“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. That started out as a trope too, until he realised he enjoyed wearing it. The ice in our drinks has long since melted – it’s too hot for Smith to wear his trademark trench coat for the show. Sigrid: ‘It is scary to be that vulnerable’.Nikki Lane: ‘I am addicted to weed and antiquing’.Ursula von der Leyen says Nord Stream gas pipeline leaks are 'act of sabotage'.She’s convinced I’ve written a lot more about my own life than I’m aware of.” “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. 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. 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. “You did all the things I didn’t like doing, like paying for brunch – you kept taking my wife out for brunch. 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. Smith met his wife, a mental health nurse, in Leeds (“a 4am snog in Bad Apples”).
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.
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. “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”. “I think all of modern Britain is a hang-up from colonialism,” Smith says. Even the instrumentation has a suspicious quality to it, thanks to the moody bass that prowls beneath the band’s oddball harmonies. “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”.
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. Eager comparisons were also drawn to the Sprechgesang (spoken-word singing) scene populated by IDLES, Sleaford Mods, and Black Country, New Road. 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. The Leeds-formed group snuck into the charts in 2020 amid a cavalry of post-punk acts. In an interview last year, Yard Act frontman James Smith spoke about how his band had “Trojan Horsed” the music industry.
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