Sounds From The Junkshop #29 - The Longpigs

 

"There is not yet a neat media label to describe you and me and this age/Well fuck them" - The Longpigs, Gangsters, 1999

Certain bands always seem to get written off from the get go as sounding like they're deliberately trying to be a cross between two other successful bands. For example, I remember Embrace (local to myself) being pilloried a lot in the early stages of their career for sounding too much like a blatant cross between Oasis and the Verve (harsh in my opinion as their second album absolutely pissed on both of the overblown turgid-fests that were Be Here Now and Urban Hymns in terms of quality). Sheffield natives the Longpigs were another band who seemed to get it in the neck as the general consensus when they broke through was that they just seemed to be trying a bit too hard to sound like a cross between Radiohead and Suede.

It's a shame really because they were a decent band. I first got wise to them after hearing their third single (and first Top 40 hit) Far on one of the Shine compilations (blimey, there's a phrase from the past!) and remember enjoying it. The follow-up, On And On, would see them break through into the Top 20 and also become one of the few Britpop bands to score a hit Stateside. And this is kind of where their problems started - their label (Mother, run by U2 bizarrely) quickly saw the commercial opportunity to pack them off on an extensive American tour to seek their fame and fortune. Bacchanalian excess was duly indulged upon and it very nearly broke the band.

Longpigs guitarist Richard Hawley sums it up well in the Craig Ferguson's excellent history of Yorkshire pop music I'll Go To T'Foot Of Our Stage where he says about said tour "I went bonkers even though I was the only one who had a missus and a kid. When I say I was fucked, I was beyond that - I didn't know shit from shino. Our lass has been amazing in terms of what she's had to put up with. But she was really shocked when I came back from this tour - I was no more than eight and a half stone wet through. I was in real trouble"

There was also the issue that while they got a few plaudits, the Longpigs were never quite the sort of band who the UK alt press took wholly to their hearts. The Radiohead/Suede similarities did seem to dog them a bit and to be honest, the fact that they had an openly middle class and very wordy frontman in Crispin Hunt didn't seem to do them any favours either. It may seem a bit weird in this era where nearly every "indie" band these days seems to consist of nice well behaved middle class white boys in cardigans but back in the '90s where Oasis' working class lads persona had made them the biggest band in the UK and Pulp's awesome class war anthem Common People was tearing up the charts, being regarded as "posh" could put a serious dagger through the heart of your credibility. Just ask Blur.

(Incidentally, I'm not gonna start on the whole class debate here - for my money, if a band makes good enough music then I can happily overlook the fact that they might be a bit posh. It's only when I see bands like Mumford & Sons or the Strokes who are quite clearly not very good and have used daddy's connections rather than their talent to climb their way to rock's top table that I tend to get angry. And make no mistake, the Longpigs, and Blur for that matter, very much didn't fall into this bracket, I'm just making a comment about the general music climate at the time. And that's my final word on the subject)

I don't think I actually bought the first Longpigs album The Sun Is Often Out as I hadn't quite made my mind up about them at this point. The album had spawned five singles and I liked three of them (Far, On And On and Jesus Christ) but found the other two (She Said and Lost Myself) a bit overwrought and sprawling. As it turned out, the album was good rather than brilliant but it definitely had enough moments (All Hype, Sally Dances and especially the epic closer Over Our Bodies) to make it worth a listen.

It would be late '98 before the band came back. I've mentioned a lot in this column about how the music climate change from Oasis to Radiohead in the interim sunk a lot of bands from this era but the Longpigs theoretically should have been one of the bands in prime place to surf it. Unfortunately by the time their second album Mobile Home finally surfaced, things were already falling apart for them. Their label Mother had been wound up by its parent company Universal and drummer Dee Boyle had been sacked midway through the recording with a lot of bad blood stemming from it - a few months later he ran into Hunt in a nightclub in Sheffield and allegedly tried to glass him. Despite this, Mobile Home was a great album, certainly the better of the two that the band produced. Lead single Blue Skies was a straight continuation of the Longpigs sound of old but with a much more streamlined direct approach but the album itself was full of some quite brutally stark odes to self-loathing and dependence in relationships. Songs such as Gangsters, Dog Is Dead and I Lied, I Love You really were the sound of Hunt pouring his heart out in really wrenching fashion like Thom Yorke with actual feelings invested rather than cold detached analysis.

Unfortunately, by now the band were very much an afterthought from their label and although Blue Skies managed to make the Top 20, Universal did next to nothing to promote Mobile Home and it tanked. The sinister Frank Sonata came out as a second single, missed the Top 40 by a mile and that was that. A real shame - Mobile Home is up there with These Animal Men's Accident and Emergency in this writer's book as great sophomore albums that the world missed.

Following the band's split, Hawley would briefly join fellow Sheffielders Pulp for their under-rated We Love Life album and manage early noughties should've beens Hoggboy (more of whom in a future SFTJ I'm sure) before embarking on a solo career which has yielded some excellent albums ranging from the quite lovely Late Night Final through the concrete-heavy Standing At The Sky's Edge to the moody Hollow Meadows, all of which and more I would happily recommend for chilled out late evening listening after the party's finished with a glass of whatever cures your ailments. Hunt would go on to be a songwriter for hire and end up standing as an MEP candidate for the political running joke that was the Change UK party in 2020 (maybe not a surprise as his stepdad Mark Fisher was briefly culture secretary in the early days of Tony Blair's government). Suffice to say that, much like nearly all of his colleagues, he wasn't successful.

The Longpigs are an odd one to look back on - a Britpop group whose best (if not most commercially successful) work actually came outside that era. I strongly recommend Mobile Home - "beautiful" is a vastly overused word when it comes to music but it definitely applies here. There's enough good moments on The Sun Is Often Out to make it worth a listen as well. Certainly class issues shouldn't apply here - these guys were simply a good band, end of story.