Jon McClure, leader of Sheffield group Reverend and the Makers, is racing through the various stages of his 20-year career. “I’ve been Alex Turner’s best mate, one-hit wonder, Twitter gobshite, Jeremy Corbyn’s best mate.” And now? “I’ve got this comedy thing with my brother,” he says of his part in Chris McClure’s hugely popular parody football manager character Steve Bracknall. “I’m the chairman of the oldest football club in the world,” he adds: McClure has just taken up the role at Sheffield FC, formed in 1857. “And I’m having an Indian summer with the music.”
That’s certainly true: the eighth Reverend and the Makers album – the hook-filled, modern, northern soul reverie Is This How Happiness Feels? – is the band’s best since their 2007 indie-electro, social commentary debut The State of Things (with signature tune “Heavyweight Champion of the World”) and its hugely underrated politically charged 2009 follow-up A French Kiss in the Chaos.
But at 44, McClure has also reached a stage of personal growth. We meet in the sunny outside seating area of a west London bar, McClure sat alongside his wife and bandmate Laura having just appeared on Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch; he’s still dressed in his best beige suit. “I look like a Colombian crime lord, or a young Jim Bowen.”
McClure has always talked a good game – his nickname “The Reverend” was anointed to him by former Arctic Monkeys bassist Andy Nicholson because of a tendency to be loud and preachy – but a recent ADHD diagnosis, coupled with grief from the death of his father in 2023, has brought a new perspective, and some reflection. “The only way I can describe it is you felt a bit out of place your whole life – that’s why you feel the way you do,” he says of his ADHD. “It’s emotional when they first tell you.”
He’s actually been saying sorry a lot recently. McClure has left 55 voice notes to friends, family and public figures apologising for past behaviour and comments. “I can be full of love and joy, but what’s the inverse of that? Rage, anger, hostility. Who wants to carry that round for the rest of their life? Let it go.” He’s had his fair share of spats with other artists over the years. “I’ve had beef with them all.” The 1975’s Matt Healy got an apology. “I was a d**khead to him and a knob about his band. Example tweet, ‘Ur in boyzone mate. Ya not Cobain’. I mean, he had a little chip at me after I apologised. But that’s your shit, not mine.”
He’d send one to Calvin Harris if the producer hadn’t blocked him: Harris was always a particular target for McClure’s ire. “McDonald’s music” was one insult; McClure also owned a T-shirt that read “Calvin Harris just presses play.” “Calvin, if you’re reading this, you’re on my list,” says McClure now. Another to receive a note was indeed Alex Turner. The pair shared a flat back in the days when Reverend and the Makers and Arctic Monkeys were heading up the noughties Sheffield scene. “It became commoditised, but for a minute, like six months, whoa, it was the most exciting place in the world.”
But he felt an apology was in order. “Imagine you’re a footballer and your mate is Lionel Messi, how do you feel? You’re massively jealous. It’s ugly. Everyone feels it, but no one wants to admit it. And my thing for years was to run away from that ugliness. But what happens when you turn around, don’t take any drugs, don’t take any drink, and just walk straight into all that ugliness and own it? That’s why I get on with Robbie.”
That’s Robbie Williams, McClure’s new best mate, who features on the new Makers track “F**ked Up”. Williams texted McClure out of the blue – “I was in my kitchen just having a brew” – having enjoyed McClure’s feature and co-write on The Lottery Winners’ “You Again”. The next thing he knew, he was visiting Williams in Switzerland. “We just stayed up for three days – sober – just yakking. And he said, ‘Are you gonna let me sing on one of your songs?’”
The track, about overdoing the partying until you become a casualty, is very on-brand Robbie fare. “What am I going to tell Rob about being a mad bastard? He’s done it all, times a billion. He’s a guru. He’s the wisest geezer in all of music. It’s obvious he’s been therapised. But equally he’s not lost the fact that he grew up in a working man’s club in Stoke. He’s such a sound man.”
Is This What Happiness Feels Like? was mostly written before the death of McClure’s father, but re-recorded afterwards to give the songs – a mix of joy, love and grief – their euphoric sonic feel. As well as Williams, it features his friend and actor Vicky McClure (no relation) on the northern, soul-stomper “Haircut”; the pair created the daytime disco event Day Fever.
The album title is testament to McClure’s new outlook. “I used to think life was very black and white, dealing in absolutes, like a cowboy film, goodies and baddies. You’re happy or you’re sad. I guess it’s my way of saying that emotions are not a linear thing.”
It hasn’t come easy. He says his Sheffield upbringing, scarred by the suicide of his uncle, left him with “a sense of melancholy. You’re born with the blues. It’s a Sheffield thing, a northern thing, a working-class thing.” He says his friend Richard Hawley, who convinced McClure to re-record the album in Sheffield rather than America, conveys this sense beautifully. “There’s a thing in Sheffield where we’d rather sometimes not have something nice in order to enable us to moan about it.” His choice of career exacerbated things. “I struggled with bad mental health all the way through the first 15 years of the band, absolutely off my head on gear.”
He realises now it was partly why he was so outspoken politically. A vociferous supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, it was McClure who brought the then-Labour leader onstage the day the “oh, Jeremy Corbyn” chant first began, at The Libertines’ 2017 show at Tranmere Rovers’ Prenton Park. “That followed us around for ages.”
Over the years he tweeted on politics habitually, and appeared on TV regularly, including a heated debate with Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain in 2018. “I built this massive following, which probably kept the band in business. At one point we’d gone right down the shitter, playing Cleethorpes Rocks with the stage blowing away. I thought we were finished.”
But the political combativeness became all-consuming. “It was an ADHD hyper-focus, and it was merely the manifestation of my own personal unhappiness. I just realised one day, Boris Johnson is not the root cause of my issues.” He remains left-wing and engaged; he has exchanged messages with Green Party leader Zack Polanski (“I like him – good guy”) and still hopes for a progressive alliance. But he’s not as belligerent.
He recently met Sir Keir Starmer – “I’m not a centrist or neoliberal” – during a meeting about the Government helping to keep the World Snooker Championships at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. “I did think, ‘I’m going to f**king tell you…’ And then when I got in the room, I thought, ‘I’m just gonna sit and deal with why we’re actually here, because on this particular issue we want the same thing.’ Does that make me a sellout? Not really. It makes me not an angry, shouty bastard. I’m not nationalist, but I have civic pride. And it was about what was best for Sheffield.”
Civic pride is what Sheffield FC is about. A boyhood Sheffield Wednesday fan, his intention isn’t to emulate the Hollywood story of Wrexham FC, but to make the club the centre of the community, to promote both the club and the city. “It’s a very Sheffield thing to have invented a game that 3.4 billion people love, and then sort of forget about it. Liverpool has The Beatles. Sheffield has football. It’s our job to commercialise that.” Since starting in February, he’s already broken attendance records, and has big plans to make the club a tourist destination, as well as build a new stadium back within the city centre. “You’re trying to arrest 169 years of dysfunctional activity. But I’m up for the challenge.”
There’s a sense of McClure’s perseverance paying off. The last Makers album, 2023’s Heatwave in the Cold North, went to number six, and last August they played their biggest-ever gig to 10,000 people in Sheffield. But there’s been periods of criticism and indifference, and a certain critical snobbishness that popular northern indie bands tend to endure. “That’s dogged me my entire career, the idea that somehow it was anti-intellectual or landfill indie. If there’s an anti-intellectual thing, it’s not in my house.”
He’s revelling as a polymath. More than once, he credits and makes a parallel to the domestic serenity of John Lennon when he made his final album Double Fantasy. “My emotive thoughts are geared towards being a good husband, father, son, brother, friend rather than being Che Guevara.” The peace and calm have been a creative boon. “Damon Albarn told me once you had to be c**t to make good music,” he says. “I’m like, ‘Do you? Because when I’m happy, I write some right tunes.’”
‘Is This How Happiness Feels?’ is out now