After three Top Of The Pops appearances, four Top 40 hit singles, a triumphant sell-out show in London s Astoria and their debut album The Sun Is Often Out having shifted over 80,000 units, Longpigs star is very much in the ascendant. But would you recognise any one of them if they bit you on the leg?
For a band capable of composing such Radiohead-friendly big ballads as Lost Myself and She Said you d think these Sheffield songsmiths would be spattered all over the front pages of the British and Irish rock comics. Not so. While wading through the last year s worth of Orlando obituaries, Kula Shaker cover stories and Menswear pull-out colour supplements in search of some in-depth dirt on the Pigs, it dawned on me that while this band might have The Kids on their side, somebody up there reckons they don t make good copy. It s not even as if these guys are unphotogenic, unhedonistic (a trip to the CMJ showcase in New York last September saw them fry more braincells than your average ECT session) or unquotable.
When guitarist Richard Hawley rang me last week to fulfil some of his promotional duties for the band s forthcoming first Irish dates, I asked him if this benign indifference on the part of the press made him feel in any way aggrieved.
I think early on we felt a bit like we hadn t been invited to the party, the musician admits, but then when we started playing big places and packing em out it actually made us feel that it was worth more because it wasn t bullshit. It left us in a position to, I dunno, use all that stuff now. We ve just gotten a Brits nomination which surprised us, we re going down to that after the tour. Initially when you re playing gigs to 30 people and a ferret you obviously feel a bit left out. But musically we ve always tried not to be part of the pack.
I think as a band we re quite maverick. A lot of British music seems to run in a pack and journalists tend to prefer to write about things that are of an ilk. But we didn t make music that was deliberately designed to date, we wanted to do something that was classic, that ll hopefully still be selling in ten years time.
Did you feel at all marginalised coming from Sheffield?
There is a bit of that, but the good thing about coming from Sheffield is that all the bands like Babybird and Pulp know each other, but it isn t a scene like Manchester or Liverpool with an obvious history to live up to. All the bands are quite isolated here so you come up with quite different stuff and the only thing that unifies them is that they re all quite odd. Obviously the success of Pulp kind of opened doors and then ourselves and Babybird got signed, so now, to come from Sheffield is actually quite cool, whereas for such a long time it was sort of Oh, in t that where Def Leppard an t Human League come from?
Leaving Sheffield for the moment, what about reports that the Longpigs recent Stateside trip made the fall of the Roman Empire look like an episode of Glenroe?
It is true, that we did go very large in New York, Richard confesses. We were just so excited to be there. We went ballistic. It s the fookin maddest place in t world, mate. It s just off its head. It can be quite an ugly place you consume and are consumed by it as well. It did my head in seeing lots of little old ladies with all their stuff in a bag and black guys beggin on t streets and Vietnam vets with no legs. That side of it can get to you. It s such an extreme place, you d see stretch limos and some guy get out with the clichid shades and the Arthur Daly coat on.
Sounds like Simon Carmody s on the move again!
On a graver note, Longpigs are no strangers to the more unsavoury aspects of the music industry. Originally signed to Elektra Records, they even recorded an abortive version of their debut album (with producer Gil Norton) for that label just before it closed its British offices. But to the band s horror, the company refused to release them from their contract unless they coughed up a half-million pound release fee . While the lawyers battled it out, Longpigs spent nine months in limbo. Richard relates the details of this Barton Fink-esque nightmare:
They basically fucked us around he sighs. What happened was, the managing director in America who will remain nameless because I m not getting into any legal shit was basically spending about a million pounds a year keeping his girlfriend in The Ritz in London and using Elektra s money to pay for that. Also, Warner Bros. in England and Elektra in America had lost loads of money on Police Academy Ninety or whatever, and Bugs Bunny was a bit skint. So they closed the English offices. Also a labelmate and really good friend of ours died in Los Angeles in quite mysterious circumstances and that contributed to the Men In Suits closing down the record company.
In retrospect I think it was the best thing that could ve possibly happened to us, but we had nine months of trying to get out of the Elektra deal that were absolute fookin hell. We all went completely off the rails. It was like our dream had been taken away from us. But then our lawyer and a guy called Kevin Bacon who produced the (re-recorded) album stepped in and they thought of this ingenious legal loophole which is too boring to talk about in an interview, but they got us out of it and stuck two fingers up Bugs Bunny s arse. Which made us very happy.
Straight away we got offered a deal by Mother Records, a brilliant company which has the corporate power of Polygram but it s a little office with five people. It feels like a little independent company and you can ring up and speak to the managing director. And it s nice to be able to spend a bit of U2 s money!
I do love a happy ending! n
Longpigs play the Olympia Theatre, Dublin on Saturday 1st of February and Belfast, Limelight on Sunday 2nd of February.