Interview taken ( & edited ) from HermAphrodite #9.
Younger Younger 28’s are but four people; two girls, two
boys. They have become, in my own head, Harrogate’s answer to Bucks Fizz. Their
songs cover tower-block desperation, idle alienation, and VPL’s. They don’t
have a drummer. People mention the Human League a lot around them. Oh, and if
you saw them over the summer, you might well have wandered off with one of
their bright pink helium balloons…
“I wanna be famous, a
star of the screen / I wanna be a teenage boy’s wet dream…”
I found the band
when they were frollicking / gallivanting around the country with My Life Story.
Joe Northern didn’t even have to see my ( mogwai ) bag to remember who I was.
‘Reading in Leeds’ he tells me. ‘You live in Ilkley’. Grin. Today has been
spent chasing V2 Press for a YY28’s interview, but when it comes to the
evening, I sneak in a chat with Joe and Andie mostly because The Crow has
button-holed the singer for me. ( And also for the fact that he’s a very nice
man who was half-expecting me to pop up somewhere on this tour... ) And thus I gain the chance to discuss in
depth the meaning of their peculiar moniker. ) Or so I thought... )
The Younger Younger 28s have claimed - on ITV2’s ‘Bedrock’ (
think late-night T4 ) - that they do not know what their band name means. This
is a lie. They do know what it means. They’re just not telling.
Joe – “We do not what the band name means. ( pause ) We just
don’t share it with the general public. Because it’s pretty dodgy really.”
Andie – “We only found out when it was too late to change
it.”
It’s all Jim’s fault. Apparently.
Joe – “Jim came up with it – he knew what it was, but he
told us it meant nothing.”
Andie – “Some sort of ‘word association’…”
Joe – “So we’re blaming it on him now.”
I ask him for some hints. Is it a club, a
position, what?
Joe thinks about it. Briefly.
Joe – “It’s similar to where Sigue Sigue Sputnik got their
name from. That’s the best I can do.”
That computer-game soundtrack thing is Jim’s doing as well.
Andie – “He was the one that chose the [ band ] name; before
he did all this stuff he was writing music for computer games. It’s on ‘Drive’,
or something. I saw that once before we were signed, thinking ‘wow, how did we
get on that?’”
Joe – “I’d like to hear that.”
So would I. Considering the other band on that soundtrack
was Orbital.
Joe – “When we started we didn’t sound anything like we do
now. At all.”
Me – “So a bit of techno boingy-boingy…?”
Joe – “Yeah. Crossed with very hard-core punk. And I
screamed in a voice about four octaves above the Yorkshire drone I sing in
now.”
Well, I wouldn’t call it a drone, but you’ve reminded me of
another topic of conversation; you don’t get that many heavily accented singers
nowadays. Apart from Billy Bragg. Naturally.
Joe – “There’s another unwritten thing that goes through
society – fake liberalism I call it – which says it doesn’t matter where you
come from, but, in fact, it’s not true. Say in music; if you come from
Manchester, you’re alright because it’s got a history. Glasgow, yeah, cos we’re
scared a ya. North East, you’re just loveable rogues. London’s alright too, but
if you’ve got a Yorkshire accent it’s like ‘you can’t sing, go and do comedy
mate’.”
But he didn’t. ( Ha. )
Joe – “I like it when people sing in their accents. And I
always think it’s weird when you get people from Redcar singing in these LA
accents…”
Yup. And while we’re on the subject of the ridiculousnesses
openly accepted by the industry…
Joe – “We went on telly to do ‘We’re Going Out’, 
and were told we couldn’t sing ‘lipstick,
cigarettes, packet of three’. And I said, ‘Okay, we’ll sing ‘lipstick,
crackerbread, packet of cheese’. ‘Yup, that’s fine’.”
Heh-heh.
Oh, and then on the subject of that song… yes, it is true to
life. Well, one part of his life.
Joe – “I lived years in that culture, where I didn’t know
there was anything else. I’d work - and hate it – to get just enough money to
get absolutely arse-holed and off-me-head at the weekend so I could forget how
shit me life was. Basically.”
With the Younger Youngers, Joe and Jim write the songs, Joe
does the words. And yes, it does tend towards the autobiographical.
Me – “So you have met lots of ginger people and been
accosted by a karaoke queen?”
There are giggles.
Joe – “Oooh… mmm… yeah… Half the time it goes off into
fantasy land. Some of them are directly historical, and some of them are quite
sad. I think ‘Valerie’s the saddest one, so far.”
What flows out of him mind does worry him. Sometimes. And
the fact that it flows at all.
Joe – “There are certain people in life who are not very
good at actually participating. But they’re fantastic at observing, and they
tend to be good writers. Form bands. Become martyrs. All that nonsense. ( pause
) It is quite sad though. I’d rather be IN there, living the life, instead of
writing the songs about it.”
And then the door opens, and we’re accidentally trodden on.
Joe announces us to be doing some ‘weird ritual’, and the rest of the
passers-by step around us. And so to continue.
Joe – “It is a cathartic release, I do feel DRIVEN to write.
It means I can’t avoid myself, which I suppose is a good thing. And the ‘ginger
people’ thing – I think I identify with anybody who’s a victim, an outsider,
fucked-up. Always have done. Writing these songs was a way of me trying to face
up to 
a lot of stuff that I’d been avoiding all
me life. Ginger people got picked on at school. But they weren’t the only
ones.”
And saying all of this is a proper Yorkshire bloooooke.
Looking at Jarvis Cocker, you don’t need to know his mother made him go to
school wearing leder-hosen ( true ) to guess that he was alienated in the
playground. But you wouldn’t immediately think it of Joe. Maybe the best
entertainers are the ones that feel they have to be. I know My Life Story were
nothing but effusive Joe and his keep-you-in-stitches stories. This from a man
who is also a master of the rock gesture ( as well as the gurn ).
Joe – “My parents were in a cabaret band, so I was brought
up with this real feel of ‘give the audience what they want’, ‘entertain them
if they don’t like the music’, all that. And then I was into punk rock. And
that era spawned a load of people who expressed themselves in really weird
ways. It’s probably a bit of both, really. I’m stuck between trying to be some
weird post-punk thing, and some very bad cabaret performer. And I don’t mind
that, because what I used to do was think ‘I’ve got to be one or the other’. So
I’d either be in a cabaret band, or set up some weird band in Harrogate,
playing surreal poems to about five people. And I just thought, ‘let’s do the
two together’.”
Using a couple of synchronised singing and dancing lasses,
naturally. So then. Are Andie and Liz dancing for something to do, because they
would otherwise be stuck with a tambourine or two, or because they simply can’t
help it when they hear those yummy tunes ? Well ?
Andie - “It gives you something to do while you’re up there
! ( pause ) To be honest, at first, it was because I get really nervous, and I
couldn’t just stand there... But now, we just do it...”
Though it only seems to be me that sees their synchronised
movements as a subtle ploy to blind Steps fans with the power of their dancing
feet and steal them away to a better place. They don’t have their Top Of The
Pops debut mapped out in that much detail. Although...
Joe - “It would have to be something really fucking stupid.
I like those bands that are really stupid on Top Of The Pops. They’re not any
more, everyone’s conforming to rubbish to try and sell more records, but I used
to really like those people.”
A particular favourite was Bob Geldof playing a sax solo on
very very small instrument during one
performance of ‘Rat Trap’. Still. At
least the YY28’s are making music that they themselves’d 
like to go and see. Literally.
Andie – “I always think that – cos I can’t see what they’re
doing, I just think ‘What DOES this look like? We must be mental.”
Joe – “I’d like to go and see us. Even just to go ‘well done
for setting up a band and doing something different’.”
He’d just like to applaud their way of working.
It even got them to the summer festivals ( for Japanese sake
), with only the one single behind them…
Andie – “Glastonbury was wicked, because it was Glastonbury.
And it was my first time there as well.”
Joe – “It was my first time at any festival, walking onto
the Glastonbury’s mainstage.
Andie – “Which was probably the scariest thing I’ve ever
done. Looking back it was a highlight.”
Joe – “Personally I think T in the Park was probably my
favourite gig. Though they were great for us, the festivals. We didn’t know
what to expect at all; we thought we might just be getting bottles of again but
no! They liked us!”
Everyone seems to, at the moment. Though they’re not quite
sure where to put them.
Joe – “We’ve played pop road-shows with 911, as well as hard-core
gigs where they’ve been playing Cradle of Filth for two hours before us.”
>>> Part 2
Last
revised: 26/07/01