She Said – Longpigs

In my office, the nineties never ended. The radio’s on almost all of the time. Most of the time it’s tuned to a certain station that plays mainly rock music from the last twenty-five years, with a sprinkling of other, non-rock, things, which always sound very strange by comparison – Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax sounds positively avant-garde in the context of endless Stereophonics and U2 and Kings of Leon.

Most of this rock music is, in the end, polite. Even the fiercer-sounding bands (Nirvana, say) are somewhat neutered in this context; the huge wall of guitars of the majority of nineties rock being less likely to jump out of the speakers as something spindly and angular, the music ends up sounding somewhat samey.

But now and again a song does poke its head up and demand to be heard by virtue of sounding different. Such a song, which I’ve only heard a couple of times on this station since starting in this job four months ago but which has been a delight on each occasion, is She Said by the Longpigs.

The ambition held by Longpigs frontman Crispin Hunt in 1996, it seemed, was to have a band that sounded as much as possible like Radiohead, with whom the Longpigs toured in 1995. In the context of their later work, Radiohead’s The Bends sounds like a conventional mid-nineties rock record, but it’s worth remembering that no one else at the time was ploughing quite the same furrow as them. Yes, you could hear debts to R.E.M., to U2, to Nirvana, to Jeff Buckley, and going back further, to Magazine* and to David Bowie, but it added up to a sound that was the band’s own, which is why it was notable how much the Longpigs’ sound owed to The Bends. Vocals that jumped suddenly up an octave? Yep. Squalling, trebly Fenders? A general sense of over-caffeinated nerviness? Songs that were anthemic, bombastic and over the top, but still managed to sound genuine and personal? Yep, yep and yep.

But despite being somewhat derivative, Longpigs made a couple of great records in their short career, and She Said is the pick of them. What’s so great about it is its lack of restraint. Hunt, sounding more than a little unhinged,  yelps and screams his way through the song while the band clatter along behind him, drummer Dee Boyle’s performance being particularly inspired. I love his playing during the bridge, just before the stop, and in the last chorus and coda – it’s not showy, it’s not spectacular, but he sounds fully inside the song and he sounds like he’s having a lot of fun. With the success of Travis and Coldplay, this kind of messy abandon would disappear from British indie rock within a few years.

The second Longpigs album flopped, and flopped hard. Nothing more was heard of them as a band. But the cultural reach of the band’s members is surprisingly long. Of course, the most famous former Longpig is guitarist Richard Hawley, who went on to a spell in Pulp (replacing Russell Senior), before releasing records under his own name, which are pleasant, if sometimes in need of a dose of whatever Crispin Hunt was taking in 1996. Bass player Simon Stafford has played with Joe Strummer and Jarvis Cocker. But Hunt has perhaps the most intriguing post-Longpigs story: he’s now a behind-the-scenes guy, co-writing with or producing Jake Bugg, Florence + the Machine, Newton Faulkner, Cee-Lo Green, Ellie Goulding, Natalie Imbruglia, Fighting with Wire, Ron Sexsmith, even Mark Owen.

*Longpigs could, however, claim their own post-punk influences that didn’t come through Radiohead: drummer Dee Boyle was a former member of Cabaret Voltaire