More about: Working Men's Club

In 2019, Sydney Minsky-Sargeant and his band found themselves thrust onto the indie scene, hailed as one of the new voices of ‘post-punk’: Working Men’s Club had just released ‘Bad Blood’, which would serve as a sonic misnomer for their later sound. Although WMC maintained its distinctive style of filtered sprechgesang, the jostling guitar rhythms of that first big single are a far cry from their eponymous debut, on which starry synths and pounding kicks reign supreme. 

In the first album cycle, Minsky-Sargeant was a teenager who, like all teenagers, had opinions in abundance – and unlike most teenagers, a battalion of journalists ready to listen. At times, that translated into enthusiastic laudations of songs, professing his love for bands such as The Fall and Kraftwerk. It also gained him a reputation for being, in his words, “a pretentious arsehole”. It didn’t help that the change in musical direction had caused an early fracture, leading to half the band dropping out. 

Still, Working Men’s Club gained a devoted following with their debut. It had everything a debut could want: dance-ready tunes, lyrics to make you guffaw (“You look like a cunt, you fuck like a bitch”) and a clear focus, all with a frontman who wasn’t afraid to speak his mind. But then the pandemic hit, and the band had to put the album out in March 2020 – and postpone the tour to late 2021. Now, with their follow-up, Fear Fear, Working Men’s Club have a proper shot at an album rollout. 

Speaking over the phone from his house, Minsky-Sargeant sounds less like a pretentious arsehole and more like any other lad in a Yorkshire town. He’s polite, if a little tired; he’s come back from The Great Escape, after all. Born to two artist parents, Minsky-Sargeant had always envisioned being a musician. “I’ve been making music since I was four or five, that’s always been my freedom of expression. I never really thought I wanted to be anything else – regardless of whether it’s success there or not, I think I’d have always been doing this in some form”. 

Freedom of expression – that’s a phrase that pops up frequently in our chat. It’s integral to understanding what makes Working Men’s Club so dynamic. As much as it is a creative outlet for Minsky-Sargeant, fans also find solace in his dynamic performance, where he plays with Liam Ogburn (bass), Hannah Cobb (guitar), and Mairead O’Connor (guitar/keys). 

That freedom of expression extends into what Minsky-Sargeant wants people to take from it, too. It was partially conceived as a “soundtrack” to whatever went through his mind at the time of writing, so there’s a lot of competing emotions on the album. Whilst some artists are intent on communicating every detail they put into their songs, Minsky-Sargeant prefers to let the lyrics speak for themselves:”‘I want to leave that for people to interpret in their own way”. 

If the first album was a partial wave goodbye to ‘Bad Blood’, then Fear Fear is an unabashed fuck you. Whilst there’s still traces of delectable guitar riffs (such as on the excellent ‘Cut’), Fear Fear delights in nearly every texture of the synth you can imagine. Here, ruralised teenage angst becomes a global crisis of epic proportions. Where the first album opened with elastic, playful kick drums, Fear Fear begins with a harrowing bellow (alternatively, my own journalistic insight was to simply write “massive fucking bass”).  

“The intensity was important within what I was trying to express, so the gear that we were using was quite fundamental,” he tells me. “Obviously it’s quite an intense and barbaric album and that’s kind of what we were going for.” Minsky-Sargeant typically writes and demos by himself, and then joins producer Ross Orton in the studio to decide what to keep and what to refine, where they produce, mix, and master together. Orton has worked with him since the debut, and boasts production credits as wide as Arctic Monkeys, MIA and The Fall.  

Minsky-Sargeant speaks fondly of him, having referenced (and probably been asked about him) in many an interview. “We’re really good mates. We’ve got a lot in common with the music we’re trying to make, so we’re also able to have comfortable discussions if something isn’t right…he’s a great collaborator and a great friend, I have the utmost respect for him”.

In his bedroom, Minsky-Sargeant has amassed a swathe of synths and drum machines, searching for the right sounds that framed what he wanted to express. Although certain aspects were tightly engineered, much of the turbulent energy you hear was preserved from the demos. “There is all the bits from the demos that we left in most of the tunes… but then there were a lot of the drums that we didn’t rewrite, but reproduced the sounds.”

Another important aspect of Fear Fear was making sure it was “futureproof”. Critics are quick to characterise Working Men’s Club as another part of hauntologist culture, where bands look wistfully back on the good ol’ days of the ‘80s (before swiftly moving onto the good ol’ days of the ‘90s, the ‘00s, and soon enough, the ‘10s). Although Minsky-Sargeant listens widely and appreciatively, he was intent on making his own sound. 

“I never really reference anything in the studio, that’s never a point of topic,” he says. “It’s purely focusing on what we’re working on and being quite grounded in relation to that. That is the sole focus – to work on original music, not to try and copy anything, or reinvent anything. We were trying to make it futureproof, that’s the main goal.”

Much like the debut, Fear Fear is a concise record of ten songs. Minsky-Sargeant usually has a good idea of when to stop, instead of rushing through the process: “I was quite tired from the amount I was giving in the songwriting emotionally, and so I felt like enough had been said at that point within this record… It’s good to have clear boundaries as to when you do think something’s done and just stick to that, because otherwise you can start going around in circles.”

It’s not quite right to call Fear Fear an outright ‘lockdown album’, but a lot of the emotional weight lent to the LP was certainly down to it. Some of the songs were written prior to the pandemic – the wonderfully brash lead single ‘Widow’, for instance, was written when Minsky-Sargeant was around sixteen. It also made lyrics like “now I fuck inside my head and not outside” eerily prophetic. “It made sense conceptually in regards to the world that we’re living in. I want this album to be futureproof, but it also documents the time that we’re living in now.”

Lockdown for Minsky-Sargeant was a tricky thing to figure out. Though I tell him his feelings are valid, he’s still hesitant to speak ill of his experience: “I don’t feel like I’ve suffered, perhaps, in the way that other people have, so I’m not gonna be negative in correlation to my personal life… I feel very lucky to have come out of it not having lost any loved ones and being a fairly fit young person who can actually go out.”

It manifests in the hectic chaos of Fear Fear: ‘Rapture’, for instance, features percussion that ricochets from every angle of the song, all pinned down by Minsky-Sargeant’s looming voice: “why is rapture rancid?”

“It was a kind of description of the peril around something quite beautiful, and how the two didn’t fit together – and I know that’s quite a pretentious answer,” he adds. “There are obviously silver linings from lockdown – well, there weren’t many, but you had to find your own pockets of happiness within that… but they didn’t necessarily last past the pandemic.”

In ‘Rapture’, there’s a particular line that strikes me: “Shallow rivers cry/For the wealth of rain and ice/Reverence aloof/When the bricks are youth.” It’s a topic that recurs often in the album, leading to opener ‘19’ and its second verse: “Mislead in an illusion/That power is a pretense/And nature’s place is pretend”.

“I wrote [19] at the very start of the pandemic,” he recalls. “Around the world, we trot around thinking the world’s ours, and actually, there’s a lot of great power within it such as the nature that surrounds us. When I was walking around where I lived during the pandemic, it was completely blossoming, as if there was nothing affecting it for once. This surrounding has been here a lot longer than humans have. And that’s quite an ominous thing to think about in relation to a pandemic that people are scared might not ever end.”

Although there’s a fair amount of doom and gloom on the record, if you’ve read enough of his interviews, Minsky-Sargeant enjoys a piss take, especially if it comes to figures such as Andrew Neil. It probably makes sense that Kurt Vonnegut is a beloved author of his. “I really like Slapstick, Slaughterhouse Five, The Sirens of Titan…” Minsky-Sargeant tells me. “He can be quite funny, but also dark and satirical. I think he’s ace.”

For Working Men’s Club, satire is important to its music: “I think it’s important to take the piss because through all the darkness, it’s got to also not be too serious about things – otherwise, it’s just impossible to enjoy anything, isn’t it? But I think it’s really important to not be too serious within yourself. It’s good to be comedic as well as be very serious all the time. The world we live in, everything’s perhaps taken slightly too seriously these days.”

‘Money Is Mine’, in particular, is one such song. Amongst jaunty melodies and a skittish drum pattern, he deadpans: “End this depression, it’s time/Suicide is yours when the money is mine.”

“I was trying to write quite dark instrumentals at the same time as writing lyrics alone to accompany the sounds of the music,” he explains. “I recall the demo being actually quite a lot darker than the studio recording. But yeah, it was a piss take out of the establishment, and that feeling of knowing, well, no one in power really cares about normal people – money speaks louder than words.”

It’s why he also believes the devastating implications of the pandemic were glossed over: “There was a lot of lies especially in the UK as to what the government were using, they weren’t really spreading things fairly, and now the normal people are having to pay the price. But, you know, suddenly we’re onto the next world issue and it seems like the pandemic never happened… we’re very quick to bury things in the media.”

Although he’s definitely grown in confidence as a person since the debut, Minsky-Sargeant is unsure how much can be attributed to the pandemic. “I’ve probably learned a few things in life, but you know, the same as anyone else. I’ve just kept writing tunes, which is what I’ve always done and always hopefully will do. So I guess that hopefully continues to grow as I get older. But, you know, maybe there is a point where it starts to decline again!” he laughs. “We’ll see how long it goes.”

Minsky-Sargeant is hesitant to really look too far forward in the future – that’s another thing the pandemic has taught him. “Time is obviously a very precious thing, and a lot of people are realising that you’ve got to live your life in the now. I think a lot of people are realising they should take each day as it comes and just value your freedom.”

Fear Fear is out now. This interview appears in Issue 4 of Gigwise Magazine, which is out now.

Issue Four of the Gigwise Print magazine is on pre-order now! Order here.

More about: Working Men's Club