Some thoughts about Yard Act and the British working class
I wrote this review in Doncaster. This is relevent
I’ve often thought that where a record was listened to and written about, should be declared alongside the record review itself. I’m certain that the albums I listened to and wrote about while deployed in the offices of music magazines, were often coloured by the unhappiness I sometimes felt in those times. Similarly, the long weekend I recently spent in my hometown of Doncaster, just over thirty miles from Yard Act’s host city of Leeds, listening to that band’s debut album The Overload is relevant to the thoughts that I share here.
I know the people in Yard Act’s songs. I know them really well. I drank (sometimes illegally) with the stoic old men of the title track, who supped bitter and dismissed the hope of a better world as youthful folly. I know the racists of ‘Dead Horse’, broken people who’ve filled the absence of hope with hate (and I can confirm that I snorted lukewarm coffee out of my nose the first time I heard the lyric, ‘Are you seriously still tryna kid me / That our culture will be just finе / When all that's left is knobheads Morris Dancing / To Sham 69’). While their eulogy to mediocre men – only much kinder than that sounds – on ‘Tall Poppies’ (probably the record’s best song, certainly it’s most welcome shift in sonic tone), explains why I see the same faces, only craggier and greyer, in the same haunts, every time I return home.
What I like about Yard Act’s songs is that they tell stories about the working class that are not only rarely told but defy the established framing of the British working class, portrayals established by culture journalists who’ve never once set foot in Rotherham. By the time I’d first bought the NME – a lifelong obsession of mine, but also the moment I was besieged by the fetishisation of the working class – I was fourteen. The local pit was two years closed. The unions had long been crushed. God knows what happened to the women who sat at the gates to the pit protesting it’s closure, but that’s a housing estate now, while the veterans who sunk pints at the miner's welfare did so with muscle and bluster but little in the way of heart.
And the men who dug for crushed dinosaurs below ground to warm up our homes? They were already on government funded training courses, trying to make sense of Excel and enjoying not having to scrub under their fingernails every morning and every night. I rarely heard songs sung about these people. The first time I heard a racist slur, a homophobic one, or witnessed a man pat a ladies bottom without consent, I was in my hometown.
When I walked past the miners welfare, I never saw a black face or a brown one. That those faces never featured in conversation about the working class briefly led me to the belief that those communities must be lazy, a view contradicted by the roaring trade in sari’s and Indian sweets on Doncaster market. The men who drank in my local never wanted to talk about politics or culture but what deals Sky had on right now. They all looked like Kevin Keegan – who, incidentally, was born in my village, at his aunt’s house in Elms Place, behind the school I went to (his aunt had electricity, his parents did not). These men smelled of Brut and Shepherd’s Pie. They put Gary Glitter on the jukebox – no judgement, we didn’t know then, and besides, those songs banged. Moustaches were very popular.
These people – my people - weren’t suffering financially but spiritually. When the pit went the soul of the village was torn away. Friends lost touch. Pubs became kebab shops. And increasingly, the areas that were once the rosiest of red, became blue. But that was okay if they could afford a new Ford Fiesta. No such thing as society. Thatcher’s masterplan realised in the forecourt of a garden centre.
I don’t like everything about the Yard Act album. It could do with a different texture; a different bed for those spirally guitars and singer James Smith’s one-note ranting. And there’s nothing on it nearly as arresting as former single (and via comedian Daniel Kitson’s great, brilliantly shambolic Resonance FM radio show, my introduction to the band) ‘Fixer Upper’ – I know that guy too, Graham, with his two homes, a Rover and an awful lot of bluster. But I can’t remember hearing a record that exposes the tragedy of the British working class quite so astutely, at least not since the glory days of Sheffield’s Pulp, a band much more worthy of being referenced alongside Yard Act than the lazy post-punk tag which dogs them.
I can hear the sadness of my hometown in the songs of Yard Act. It’s a much more authentic portrayal of the British working class, as stands, than the anthemic bravado of Comrade Bragg or the pomp of Oasis. Theirs are songs befitting these predominantly northern places, areas trying to rebuild, only on soft sands, the bedrock of industry and community chipped away, a Matalan, a Harvester and a dozen vape shops built where strong, durable things were once made. At the time of writing, the record sits at number 2 in the actual pop charts. The fastest-selling debut album on vinyl of any band this century. Remarkable.
It's stupid thinking a document as nuanced as a record can be summarised with a number. But if you must, The Overload gets four Spoooks.
Hey. There’s a new episode of my music podcast out now. It’s a nice conversation with James Spence from Rolo Tomassi, another Yorkshire band I like a lot. And why not check out my podcast Shame, which wrapped Season One with a far-ranging conversation with the writer/journalist Jon Ronson, just last week?