Despite being hatched in the none-too-rock’n’roll environs of Leicester University (and, apparently, containing alumni from Leicester Poly plus
Birmingham and Liverpool Unis as well) it’s curious as to why Yeah Yeah Noh have so far failed to be awarded the ubercult status of, say, Wire or The Blue Orchids, considering that they produced virtually the only genuinely psychedelic music that wasn’t retro (allowing for a few exceptions like Julian, the Television Personalities and the early Mary Chain of course) during that fallow 1984–86 watershed period in the annals of UK post-punk. This compilation, cherry picked by lead singer and lyricist Derek Hammond with assistance from Tim Madgewick, showcases a fine treasure trove of songs that drew little or no public attention outside their home town bar the standard accolades fom the John Peel / NME axis.

Although the tracks are not presented in chronological order, the earliest offerings here are from the 1984 mini-album “When I Am A Big Girl”. These are “Cottage Industry”, “Bias Binding” and the inevitable Joe Orton ode “Prick Up Your Ears” (Leicester, remember), plus Peel Session recordings of “Beware The Weakling Lines” and “Starling Pillowcase And Why”. Each of these cuts resonates with a distinctly Fall-like rockabilly bass rumble topped off with Hammond’s similarly MES-like penchant for cryptic, sardonic social commentary and a strong affinity with Brit indie compatriots like The Nightingales, Television Personalities and Marc Riley’s post-Fall outfit the Creepers. (Incidentally Riley, now better known as DJ Mark Radcliffe’s sidekick Lard, was the co-owner of Yeah Yeah Noh’s label In Tape.) 

“Beware The Weakling Lines” is a wry pisstake of pasty-faced indie kids who adopted a bogus black leather-clad wasted look as a fashion affectation. However, the stinging Velvets-like punk/raga drone of “Prick Up Your Ears” suggested a strong psychedelic influence as well, and it was this side of their music that would explode into supernova on their first full-length album proper, the preposterously titled “Cutting The Heavenly Lawn Of Greatness … Last Rites For The God Of Love”.

Over half of the album’s cuts are included here. “Temple Of Convenience” rips off the “La Bamba” riff and couples it with a strange lyrical saga of a teenage girl joining a relgious cult. The single, “Another Side To Mrs. Quill” is a haunting and ever-so-slightly sinister sounding song which seems to be about a bored suburban housewife experimenting with hallucinogens in order to colour in a dull existance shackled to an unattentive husband.

“The Short-Cut Way To Saturday” and “Married Miss New Jersey” are the most tuneful, melancholic elegies that Dan Treacy never wrote. Meanwhile, “Blood Soup” — represented here in its Peel Session version — is a harrowing and trippy anti-nuclear epic which, in a moment of supremely black (and effective) juxtaposition, quotes the Shangri-Las’ “Train From Kansas City” before launching into a sample-laden blitz-out of truly volcanic proportions. 

The remaining highlights are the bouncy-but-oddly-downbeat-at-the-same-time “Superimposed Man”, and the witty gospel/rockabilly ode “Stealing In The Name Of The Lord”, both of which recall the lighter, more vituperative side of the band showcased earlier in the Nightingales-like “Cottage Industry” and “Bias Binding”. Two tolerable but dispensible surf-punk instrumentals and a batch of “post-split demos” (actually recorded in 1987 by Hammond and guitarist John Grayland’s subsequent band the Time Beings) include the previously unreleased gem “Hands Up For Happiness” and show the pair’s songwriting to have been heading in an even more melodic, downbeat direction after YYN.

Overall, in tandem with musically dissimilar but contemporaneous US outfits like the Meat Puppets and Husker Du, Yeah Yeah Noh showed that the real future of psychedelia lay in filtering it through the disciplined lens of punk’s Year Zero austerity, rather than merely trying to recreate the 60s without any attempt to validate their sound to fit a more cynical era (see The Paisley Underground). They also had both punk spikiness and melodic cuteness in spades and yet were so seperate from the UK indie scene’s predominantly London/Glasgow-based mainstream that no one thought to include them on the “C86” compilation. Shame they didn’t stay together as long as The Fall…