Part of an irregular series of bite-sized posts about 7″ singles I own – shameless nostalgia from the days of vinyl. (Search ‘Backtracking’ to collect the set!)
YEAH YEAH NOH – The Cottage Industry EP (In-Tape, 1984)
The absurdly named lo-fi combo from the English Midlands made zero imprint on the national psyche but hit a soft spot with me. The winning detail lay in the lyric “cottage industrial rap / plenty of water in the tap” which gave a sub-cultural endorsement of one of my mom’s catchphrases.
Along with “come on in you’ll ‘ave it dark” when we stayed out playing too late, she was fond of pointing out that there was “plenty of water in the tap” if we complained of being thirsty. Yeah Yeah Noh came from the East Midlands in Leicester while I was brought up in Lichfield in the West Midlands but this song suggests a linguistic common denominator.
“Putting the fun back into being pretentious” and sounding a little like The Fall, they were bound to find favour with John Peel, which, somewhat inevitably, is where I heard the three tracks on this EP : Cottage Industry /Bias Binding / Tommy Opposite.
The songs are rich in telling details of the days in the life of downtrodden citizens in mid-80s Britain and note the generally dire state of the airwaves beyond Peel’s life-preserving late night slot. A direct hit comes with the sneering put down of an unnamed “Radio 1 new soul combo, talentless but disco photogenic”.
A lost classic.
Nowadays, everybody has their own definition of what Punk Rock sounds like but back in 1976 there wasn’t much to go on.
