Yard Act: ‘I’m more interested in the complexity of existence’

Now aged 31, and a comparative veteran of the city’s DIY music scene from a decade spent in the band Post War Glamour Girls, Smith and co-conspirator Ryan Needham, erstwhile guitarist in Menace Beach, are on the cusp of a potential number one album but are very much taking events as they come.

“It’s loads of fun and it’s daft, we’re just having a good time with it,” he smiles. “You only find yourself in this position once, if you ever do at all, so we’re just making the most of it and having a laugh.”

The beginnings of Smith and Needham’s partnership date back to a split single, featuring both of their previous acts, released to mark Leeds store Jumbo Records’ 45th anniversary. “Menace Beach’s first show at the Brudenell was with us and Lone Wolf, that’s the first time I met Ryan,” the singer recalls. “We were like music scene associates over the years. We weren’t close but we’d see each other at gigs and enjoy each other’s company. We probably ended up on a few bills together, then that split single was the first time I really communicated and worked with Ryan, sorting out the artwork, then that blossomed into a friendship and he ended up moving into my spare room for a couple of months in 2019.”

At that point both Post War Glamour Girls and Menace Beach were coming to an end and Smith and Needham decided to “start something new for the fun of it”. Their original remit “ironically” was to be “completely anti-industry” and only release songs on cassette.

“It was just a song writing exercise originally as a way of having fun doing it and avoiding the promotional cycle of what is often a pretty depressing and exhausting part of being in a band, trying to flog your record after you’ve made it,” Smith says.

“This is the first time it’s ever been enjoyable, in all honesty, because loads is happening, that’s what you want. In the past when it didn’t, that was quite tiring and you felt quite defeated by it, so we were anti even trying to promote it because we thought we would just get disheartened again.”

However on this occasion, the pair quickly discovered there was an audience for the music they were making. After creating a Facebook page and putting early singles such as Fixer Upper and Peanuts on Spotify, their reputation quickly spread.

“I guess the remit then became let’s take this seriously because we have a shot,” says Smith. “After Fixer Upper, having had years of experience in known but struggling bands, I turned to Ryan and said, ‘This is a much bigger reaction to anything I’ve ever had here, is it the same for you?’ and he was like, ‘Yeah’, because it just took off really fast.”

The idea to combine no wave-style disco bass lines and atonal guitars with Smith’s largely spoken word, character-filled vignettes came from Needham. “He encouraged me to try the spoken word approach a lot more,” Smith says. “I was originally singing. Trapper’s Pelts, the first single, was the first track where I ended doing the spoken word thing, then became the template for everything.

“The no wave thing, we have a shared love for those bands but particularly Ryan for stuff like ESG and Liquid Liquid, then stuff like The Rapture and LCD Soundsystem. We love those bands, but another part of it was necessity. Ryan had never played bass before and limitation became a brilliant tool, that drove the early sound as much as the influence itself.”

Yard Act’s album The Overload is peopled with quirky characters, some drawn directly from contemporary life, others from memory. “I think a lot of the album’s observations I just reflected on my past and my upbringing, I looked back to a lot of people from where I grew up in Warrington in the North West,” Smith says. Graham, the two-home owner with a Rover in Fixer Upper, was one such.

“The observations are lived-with, so it means a little more three-dimensional, maybe, but there have been a few people on the street. There was a bloke outside the bookies the other day who told me he’d pulled all his own teeth out – that was in Meanwood, I thought we were past it, so there’s those people and you think ‘They might make it into a song’, and you don’t forget a man pulling his face mask down and showing you he’s pulled all his own teeth out because he wouldn’t go to the dentist. But for the most part I know the people I’m drawing on well enough to write about, rather than it just being inside the home of the person on the street.”

Smith says he has become “less judgmental” of people as he’s got older. “I definitely try quite hard to understand why people are the way they are,” he says. “I think I have a genuine interest in trying to understand how a person has ended up at the point they are in their own life, whether they’ve done the right or wrong thing with every decision they’ve made or how it’s formed their character and their beliefs.

“I’m more interested in the complexity of existence and life than I am in finding a finite end goal for morals and what we’re meant to be as a species, and I think that probably stems from the fact that I don’t think we’re that important either, so whilst we have our belief systems those belief systems are constantly shifting and they’re not finite.

“I think a lot of people in recent years really do seem to believe that we are set in stone and good and bad exists, and there isn’t even a spectrum, that’s something I felt was coming out in music quite a lot, probably because the vehicle for pop songs is three minutes and there’s not that much you can get into three minutes.

“With this, I knew I definitely didn’t want to do the whole ‘there’s a divide’ thing because it’s way more complex than that. I’ve definitely got mellower as I’ve got older, the more life experience you gather, the more you realise that none of it’s easy and there’s always more people who have had way harder lives than you and you can’t live in their shoes so you don’t get to decipher why they’ve made the decisions they have. You should be trying to make a connection with those people.”

Six of the album’s 11 songs were written remotely during lockdown, with Smith and Needham sending ideas back and forth. “It isn’t a million miles away from the way we’d both worked on things before,” says Needham. “It was more building tracks on the computer, like remixes or more like electronic music or hip-hop. But not being able to play loud in a room with your mates and get drunk it definitely affects things. If you really start to analyse it or think too much about how it has affected things, it does your head in a little bit.

“We don’t know what the other option would have been, but James was saying the other day, if we’d all been playing in a room he would’ve had to battle to get his vocal over everyone. There wouldn’t have been as much talking because it just wouldn’t have been heard. All these tiny things add up to having an influence on the way it was written and the way the album sounds.”

Yard Act’s deal with Island Records last autumn was an ambitious statement of intent to reach far beyond the confines of the independent DIY scene.

“The indies are kind of the same as the majors but we wanted something more consistent,” Smith says. “I’ve been in a DIY band for ten years with Post War Glamour Girls, Ryan’s been on a small indie label with Memphis Industries, Memphis Industries manage us as well, but when the offers were coming in there wasn’t that much to get excited about the indie offers. I’ve kind of done that before.

“I think if you really believe in what you do there’s a much bigger world out there and there are a lot of people who would be interested in what we do who wouldn’t necessarily hear it because they don’t use the same avenues that we’re associated with, 6 Music and NME. Beyond that the world’s a very big place with lots of people looking to find new music, and to us it seemed why not.

“But the main reason was there were quite a few majors got in touch and we kind of laughed at them all, but Island got us because of the team there. We turned them down a few times and they kept coming back. They got that we weren’t a post-punk band, that there was a lot more going on, and we told them where we planned to go and they were really into that.

“You have to go with who you think gets you the most, really, go with the people you like and trust, and the people that we’re working with at Island are great, they totally got us and encouraged us.”

“Maybe with a bit of experience we realised,” adds Needham. “In your 20s you’re very idealistic and maybe a little shortsighted about some things. People at these major labels aren’t cloak-wearing, ruthless overlords; they’re pretty sound people.”

“Universal is a giant corporation and we are in that system, but that system has many levels,” says Smith. “We’re just knocking around at the bottom being give that Universal money to make stupid music videos and not being bothered and not bothering anyone else. They leave us to get on with it, we’re not enough of a priority that they’re bothered about what we do, we kind of do what we want, it’s great.”

“I love the idea of going for a number one album on a massive major label but with an album that’s inherently anti-capitalist,” says Needham, “it’s kind of perverse.”

“The complexity of life, as we were saying,” smiles Smith.

The Overload is out now. Yard Act are doing a stripped back instore set and signing at the Vinyl Whistle in Headingley, Leeds on January 25. They also play at Belgrave Music Hall, Leeds on February 1, Hebden Bridge Trades Club on February 25, Brudenell Social Club on February 26, Leeds Irish Centre on May 20, Sheffield Foundry on May 22 and O2 Academy Leeds on November 24. yardactors.com