The frontman is realising his stage dreams by starring in Edgecity which draws on playwright gobscure’s experience of sleeping rough. The pair talk about an urgent, explosive show

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n 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”.