Sounds From The Junkshop #84 - Hoggboy

 

"Smashing cars don't make me feel like a priest/Paintin' windows ain't something that I need to achieve" - Hoggboy - Gonna Take A While

In the early weeks of 2002, there were two British bands jostling for the position of "most likely to" in the pages of the NME as potential spearheads for UK indie's kick back against the Strokes, the White Stripes et al. One were from London and were called the Libertines. You might just have heard of them. The other hailed from Sheffield and were peddling a much more scuzzy and punked-up take on the garage rock formula and sadly never really went anywhere despite being, in this writer's opinion at least, a far superior band. They were called Hoggboy.

Hoggboy were formed from the ashes of an earlier Steel City band called Seafruit who I also saw a few times back in the late '90s but it actually took until me researching this article to realise that the two were related. Suffice to say that Seafruit were a very different proposition, being very much of a bouncy post-Britpop vibe as best evidenced on their best single Hello World with the odd tendency towards overwrought balladry as evidenced on their other single Looking For Sparks. Anyway, they pretty much came and went without really making much of an impression and gave literally no indication of what was to follow.

I heard Hoggboy's debut single So Young about the same time as I heard the Libertines' debut What A Waster and I genuinely thought at the time that both bands were going to be huge - both of them had a sleazy air of menace to them which was a welcome contrast to the "nice boys don't play rock 'n' roll" that the Strokes et al seemed to epitomise. The difference is that to my ears the Libertines never really surpassed that first blast with subsequent releases being sunk by the terrible production and mumbled vocals. There was maybe an acorn of a decent idea lurking underneath somewhere (I mean the band were forever proclaiming their love of the Clash and the Only Ones so they'd clearly been reading from all the right materials) but by the third or fourth single of theirs I'd heard combined with how unlikeable they came across as in interviews with endless heroin-addled babbling on about some redundant, long-dead notion of an "Albion" and it's safe to say I'd lost interest.

Hoggboy, on the other hand, clearly couldn't have cared less about the vagaries of 18th century literature or chasing the dragon, if their brand of rock 'n' roll conjured up any sort of image, it was of cheap booze, cheaper speed and even cheaper and nastier sex in supermarket car parks. Similar to many who'd come before from Johnny Thunders through These Animal Men to King Adora, it sounded sleazy, decadent and dangerous so it's no wonder that I quickly became a huge fan of theirs. The sheer rush of So Young and the clanging menace of its follow-up Shouldn't Let The Side Down were almost irresistible to those of us who'd seen one disappointment after another in the name of garage punk in the preceding couple of years - bands with sod all in the way of memorable tunes but who'd clearly had exactly the right stylist employed by their trust fund guardian to advise them which leather jacket/skinny jeans combo would work best for that NME photoshoot. Hoggboy, on the other hand, genuinely did feel like the real wrong-side-of-the-tracks deal - they had that realness that no rich parent can buy ya. As Iggy brilliantly sang on I Wanna Live all those years ago, “The tools I see on my TV/Can’t stand it when they fake/A prick’s a prick at any age/Why give one a break?”

I went to see Hoggboy live a lot throughout 2002 and they always delivered. By this time, I'd left Uni and was sliding through a succession of short-term minimum wage jobs meaning nights out were often something that had to be saved up for even if it was just a group like Hoggboy playing the Well for £5 entry. So these nights out would basically be an excuse to well and truly kick loose and they were a perfect soundtrack to headbanging along with a mix of booze and other "stimulants" flowing through my veins. I still remember one gig at the Cockpit (I think) where I was, shall we say, somewhat mashed and during the band's traditional instrumental closer Call Me Suck I remember holding the horns aloft during the breakdown section to which lead singer Hogg did the same back at me. I then remember the next three or four times I saw 'em that year they did exactly the same thing during that song. I mean, I'm not claiming credit for it like but I'd like to think I helped 'em a bit there...

Hoggboy's debut album Or 8? landed in the summer of 2002 and was one of my favourite records of that year. Sure, it was very much in vogue with the garage rock zeitgeist but it packed a sheer nastiness to it that you'd never get from Casablancas, Doherty or any of the others and was a gleeful two fingers stuck up at pretentious art school kids like Franz Ferdinand. From the freewheeling opener Left And Right through the likes of Urgh!, Gonna Take Me A While and the Longpigs-esque closer Mile High Club (indeed the band were briefly managed by former Longpigs guitarist Richard Hawley prior to his solo career), it was an absolute stormer.

And of course, it did absolutely nothing commercially. The British music press had taken the wrong fork at that junction in early 2002 and instead of making Hoggboy the all-conquering rock gods they should have been were fawning over the increasingly pretentious gibbering of the Libertines and the arched-eyebrow tedium of Franz Ferdinand. Bloody trendies as I was prone to muttering darkly under my breath back then. The group would be dropped by their label and it would take them 2-3 years to get back on to their feet with a second album that I couldn't find anywhere and thus totally missed apart from the lead-off single 400 Boys which was okay but not up to the standard of their debut. And so it ended - the band would split in 2005.

I know I say this a lot about bands who feature in SFTJ but Hoggboy really were unjustifiably kicked to the kerb way too soon by the indie press. They were genuine rock 'n' roll licentious scumbags the way that so many groups around this time only pretended to be (I've still got memories of one of my early twenties punk bands of this era sharing a local bands bill at the Brudenell in Leeds with a group who were desperately trying to be Doherty and co and who spent half their time onstage ranting about "keeping music real" only for us to see them loading their gear into one of their dads' Chelsea tractors afterwards - well and truly busted I think is the phrase!) but instead of being lauded for it, they ended up being the first band in the firing line come the garage punk backlash. Even twenty years later, listening back to Or 8? certainly brings back a lot of good memories of gigs in this time period...even though my memory arguably wasn't at its most reliable for all of them for the reasons I've touched on above. Among so many of the anodyne bands of the movement that eventually evolved into the atrociousness that was "landfill indie", they really were princes among the dross.