Just a few hours after arriving home from Sarajevo, I was off to the Chelsea for the first Vienna appearance by Sleaford Mods, an eccentric English duo who specialise in obscenity-laden rants dripping with bile and sarcasm. Given their obsession with the thuggishly absurd nature of contemporary life in England, they’re very much an English thing, but that didn’t prevent the Chelsea from being rammed to capacity on this occasion, tickets having sold out weeks in advance. The fact that the following day was May Day can’t have done any harm, either.

It’s been a while since I’ve been in the front row at a gig and found myself having to take evasive action to avoid being sprayed with beer, but that’s the kind of night this was. In fairness, it was only one or two idiots who elbowed their way to the front and insisted on heckling and throwing their weight around as though this was some kind of GG Allin performance, and thankfully they got bored after a few songs and slunk back from whence they had come. Sleaford Mods’ music may be on the aggressive side, but that kind of behaviour is unconscionable.

Most people know what to expect from Sleaford Mods by now, and on this evening they certainly don’t disappoint. Jason Williamson barks out his anger-fuelled texts in a bitter, Midlands-inflected Sprechstimme, while Andrew Fearn loiters at the back of the stage swigging from a bottle of beer and occasionally seeing to his laptop. That device provides the only musical accompaniment to Williamson’s narked vocals, its constant stream of jittery beats echoing the wired tension that emanates from the singer as he stalks the stage. Gesticulating wildly to himself as much as to the audience, his movements lurching from a cocky strut to a simian lumber, Williamson is a fidgety yet compelling presence.

I do wonder how much Williamson’s splenetic diatribes of rage and disgust mean to the Vienna audience, though, since so much of what he writes about is inextricably bound up with the crap quality of modern English life. To really get a song like “Jobseeker”, for example, you have to know that “Jobseeker’s Allowance” is now the official term for what used to be called unemployment benefit. This insidious piece of Newspeak permits no alternative to the recipient of benefits being in a constant state of “actively seeking work”, an absurdity beautifully satirised in the wretched civil servant’s fortnightly chorus of “So Mr. Williamson, what have you done to find gainful employment since your last signing on date?” There can’t be that many in the audience, moreover, who remember not only Tiswas but also its pitiful late-night spin-off, OTT, as well. Such arcane pop-cultural references, entertaining as they are, merely cushion the seething mass of disquiet that is Jason Williamson’s England.