What’s the difference between a bit of grassy structure, and a yard?
Unlike a front-lawn or a communal space of patchy green, a yard has the respect of Kelis, can be privately-preened, publicly enjoyed and – both simultaneously or when left to its own paved devices – fuck all difference is made due to its natural accessibility and tendency to plot itself in spaces that shy away from any sunny-interactions of the unnecessary kind.
Cyclically iconic with a communal air of haphazardly-maintained shade, in ‘Fixer Upper’, Leeds’s Yard Act are the punk-ish equivalent to a four-way Zoom session in which all offenders are sat back-to-back in the same room; receptively interchanging blurred chaos, and unanimously provoking an inner-ear-echo that spurts gossip with rhythmically discorded disruption, and pays very little attention towards respite throughout the duration of their three-minute call.
Channelling the inspired idiom of “Graeme” – an amalgamated brasher with a tendency to believe “he’s from a country and generation that achieved the apex of everything, so therefore can’t ever be wrong about anything”- ‘Fixer Upper’ is a yappers paradise. The four-piece bullishly babble with their heads full of copious wit and all the dial-up in-sensibilities of John Cooper Clark if ‘Beasley Street’ were to have had a power shortage, with the punk-plugs switched on to analogue-saving mode. Clunky and caustically cross-wired, when all it takes is one hypothetical moron to uproot any attempts at social decency, and a lockdown to keep us inside our plots of disorder whilst eyeing our peers suspiciously through the gauze, it’s the turn of Yard Act to rise above the daily-grind and sprinkle a bit of jovial-jaunt across our land once again.
We might not be able to extract Graeme from society, but we can socially distance ourselves from intolerance.
Header Photo by James Brown
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