0.31.1b - Gonna Try With A Little Help From My Friends
If my superpower is meeting interesting people and gently inserting myself into their life, it's without doubt that my friend Rachel's superpower is knowing, I think, everyone in the city of Sheffield and its local environs. I've walked into bars with Rachel, gone to lunch with Rachel, visited the Snooker with Rachel; no matter the occasion, no matter the venue, you can be sure we would walk in and within five minutes she'd be greeting someone you'd never seen before in your life like an old friend. If you needed to get in touch with someone in Sheffield and you had no idea how to find them, I'd recommend just handing Rachel a letter and assume that if she doesn't know them herself, someone she knows will. She's direct, and honest, and fun, and incredibly easy to talk to about just about anything, which is probably what makes her a great doctor as well as a great friend.
We met in a fairly normal chain of events, I dated Catherine, who lived with Ben, who knew Andy with whom we played board games, Andy had shared a house with Rachel at some point and so this increasingly perplexing string of connections eventually drew us together enough that we started to get to know each other outside of the weird friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend distance you always get when you are first introduced to someone. Rachel started playing Board Games with us on a Sunday night, and I can't remember when it was, though it must have been early in our relationship, when she asked us if we wanted to come and see her band play.
I think I had only vaguely registered that Rachel was in a band; it had passed with some comment but I'd never really interrogated it. I had no context for what it meant; but I like to support my friends and I love live music so I was never going to say no. That was the first time I saw The Yell, playing at The Plug in Sheffield; What became apparent as I stood, impressed and bemused and slightly overwhelmed by the strength of their performance, was that they weren't just a band your friend was in. They were a Real Band, a band that went on tours, a band which had recorded an album, a band with a tight setlist and hours of practice and an aesthetic; a band knocking on the doors of mainstream success, just waiting for a crack to force themselves through. All in all I saw them Yell perform three times; each time they had a gig somewhere in Sheffield, we'd be there, wondering why something hadn't happened for them, why they weren't, well, famous.
It's weird to me now typing this that I know there's a reasonable chance several members of the band who produced this record might read these words - certainly it will be absolutely the highest proportion of the artists reading my dumb prose of any of the other 700 albums I've listened to this year. I could also probably just say this to them next time I see them at the pub, or a birthday party, but I wanted to take the time to make a corner of the internet which celebrates the fact that this record exists, that this music is available for the world to listen to, and taken against the vast majority of the other 699 commercially successful recordings by artists across the musical spectrum I have listened to this year, this is no less deserving of the critical and commercial acclaim granted to the others - it just somehow never quite found its purchase on the rocky soil of public opinion.
While they were not to know it, the Yellow Pages rebranding to Yell really hurt their SEO
When I saw them perform for the first time, I had flashbacks to seeing Public Image Ltd, the post Sex Pistols band fronted by John Lydon, perform on Top of the Pops. There's the same kind of punk anarchy, alongside some David Byrne and Devo thrown in - punk but with an emphasis on the chaos, the confrontation, but not the violence. This is punk played for fun, and with a sense of thoughtful musicality behind it you might not associate with the "lets learn three chords and throw our guitars into our amps at the end of each show" approach some punk bands would espouse. How many punk bands two part vocals and the occasional tasty drum fill or intricate guitar part?
If you thought me being reductive when trying to describe bands where I'm not likely to run into them in the pub made me uncomfortable, this is, as you can probably imagine, worse. But if you want a good point of comparison, Leeds based alternative punk band Yard Act exist as a modern facsimile, a tribute the the style The Yell were representing more than fifteen years ago, to the point that when I listened to them for the first time a few years ago, the first thing I did was send Rachel a WhatsApp message.
Nominated for a Mercury Music Prize for their first album; won two NME awards the year after releasing their first album, I quite enjoyed listening to Yard Act in 2022, but you cannot tell me there are musical or performative qualities which Down With The Yell! lacks but that Yard Act's The Overload has in evidence. It's a flip of a coin, a roll of the dice, six people in a van throwing darts blindfolded at an invisible target a mile away and if you hit the bullseye, congratulations, you're going to the Mercury Music Awards Ceremony.
Can I redress the fickle whims of fate and retroactively make this album a mainstream success? Almost certainly not, but what I can do is use this tiny corner of the internet to celebrate the fact that it happened, that Down With The Yell! can hold it's head high, stand shoulder to shoulder with Different Class and Dare! as music born in the crucible fires of the Steel City.
Do yourself a favour. Take a chance on something unknown, go listen to this album. It might just be your new favourite record.
