Delightfully Weird: Honesty, Yossari Baby and Private Reg at Hyde Park Book Club
Image credit: Rowan Morrow.
26th January – 1st February 2026, or Independent Venue Week, is an annual celebration of the UK’s independent music and arts venues. Keen to see something live and local, I headed down to Hyde Park Book Club on a Tuesday night to check out Honesty, Yossari Baby and Private Reg in its ‘Basement’ gig venue.
Book Club is a former petrol station converted into a cafe-bar-music-venue with gallons of independent personality. While it fuels itself on more expensive pints, Book Club draws in plenty of students who want to fill up on cool factor. There are lots of colourful tins and bottled beers in the fridges, plus a few local beers and ciders on draught. I got a can of Judicious, from the local Kirkstall brewery, and headed down into the Basement.
A small room, dark and low-ceilinged, with the stage barely a metre up from the floor: it really is a basement. But, in style with the rest of Book Club, it’s also a perfect intimate gig venue, with the performers close enough to touch.
First up is Private Reg, with a delicious crunch of bass. At first I think it’s a four-piece: someone playing a keyboard drum machine, a singer, a cello player, and a sunglasses-clad guy eating an apple at the back of the stage. Then another guy heads onto stage and starts taking bites out of a lemon, skin and all. It looks very sticky. They keep wiping their mouths with their woolly jumpers. At one point there are actually six people on the small stage, including a tambourine player who also appears at random from the audience.
It’s charming but slightly distracting faff. It feels like an outtake from a healthy eating campaign (perhaps a nod to Book Club’s vegetarian brunch menu?) with a hint of The Wiggles. It does suit this venue, though, where there’s minimal separation between crowd and band. If you brought your own piece of fruit or minor percussion instrument, you could probably get up on stage!
The cello player is great, and perhaps deserves more attention, often a little drowned out by the bass and the fruit antics. He leaves the stage for the last few songs, followed by the fruit guys with two apple cores in a pint glass (there’s nothing left of the lemon).
We’re left with the drum machine, and singer James Vardy, who is also the founder of Private Regcords – an independent Leeds label that is currently gaining a lot of traction, home to bands such as Rhiannon Hope, Kiosk and Bathing Suits. There’s a bit of King Krule in these heavy lyrics, and the stripped-back style works well. It’s a demonstration that while this band can have a bit of fun, they can take themselves seriously too.
Next up is Yossari Baby, bringing thunderous, chaotic electronic rock. There’s an alarmingly tall, stylish guitar player, a smiling singer in a white mask and a baggy Talking Heads-type suit, and a grizzled Mancunian guitarist-singer in a baseball cap. ‘This song is about… the vice of gambling!’ he growls into the microphone. The masked girl in the suit dances like a cartoon character. It’s mesmerising. They sound great together – pumping, cohesive instrumentals with aggressive, bitey lyrics. There’s a bit of Krautrock influence, a bit of post-punk, a bit of avant-garde with all the weird dancing.
Then the band seem to be having a bit of argument over what their next song is going to be. It sounds like they just said ‘A Bee Gees cover’ – surely not? But oh yes it is. I didn’t think ‘Staying Alive’ could have so much attack, and the crowd are loving it. They go out in a blast of synth-infected guitar.
For Honesty, a translucent sheet of gauze comes down over the edge of the stage, separating the band from the crowd. An engaging visual display is projected onto the fabric – lyrics in bold typeface, urban images of the North, twisty video of motorway driving. It almost feels like a rejection of the venue’s smallness, constructing a place to hide from the close view of the crowd. Already, there’s a sense of mystery and intrigue.
Honesty, a Leeds-based collective, have four core members and a rotating cast of guest artists and musicians, which explains the varied sound they’re producing on stage. ‘MEASURE ME’ reminds me a little of Visions-era Grimes, hushed female vocals over an urgent drum beat – and I really enjoy the way that snippets of this song keep resurfacing through the set. Leeds-based rapper Kosi Tides features in a few songs across the set, including the more low-key, atmospheric ‘NORTH’. ‘North on the rise and it’s potent,’ he repeats, a sentiment that really brings up the energy in the crowd.
The other Honesty members onstage are impressively multitasking with various electronic instruments and pieces of technology, but Tides has a much more alert, compelling stage presence – I was straining to see through the mesh, trying to follow his silhouette. I wondered why they didn’t keep him on stage the whole time; sometimes I forgot the band when I could see him dancing in the doorway, waiting to come back out on stage.
The atmosphere has changed into something more club-like, and it’s getting hot in the small room. Honesty are playing tracks at the right tempo to dance to, the arrangements are intense and moody, and the lyrics echo enough for you to latch onto. The chorus of ‘NIGHTWORLD’, ‘We beg for change but all we get is pennies’ is, again, potent. There’s a sense of this group as a collective in more ways than one – collaborative, but also with firm nods towards community and changemaking.
If this changemaking sentiment resonates with you, supporting music at independent venues is one way to put it into motion. Go and see some local bands, even if you don’t know any names on the lineup (besides, you’ll be able to say you saw them before they were big!). For the price of a single pint at the Co-op arena, you could go to a gig like this and tap into a wealth of weird, cool music.
Words by Rowan Morrow