Released: 2005
Idiot, former Prime Minister and chief architect of Britain’s current SNAFU, David Cameron at least had the temerity to get one thing right. Speaking of the region’s complex inter relationships on a trip to Leeds in 2015 he was caught supposedly off mic sniggering “We just thought people in Yorkshire hated everyone else, we didn’t realise they hated each other so much.”
It was passed off as a joke at the time. But as any citizen either from or who has lived in the region will tell you, nothing is more fact than the understanding that if an outsider insults the place trouble is almost inevitable, but no group of people is more critical of other parts of Yorkshire than people from Yorkshire.
In the middle of the decade a clutch of indie bands playing rock n’ roll almost overnight gave the region a rarely experienced musical profile, with the Kaiser Chiefs and the Arctic Monkeys both unafraid to use some of it’s colloquialisms and remind everyone that Sheffield and Leeds were cities with a pop pedigree. The bright sparks at the NME even gave the movement a name – New Yorkshire – which was then applied to seemingly dozens of other vowel-flattening contenders.
The Cribs were from Wakefield, a city which bred chippy outsiders who had little time for ostentation or hipster posing. Produced by Edwyn Collins of Orange Juice fame, their second album The New Fellas was released as New Yorkshire’s goldfish bowl effect peaked, but it’s opening track Hey Scenesters was no glossy stab at the column inches and canapés now being dished out. Indebted in sound more to the American nineties (Pavement, Sebadoh, Built To Spill) than Ray Davies or Gang of Four. Singer Ryan Jarman happily slagged off those who came to their gigs specifically to be seen at their gigs; in just over three minutes the scruffy DIY punks who wrote it had transcended a scene they taking the piss out of.
That David Cameron though, ‘ee were a right arse.
The Voice Of Unreason 
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