YARD ACT

Yard Act’s first album, The Overload, came out while I was in my first year of university, and it soundtracked the whole year for me. I know I’m not the only one; things changed because of that album. ‘100% Endurance’ soundtracked my best friend’s first love; a love that still endures now. A boy I once dated was invited onstage to sing ‘Peanuts’ at one of their gigs and told me the story every time I saw him, just as proud of it as if it had happened the night before. The first press pass I ever applied for was for The Overload tour, and I went twice in the end; first with Isaac, and then with Kirkland. Their frontman James Smith saw my review of their gig and thanked me for my kind words: I was with Kirkland when I saw it and was so happy that I drank four pints and skipped all the way home.

This is all to say that Yard Act’s music has become a kind of currency for me and the people I’ve met in Bristol, however peripherally, that we could exchange as a sign of recognition. The first after-party Negativland went to was DJ’d by Yard Act, which was the first time I met the band's guitarist, Sam Shipstone; he agreed to be a part of the magazine before we had any content to show him at all. On my 21st birthday, Kirkland developed a still from one of the gigs to give me. He’d written ‘The start of something great’ on the back. Negativland and Yard Act, for me, have always been tied together.

It was a big deal for me, then, when I managed to pin Sam down to interview before the first gig they did after the release of Where’s My Utopia? There’s something a little embarrassing about coming to an interview like this with so much heart and history hidden up your sleeve, my head pre-craned to look up at the pedestal I’d put Sam on. It’s impossible to make a person who made music you love understand just why it’s so significant – why it was such a milestone to me becoming an adult – without sounding clichéd, forced, self-conscious. I didn’t bother; I’m just telling you.

Sam is Yard Act’s guitarist, not the band’s songwriter, but he’s a phenomenal speaker; gentle, considered, wry. A towering presence in a dark room – moustachioed, craggy, buttoned up with silver – he knew how to put me at ease like it was sleight of hand. I’d have found it a little embarrassing if I wasn’t so relieved.

I asked him if there was a nervousness about releasing the second album when The Overload had received such universal critical acclaim. ‘We have a sort of irreverence in this band; Ryan often makes a joke about how long this band has left for definite; how long are we going to be in this for, looking at the calendar, saying, “We’ve got 11 months at least.” And we’re all at an age where we’ve done music for a while, and it matters a bit less. There are moments of doubt, I’m sure, but we don’t talk like that to each other.’

I ask whether it had been a conscious decision to move away from the stylings of The Overload, and he nods. ‘I think it’s gonna sound really calculated, and it isn’t, but we just knew we weren’t going to make The Overload again; it was a moment in time. James just writes what he writes, and he doesn’t plan things in that way. I think with a lot of creative people, you create and then you look back and go, “Oh, yeah, I see what this is now.”

‘When we first started writing that album, [James’] idea was to do it about a roadie for U2, and lots of the songs were lyrically about that. And then he suddenly thought, with a lot of these songs, the roadie is me. I think ‘Fizzy Fish’ was an early one. There is something in James’s approach that has the Northern history of Northern poets in it. I think that’s in his spirit.’ This is hardly surprising: their new song ‘Fizzy Fish’ details how ‘It happened so fast that I broke the one thing I could ever fix; How about one last crack at it before we quit the biz?’

The roadie figure seemed immediately transferable to Yard Act’s nods to the struggles of touring The Overload, and I wonder how much of their literal experience became manifest on the release; whether touring had been a difficult experience for them.

‘One of the things I should definitely emphasise is that we’re massively thankful and we’re having a good time; this is a good position. But there is a thing in all our lives where you’re wanting to achieve a goal, and in some rare cases you might achieve it, but most of the time that goal won’t deliver all the things you think it will. In that respect, this isn’t a message about being in a band, it’s about all human achievement. There’s a reality to achieving goals you don’t realise until you’re in that position.

‘And there's some stuff that's rough: for James, he's got a new kid, and he didn't imagine this band was going to explode when he had his first child. So he's trying to balance that; that was really, really difficult with him and his wife. And then there's been a lot of overdrinking and not seeing family. This album talks a lot about an alcohol theme. I was listening to the songs the other day and there’s a lot of drinking, a lot of intoxication there. But it’s good though. Touring is good.’

The tours on the horizon are far more expansive than before. I ask him where he’s most excited to go. ‘I love playing shows in America. I think that they've got a real open spirit. In Britain, we tend to be a bit more critically vicious.’

Yard Act began in Leeds but had some quick turnover with musicians, with the line-up differing slightly depending on the show. Sam joined a little later, but had known Ryan well and James a little prior through the circuit.

‘They’d done three shows before the Covid lockdowns; I'd seen all three and dug it. And I thought, I’d like to be in this band. So circumstances arose that they needed a guitar player in the first lockdown, and they asked me. They sent me a demo of ‘Fixer Upper’, before ‘Fixer Upper’ was released, and asked, "can you do guitar on this and see?" They kept the original guitar for it ‘cause mine was a bit too '90s noise rock.’ He laughs. ‘The guitar on the original’s better.’