labour, which he did for the next 20 odd years – “I did warehouse work, had a job as a chef in Little Chef, worked as a security guard, then moved into fashion retail – I was always into clothes – worked my way up to managerial positions in a couple of them, got the sack all the time.” “I really did learn a lot about life there,” he says. This is how bleak it was, f**king horrible.” He signed on for a while, briefly went back to college, dropped out, and worked in a factory making microwave meals for Marks & Spencer. The headmaster was like, you’re s**t anyway, you may as well just go, don’t bother with exams. “I’d been caught trying to pierce my mate’s ear in the toilet. “I got kicked out in April 1987,” he says. Despite his verbal dexterity, though, he left school early.
It’s a singular talent that can make something as simple as “who knew” on the song “Kebab Spider” sound like a chorus that has been sitting there like a pound coin on the pavement just waiting to be picked up. Williamson has an ear for the poetry of everyday speech.
So when you’ve got someone like Johnson or Farage, who really did strike a chord with a lot of people because of the nationalism thing, of being patriotic, it’s basic maths, innit – ‘yeah, I f**kin’ love England’.” This idea of a smaller world, of globalisation, of Europe, it’s just, ‘what the f**k’s that?’, it’s a million miles away from them. He continues: “It’s a mindset people in small towns and a lot of working class people have, people who don’t leave the local area, these people live hard lives. He thinks a lot of Leave voters had a “f**k the EU” attitude, because “they haven’t got an option to go over to Spain or Germany to work, these things are completely f**king unimaginable, you know, so no wonder they were alienated from it”. “I reckon there’ll be quite a few riots eventually, when more cuts are made, because the poor are gonna get it in the neck, aren’t they? Somewhere along the line you’re gonna get someone on an estate just kicking off, and it’s gonna do it like it did in Tottenham.” That said, he can see that emotions are starting to boil up.
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