An endearing hotchpotch of homespun grooves and mordant Northern wit, YARD ACT are Britain’s busiest buzz band. But can they compete in the big leagues while still keeping it DIY? “What we’ve realised,” they tell ANDREW PERRY, “is that we can have it both
‘‘ YOU LEARN A LOT PLAYING TO EMPTY ROOMS,” SAYS James Smith, the bespectacled singer of Yard Act. “You learn that you don’t want to go back to them.” Smith is reflecting on his Leeds-based group’s unlikely transformation into one of 2022’s most hotly tipped, with a debut long-player, The Overload, that’s best described as Arctic Monkeys meet Sleaford Mods – their driving grooves a robust platform for Smith’s wry postcards from a Britain mired in disappointments big and small. It’s a world-view hard-baked by the 10 years Smith served with noise-rockers Post War Glamour Girls, the appeal of whom might be described as selective. “Although we had a pretty strong following in Wakefield,” he deadpans.
2019 was the low-point for Yard Act’s two prime movers. That winter, Smith, recently married but at a loose end musically, loaned his spare room to bassist Ryan Needham, erstwhile driving force behind boy-girl noise-poppers Menace Beach, whose run of three 2010s albums for London indie Memphis Industries had also just dried up.
Smith had led Post War Glamour Girls as a blood-and-thunder rock howler through four LPs but found he “couldn’t keep up the anger that that band required”. That year, he’d started up a straight-down-the-line alt-country band called Cruel World. It could hardly have been further from where he’s ended up.
“I was into classic, Glen Campbell-style songwriting, and I almost didn’t want my personality in there,” he explains, “just this ‘blankist’ image of the vessel for The Song.”
IN YARD ACT, BY CONTRAST, SMITH’S PERSONALITY IS THE MAIN EVENT. Raincoat-clad, he commands the stage with a dry charisma that’s drawn favourable comparisons with Jarvis Cocker and Mark E Smith (he’s actually from the Fall singer’s hated Cheshire). Back then, though, he was struggling to find a voice, one that connected anyway. It was only when his lodger started looping basslines and drum patterns that he discovered
one, adding vocals to Needham’s tracks in a more declamatory, spoken style. “When the music is that bare-bones,” he reasons, “you’re more connected to the rhythm – not far off rapping.”
Smith admits he’d followed Sleaford Mods since the release of 2013’s Austerity
Dogs, drawn to its artwork’s echo of Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head, and there’s a clear parallel between the core partnership of Needham and Smith in Yard Act, and in Sleaford Mods, where Andrew Fearn’s backing tracks unlocked a creative door for Jason Williamson, who’d likewise been plugging away fruitlessly in guitar bands, including post-Britpoppers Meat Pie.
The first song Smith and Needham came up with was The Trapper’s Pelts, in which, against Fall-ishly lumbering backing, Smith satirised today’s cut-throat gig economy via a picaresque fable where the narrator buys discounted furs off a trapper, makes a mint selling them down the local market, but ultimately feels “gnawing guilt” as his underpaid supplier is left “shivering, naked and alone”.
In early 2020, the duo played their first shows as Yard Act, and dropped The Trapper’s Pelts into a set of the “Guided By Voices lo-fi rip-offs” they’d concurrently been hatching, with bonus mates on drums and guitar.
The latter pair quit when Fixer Upper, a prospective B-side for a Trapper’s Pelts 7-inch, came back from remixing by Sheffield producer Ross Orton with “this beefy 808 drum machine pounding away under it” – too electronic for them. Smith’s lyric told of an upwardly-mobile Everybloke called Graham, who spouts casual xenophobia and ruins his street with needless rebuilding and “poundshop terracotta frogs everywhere”, and this unforgettable slice of aural portraiture duly landed on BBC 6 Music – connection made, at last.
Graham, says Smith today, is a composite character, based on “kids from the football team’s dads, someone who lived down the street when I was young, an uncle who isn’t my favourite uncle, and just people in the pub. (Pause) That type of man comes fully formed without being based on one person… and he lives with me now.”
Two years on, Smith’s obser vational wit has publishing houses clamouring over a 50,000-word novella he’s written, with the trapper as the main character, and cameos from Graham and a vicious pub landlord from The
Overload’s title track, called Fat Andy.
“I was trying to write a short story for the second 7-inch sleeve,” Smith reveals, “to embellish those first four songs, and it just sprawled. Now my agent’s saying, ‘It doesn’t all have to be connected to Yard Act. You can be a writer in your own right.’”
SMITH’S EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLD BEGAN in Lymm, a leafy riverside village on the outskirts of Warrington. His dad worked in a supermarket, his mum as a child-minder, and they lived “on a council estate at the far end of town”.
He had a drum kit in his teens, but had more aspirations towards animation, which is why the debut album by Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz was his listening epiphany – “hip-hop, punk, funk, folk, Latin music and dub reggae all being drip-fed to me through cartoon monkeys”.
At college age, he moved to Leeds to do a music production degree, where he met the other members of Post War Glamour Girls. Rather like Dublin and Melbourne, two cities which have bred successful indie scenes in recent years, Leeds has its own selfsufficient DIY culture, largely oblivious to mainstream acceptance. DIY certainly describes the duo recordings Smith and Needham made during the pandemic’s first lockdown as they pinged music and vocals back and forth (“It was the polar opposite of writing in other bands I’ve been in,” says Needham, “a lot faster and freer”). And once lockdown lifted in summer 2020 they shifted into higher gear,
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