Photography: Rachel Lipsitz

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – ULU, London

Did you clap your hands and say yeah? I bet you did, you hype-addled fool.

Damn straight I did, but they didn’t leave me with a choice.

He can’t sing though, can he?

Oh no you don’t, you can’t tell me this boy can’t sing. OK, for sure, he might not sing how technically singing is supposed to happen, but Jesus, are we really still getting bogged down in those traditions? Can’t sing in whose tune? Who’s deciding this? I love this cracked yelp, jerked out of his serrated voice box and piercing like a terrified fox. We need a new scale, a new standard for song. No, no, no…not a new standard, we don’t need any standard, we don’t need any rules on this. We do need to embrace these voices which strain and fizzle and break and totally collapse, because there’s more life and there’s more death in these, and there’s more credit and integrity (cor, when was the last time we were allowed to mention that round here?) in someone who’s singing through pure need and desperation, someone who needs to sing these words because it’s what they have to do to stop themselves from imploding, than in a million others singing because it’s the thing-they-can-do…So c’mon lets bring in the voices that ain’t pitch perfect according to the old rules, lets forget what we’ve been taught is right and instead give in to what just sounds so, so right and which makes you go…argh, I don’t know how to tell you what it makes you go, but it just gets you, y’know, (I’m thumping my heart with my fist here, by the way) there. If you’re not dealing in standard thoughts, then you don’t need standard delivery. Don’t need? Hell, why would you want it?

Ok, fine, he can sing. It’s just indierock though, I’ve heard it before.

No, it’s not just indierock. Why not? Because CYHSY skew yer indierock right off its template, that’s why. They break glass bottles over bars and cut it up bad. They barbeque it British style, scorch the skin and crisp it up, leaving the inside raw, with blood and sinew creeping over lukewarm bones. CYHSY drag your precious indierock through hawthorn hedges backwards, they lock it in graveyards over night and pick ravenously from its carcass. They kick it, bite it, punch and scratch it. They set killer bees on it and leave it like Macaulay Culkin in My Girl. CYHSY take your indierock to the fairground, fill it with candyfloss, distort it in mirrors, give it carpet-burns on the helter-skelter and make it throw-up on the waltzer. CYHSY don’t give two hoots for your indierock because they’ve got themselves a hyperactive stomp and twitch that seizes like a nuclear itch. They’ve got themselves an agitated, inflamed heart not content to simply beat and pump and do all the other regular heart jobs, but hellbent on doing the breathing, the seeing and the speaking too. CYHSY’s thing is an abrasive and grazed, warped and pummelled, panel-beaten hybrid of what you know as indierock and it swoops up alongside innocent bystanders, dives into their ears and seeps through their entire being…no, no. No. That’s not how they get in, how they get in is through Evel Knievel style heroics; leaping from the stage, tunnel vision focused dead on you cos that’s where they absolutely, 100%, no-questions-asked, have to land, and as your eyes widen and as your jaw drops they’ve already knocked you flat on your back and they just maniacally trampoline on you till you fuse with them. And when they get you it’s a sweet-Jesus-in-heaven-on-a-bike-in-a-snowstorm-what-the-hell-was-that moment and you’re feeling...argh, I don’t know how to tell you what it feels like, but it just gets you, y’know (I’m thumping my heart with my fist here again, by the way), there.

Oh. Kinda wish I’d gone now.

Well, *claps*, yeah.