A debut album,
The Overload
(Music As Usual), entered at number two in the UK charts.
A fan with a pedigree like Elton John, who has recorded a new version of one of the songs from that album with them.
A singer who has been an extra in
Peaky Blinders
and that during filming he had a run-in with Cillian Murphy that ended with the musician on the ground.
A little over five years ago this would have been enough for Yard Act to appear on the bill of half of the festivals in this country, dominate the independent media and even show their heads in the mass media.
But right now that independent and Anglo-Saxon post-punk that defines them is once again something residual in almost all non-English speaking territories.
The world twerks
Spain parked Anglophilia to abandon itself to traditionalism and its own tradition.
Meanwhile, these four thirtysomethings from Yorkshire and other music combos with guitars from the islands (Idles, Wet Leg, Shame, Dry Cleaning) remain stubborn in sounds and a way of understanding this business that sounds archaic today and, above all, it is no longer universal.
"There are quite a few bands that do things similar to ours and that have achieved some success in recent years," Ryan Needham (Yorkshire, 32 years old), the band's bassist, points out via Zoom from his home in Leeds.
“I think a change is coming, that the guitars are going to come back, because they always come back.
At least we think so.
If you stay still, sooner or later you end up catching some trend.
Although, to be honest, we are not programmed for success.
I don't know to what extent it is normal for us to triumph."
James Smith (Yorkshire, 32 years old), vocalist, nods from the other half of the screen – he is spread out on the sofa in his house, also in Leeds – and adds: “When we saw that there was an option to be number one, we decided to work hard to do it for a week.
We got to two.
Voucher.
Time to get back to normal."
“When we saw that there was an option to be number one, we decided to work hard to achieve it for a week.
We got to two.
Voucher.
Time to get back to normal."
“When we saw that there was an option to be number one, we decided to work hard to achieve it for a week.
We got to two.
Voucher.
Time to get back to normal."
James Smith, singer of Yard Act. Manuel Vázquez
Normality, everyday life, the most abject miseries of human beings and the ridiculousness of feeling special are some of the guidelines that mark the discourse of James Smith, who conceived
The Overload
as a conceptual album around a character, Graeme, who has already appeared on the group's first single, the self-released
Fixer Upper,
and that we could describe in short as an imbecile.
Smith drinks from the narrative tradition of Ray Davies (The Kinks), Damon Albarn (Blur) or Jarvis Cocker (Pulp), but he lives in the post-Brexit UK, so that mixture of self-injurious humor and tenderness tends to lean toward the former rather than the latter.
“I am struggling to be optimistic.
In fact, I managed to have a certain redemption, a certain humanity at the end of the album”, he points out with respect to a narrative that mixes the study of the essentially English character with the style of the classic of the literature of the islands,
Fall and rise of Reginald Perrin
(David Nobbs, 1975), with an almost unhealthy fondness for watching First Dates every night.
“I think there's a very English, even Yorkshire element to the lyrics, especially in the humor, but then there's also a universal intention, to tackle big problems.
But without giving importance, knowing that at any moment I can get tired.
It makes no sense to be cynical all the time, because with cynicism nothing is achieved.
I'm not going to become a
hippy either,
because with
hippies
you get even less”, he points out.
The British rock band Yard Act, photographed at the Earth room in London. Manuel Vázquez
Not only is the commitment to a somewhat reviled and even disoriented sound today heroic in Yard Act. There is more.
Success has come to them after more than a decade combing the alternative circuit of Leeds.
"Imagine how we are that moving to Leeds seemed like the hell of a cosmopolitan", jokes the singer, who did not see it feasible to get ahead in this music until he met Needham and together they began to compose some songs in which they met from Talking Heads to Sleaford Mods, going through The Fall, Gang of Four or that hip hop of which Smith is a fan "even before he knew that the US had two coasts".
"And then the pandemic came," intervenes the bassist.
“We had always had bands apart from our jobs, because you have to pay the rent.
Suddenly, you couldn't go out to work, so we could spend all our time on this.
I'd record a bass line, send it to James, and he'd send me back five melody choices in half an hour.
As he was at home… ”.
Today the band seems about to take their sound to new heights.
"The other day I couldn't go to rehearsal because I was alone with my son," Smith spontaneously begins a chat with his bassist.
“We walked past the venue where you were playing and you almost sounded like Rage Against The Machine.
I like that".
Yard Act will perform on September 10 at Mad Cool Sunset, a one-day festival in which the headliners are precisely Rage Against The Machine.
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