I've always thought the Longpigs were underrated. History seems to have lumped them in with crappy Britpop also-rans like Northern Uproar and Menswear, but their debut album, 'The Sun Is Often Out', is amazicles. It's stuffed full of songs that weren't hits but should have been. I missed them first time round, so I've got my flatmate Joe B to thank for bringing them to my attention. I bought a hi-fi with a MiniDisc player in September '99, and proceeded to copy as many CDs as I could get my hands on, in an attempt to broaden my musical knowledge. Joey B and Wooster were frequent victims of my copying sprees, and it's because of them that I got into a lot of the bands I listened to during my second and third years at university.
I saw the Longpigs tour advertised in the NME and asked Joey B if he was up for seeing them. They'd just brought out their second album, 'Mobile Home', which was lacklustre to say the least, but I loved their debut album so much I still wanted to go. The gig ended up being my third in as many weeks, which seemed like an amazing run at the time.
The support band were Darkstar, who I didn't know much about despite hearing them once or twice on Steve Lamacq's Radio 1 show. They were stunning live though. They'd decked their drum kit and amps out with white fairy lights, which looked ace, even though it was really simple. And the band were all fantastic players; particularly the dreadlocked drummer, whose wrists were a blur as he whirled his sticks around his kit. Stand outs were "I Am The Sun", "About 3AM" and "Graceadelica" (a Danny Saber remix of the latter gave the band their biggest hit the following year). I was so impressed I bought their album, 'Twenty Twenty Sound', after the gig and dragged Novacain to see them when they played Leeds again in March 2000.
The Longpigs weren't quite as good, although they were still decent. The band's earlier tracks, such as "She Said", "Far", "Lost Myself" and "On And On", sounded predictably fantastic, with guitarist Richard Hawley dragging some great feedbacky sounds from his Gibson semi-acoustic. The problem was that these songs were so good they made the newer tunes from 'Mobile Home' sound worse than they actually were. The new single, "Blue Skies", went down well, but the crowd seemed bored during the other new tracks, and the atmosphere suffered a bit a result. I'm just glad I got to see them, as they split shortly afterwards. Lead singer Crispin Hunt ended up writing songs for the likes of Natalie Imbruglia and Florence And The Machine, while Hawley went on to have a successful solo career. I'm still holding out for the Longpigs reunion tour :(
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