In an interview last year, Yard Act frontman James Smith spoke about how his band had “Trojan Horsed” the music industry. The Leeds-formed group snuck into the charts in 2020 amid a cavalry of post-punk acts. Early singles – the juddery “Dark Days” and the foot-stomping “Fixer Upper”, with its funky “Fame” guitar squalls – saw the four-piece (completed by Ryan Needham on bass, Sam Shipstone on guitar and Jay Russell on drums) lumped in with London bands such as Dry Cleaning and Black Midi. Eager comparisons were also drawn to the Sprechgesang (spoken-word singing) scene populated by IDLES, Sleaford Mods, and Black Country, New Road. But Yard Act’s wry yet good-humoured take on post-punk always had that extra dose of salt, Smith’s tongue firmly in cheek.
“It’s weird, I feel there were a lot of good reviews for the first album that I disagreed with,” the 32-year-old says. He’s referring to their excellent debut The Overload, released in January and shortlisted for this week's Mercury Prize. “A lot of people seemed to get the wrong impression of us but still praised it. I felt like they’d missed the angle I was coming from. They thought it was a ‘state of the nation’ thing, anti-Brexit, anti-Tory.” He’s lounging in his chair at a restaurant in Sicily, where Yard Act are performing as part of Ypsigrock festival. “Grazie,” he says to the waitress clearing away his plate, in a passable Italian accent. “Was that good?” he asks, then puts on his best Westminster boys’ school voice: “I do a very good northern accent as well.”
The warm northern burr returns as he chats with Needham. They’ve been friends for years, meeting at a party in 2013 then orbiting one another as they played in their own bands – Smith’s Post War Glamour Girls and Needham’s Menace Beach – and bonding over pints down the pub. An idea for a new group was floated, and in 2019, Yard Act was born.
The Overload is a taut spring of a record. Its 11 tracks bristle with energy, dealing out Smith’s astute lyrics with a Swiftian (Jonathan, not Taylor) rhetoric about traditionally unsympathetic characters. Listen and you’ll find yourself perhaps not sympathising, but at least hearing them out instead of dismissing them completely. Smith grew up listening to Arctic Monkeys’ jittery Sheffield rock in his hometown of Lymm, Cheshire, and clearly riffs on Alex Turner’s early habit of romanticising the mundane: squabbling couples, bar brawls, ritz-to-the-rubble sleaze. “[Arctic Monkeys] and The Streets were the two bands who made me realise I could write about what was around me, romanticise it, find beauty in normal surroundings and realise that was exotic to someone else,” he says.
Elsewhere on the album, he reckons with an innate selfishness that seems to permeate much of post-Brexit Britain, along with a stubborn refusal to face up to our own history. “Though there is beauty in a whole truth/ The knotty roots of a shameful past, will never let it be,” he croons on “Land of the Blind”. Even the instrumentation has a suspicious quality to it, thanks to the moody bass that prowls beneath the band’s oddball harmonies. “I think all of modern Britain is a hang-up from colonialism,” Smith says. “We’ve never faced our past head on.” We’re speaking in the same week that Tory leadership candidate Rishi Sunak declares he wants to punish anyone who “vilifies our country”. Smith scowls. “It’s bananas. I can’t get my head around it.” Education, he thinks, is one of the biggest problems: “We don’t teach kids in schools about what our past really was. Until we actually bluntly acknowledge that we profited from the slave trade and colonialism, we’ll never understand why we are” – he corrects himself – “were a rich nation. We’re never gonna understand.”
I think all of modern Britain is a hang-up from colonialism. We’ve never faced our past head on— Yard Act frontman James Smith
Critics were impressed enough by The Overload to nominate it for this year’s Mercury Prize, alongside records by rappers Little Simz and Kojey Radical, indie-rock duo Wet Leg, and, er, Harry Styles. Smith couldn’t make the shortlist announcement in London because he was in Doncaster, looking after his 18-month-old son, Huey. Needham ended up doing the press interviews – he enjoys them but struggles to provide as much insight into his bandmate’s lyrics. “I don’t know man, I just play bass,” he says, laughing. “It’s not like I’ve written socialist basslines.”
They feel some pressure to act as Leeds ambassadors, but enjoy flirting with the tropes that come with that: “It’s fun to play with, and it’s an inherent part of who we are,” Smith says. One of the most notable examples of this transpires on “Rich”, where he chants: “Skilled lay-buuh in the private sec-tuuh.” It was bait for critics looking for blatant nods to Mark E Smith and The Fall. “There is stuff on the album where we deliberately recorded more lines to sound more like it, to wind people up,” Smith says, with a grin. Yet they still ended up with a few music video directors taking them at face value when pitching ideas: “They were all like, ‘OK, you’re from the north so you’re in a gritty council estate, you’ve got flat caps, there are pie shops…’ and it’s like, no, you’ve got it wrong!” Needham says.
Smith met his wife, a mental health nurse, in Leeds (“a 4am snog in Bad Apples”). Needham moved into their loft for a couple of years when he had to move out of his own place: “We shared you quite well,” Smith tells his bandmate fondly. “You did all the things I didn’t like doing, like paying for brunch – you kept taking my wife out for brunch. And she doesn’t particularly like staying up ’til 4am drinking cans and writing demos.” It was his wife who told him about how intrusive thoughts can manifest in dreams – much of Smith’s writing flits in and out of a more subconscious realm, where familiar characters are given an abstract edge. He’s always had a vivid imagination – his dad, a former pawn shop manager now bus driver, gave Smith his love of books, from reading The Hobbit to him as a child to handing him a copy of On the Road when he dropped him off at university. “He’s a good egg,” Smith says. “Changed my life in interesting ways.” He saw his mum recently and says she listed “about 20 things off the album she thought were references to growing up. She’s convinced I’ve written a lot more about my own life than I’m aware of.”
The ice in our drinks has long since melted – it’s too hot for Smith to wear his trademark trench coat for the show. That started out as a trope too, until he realised he enjoyed wearing it. “The first gig we ever did I wore it as a joke, and the photos came back and I thought, I look quite good! It became a bit of a cape, a stylistic thing,” he says. “It’s commandeering. And swishy.” Apparently there’s a song on their in-the-works second album called “Trench Coat Museum”, about Smith’s own ego. It’s something he’s been “grappling with quite a lot”, amid growing fame and everyone having their own opinion on the band. As long as it’s not another record about “being a new dad and discovering what it is to be responsible,” I say, quoting press release spiel. “Uh, the second album is about fatherhood…” Smith says, while Needham guffaws. “Nah. It’s a concept record about a roadie for U2,” he continues, grinning. “I’m gonna play chicken with you and see if you put that in…” Another Trojan Horse? Who knows.
The Mercury Prize award ceremony takes place on 8 September at the Eventim Apollo in London
