The Slight Incline of the Big Pig Porkers.

Anthony Jones

The self-consciously trendy curate of St Peter's Church stood at the mic and addressed the audience of the regular Sunday night youth club members and a rag-tag assortment of our friends. 'Tonight,' he announced in a public speaking style more appropriate to the boxing ring than the pulpit, 'making their first ever live appearance, please give a big hand for the BIG PIG PORKERS!!' There was some reluctant applause, a couple of whistles and boos and then a silence. Then, with my bass guitar slung mean and low like the bloke in The Clash I played the opening notes of our first song - 'Du-duh. Du-duh. Du-duh. Du-duh' - and Neil (the guitarist and our only vaguely competent musician) and Steve the drummer joined in as we launched into the two minutes of raw high energy punk rock which was our signature tune 'Swine Dysentery'. Our singer Phil had been a last minute recruit since I had finally had to admit that I could barely play bass, let alone play bass and sing at the same time. But we were committed to playing the gig. Phil had been a controversial choice, not particularly liked by Neil but selected by me for his punk authenticity which none of the rest of us could claim. He had embraced early on the punk aesthetic, particularly his clearly defined dress code. In a conservative small market town he dared to wear bondage trousers and odd Day-Glo socks in broad daylight. He pogoed in rugby club discos. In my book Phil deserved to be in the band for sheer bravery alone, never mind the credibility he brought with him. For this gig Neil wore beige corduroy flares. Steve (or 'Se!' as he was known, the exclamation mark being compulsory) sported a grey polo neck sweater in the height of summer. I've only recently discovered that this was because he was covering up embarrassing love bites on his neck. Most of our friends were still wearing Oxford bags - ridiculously wide parallel tubes descending from the waist. I had bought a pair of straight jeans which weren't quite the de rigueur drainpipes of the punk wardrobe. I wore these with some trepidation, fearing ridicule or physical violence or both from the wide-looned town hardnuts. Whether Phil could sing or not was a complete unknown since his joining the band was an eleventh hour decision we had not had time to practise with him and hed been learning the songs from a tape hed had for less than a week. Frighteningly, only five minutes before we were to go on, I heard his girlfriend testing him on some of the lyrics. It seemed wise not to tell the others. We played all our songs at breakneck pace, fuelled as we were by adrenaline and

abject fear. Phil turned out not to be a singer at all but delivered his vocals with a snarl of menacing disdain. He wasn't word perfect but he improvised well and the

whole thing was considered to be a great success. The buzz of playing live loud music was an addictive drug and I was an immediate junkie. The Big Pigs' career was tragically short however. We were only to play one more gig, about a month later at Phil's girlfriend's eighteenth birthday party. It was way out in the sticks and I had to drive into town to drag the rest of the band out of a nightclub, where theyd rather have stayed, and drive them back to the party to play our set, getting booked by the police on the way for overloading the car. I barely remember playing that night. It's like a memory of a dream, an alcohol driven nightmare. So, as it turned out, that comparatively brilliant gig back in the Sunday evening youth club was at once our debut and our penultimate gig. .. My school was called the 'Queen Elizabeth Grammar School for Boys'. It was founded during the reign of Elizabeth I and in 1978, my 'O' Level year, we celebrated its four hundredth birthday. A lesser Royal, ancient and of a different century came down for a special Founder's Day service. I was grateful no longer to be in the school choir. My newfound punk ethic would never allow that. The previous year our current Queen Elizabeth had rolled into town, with her consort in tow, as part of a whistle-stop tour to celebrate her Silver Jubilee. Her armour-plated limousine door was opened for her by my friend Michael who gave the Queen his best Boy Scout salute. A couple of years later I was to sing in his band to which we gave the name 'The Kosher Butchers' (no more pork). We would play one gig only. That summer, as street parties were held throughout the land The Sex Pistols 'God Save the Queen' with its incendiary lyrics was not allowed to top the singles chart. A year previously still, the long hot summer of 1976 there were race riots across English cities. A discontented underclass who felt they had no future began to sound its voice. The feeling of social unrest seemed to be permeating its way throughout the country even trickling down to the stagnant backwaters of an increasingly anachronistic self-important old grammar school. To me and my friends the feeling that this was a time of social significance, a time for change was palpable. A revolution was in the air and we wanted to be part of it. And the clarion call to this movement was PUNK ROCK. It was with this in mind that one morning Stephan, Neil and I presented ourselves at the headmaster's desk, each of us clutching letters from our parents requesting that we may be excused school for a day to attend a music concert in Cardiff. The head eagerly agreed, mumbling something about travel and music broadening young men's horizons. We
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emerged from his office whooping and punching the air. We were going to see The Clash and, what's more, we had our parents' and head teacher's permission. How much more rock and roll could you get? An infinite amount more, clearly. At this point I could relate the links between punk and 'New Wave' music and the rle it played in raising awareness of such causes as the Anti Nazi League and the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament but what's the point? Thirty years later and the British National Party has seats in local government and the Trident Nuclear Missile Programme will soon be recommissioned so that we can continue to dine at top table with the big boys. But I digress... I only wanted to set up a backdrop in front of which the distinct, clean rift in my musical tastes played out. Once I had discovered punk, mainly through the New Musical Express and, of course John Peel whose ten till midnight late night Radio 1 slot soon became required listening, it was as though everything that went before was, with a few exceptions, largely irrelevant. It was my musical Year Zero. The NME had largely adopted the same policy. They branded the old guard (acts like ELP, Yes, Genesis, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd) as BOFs (Boring Old Farts), decrying them as overblown stadium-filling sellouts, purveyors of pompous long guitar solos played on twin-necked guitars. They had emerged from the sixties and to my generation's movement they were seen as yesterday's men who should make way for the new youth culture. The reaction of my friends who actually cared about music to this new era was mixed. Johnny (soon to be the Big Pigs' first drummer) and Neil took the most balanced view that musically the Old and the New could peacefully coexist. To them there was no contradiction between owning an album by Pink Floyd while simultaneously rushing out to buy the latest Buzzcocks single; it was all music after all. You only had to worry about whether you liked it or not. One of my closest mates at the time, Chris, however, who had accompanied me and Neil to our first ever live concert (10CC in Cardiff), conservatively refused to have any truck with this new rubbish any more than I would tolerate one of his endless Yes triple albums. Such was our passion for our cause that we completely fell out. We had been really close and it felt like the end of an affair. We were back at school to begin our 'A' level studies. The front room of my parents' house was overlooked by my school. To be precise, from our house you could see the language lab (ecoutez et repetez) and the Spanish and French rooms. The front room contained a teak 'stereogram' which occupied the whole of the bay window like a coffin at a wake. My father would endlessly play classical music, Rogers and Hammerstein, Gilbert and Sullivan and, patriotically, Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey. My younger brother and I influenced each other's tastes. My elder brother, as Shakespeare would have it, 'heard no music'. The close proximity of the house to the school made it the perfect place focus to skive off to, particularly in the sixth form where we suddenly had all these free periods. It was here that the Big Pig Porkers were formed.

The line up was this: Neil Morris - Guitar Johnny Morris - Drums and vocals Me - Vocals and drums and dodgy Guitar solo on one song.

There was no grand scheme of things here. All we had was my brother Williams battered acoustic guitar with only the bottom E string remaining (not that we would have known it was the bottom E string then), drumsticks fashioned out of old copies of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph (how punk was that?), banged on the carpet for percussive effect and vocals sung directly onto the external microphone of my cheap mono cassette player. While Neil banged out a one string guitar riff, sometimes with such a fury that his fingers bled, Johnny or I would extemporise lyrics while the other 'drummed'. This doesn't sound particularly promising but the spirit was of punk pop songs - you couldn't get much more stripped down or minimalist or homemade than this - and, on playing each song back, proved to be surprisingly effective for what was meant to be just a bit of a laugh. After two or three lunchtime sessions we ended up with seven or eight songs, interspersed with short affectionate pastiches of musical genres like reggae, Cossack drinking songs and both country and western. We knew Johnny was serious when he turned up to school one day with ready made 'drumsticks' - two colour supplements rolled up and fixed into shape with sellotape. The only song which was not recorded chez moi was at Neil's and was called 'Assassin' and it differed in that it was actually 'written' in a premeditated way. By this time Neil had borrowed an actual electric guitar with six strings attached and now revealed he had had some guitar lessons when he was younger. To me and Johnny he was a virtuoso. First we agreed how the guitar part should go and then Johnny and I cobbled together some lyrics which were the most coherent we'd done since all the others came off the tops of our heads. I think 'The Day of the Jackal' had been on the telly so we drew our references from that. We called it ' Assassin'. It actually caused a musical difference between us as Neil hated the 'Bang Bang you're dead' backing - vocal at the end of the song. Johnny and I stood our ground and democracy ruled. I am uncertain how we came up with The Big Pig Porkers as a name for our band. I know that the song 'Swine Dysentery' came from a doom-laden story in one of Neil's dad's farming magazines. We must have been influenced by that and the accompanying Orwellian cartoon of some pigs on their hind legs, looking a bit poorly, holding a placard with the legend 'Stamp Out Swine Dysentery Now'.

To illustrate just how ridiculous The Big Pig Porkers were here are the lyrics to the song Swine Dysentery. Remember that they weren't 'written' at all but ad-libbed like free form rap, straight onto what we pretentiously called the 'master tape': Swine Dysentery I got up one day I went down to the sty I went to have a look at my piggies This is what met my eye Chorus (They got) swine dysentery (Oh Yeah) swine dysentery (They got) swine dysentery Oh yes they do So I rang the vet I told him about my piggies He said he'd be there right away I said 'Doctor don't delay (Repeat chorus) The vet came up He had a look at my pigs They're a lot better now I guess he saved their bacon (No more) swine dysentery (No more) swine dysentery (No more) swine dysentery Oh no no no! Some other titles of our songs were:' Amoco Cadiz' (Nonsense lyrics over Neil detuning and retuning his one string, inspired by a leaking oil tanker) 'Judy Wap' (a bluesy song about her running over her husband with a sleigh)

'Stalin was a Russian' (on which I fluked a reasonable guitar break. My pedantic younger brother pointed out that Stalin was, in fact, born in Georgia but we went with it anyway) 'Insecticide' (Our best song which I had very little to do apart from erratic drumming)
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Johnny busked out a meaningful narrative about the horrors

of delousing treatment)

So anyway, we copied some tapes for our friends and thought that was the end of it. Johnny left school to join a bank, although we saw him at weekends for rugby (despite having left school he somehow kept his place hi the team) and Saturday night discos. My interest in music grew and I bought a bass guitar from Michael, he who had taken on the job of greeting the Queen in Jubilee year. Like a lot of people who buy a bass I assumed that, since it had only four strings compared to an ordinary guitar's six, and there were no chords to master (or so I thought at the time), it would be easy. Literally a schoolboy error. I did discover, though, that the notes which Neil had recorded on our now legendary album were very easy to find - there had been only one string at his disposal. So I soon found I could play the riffs to all the Porkers' songs. My brother had acquired a snare drum and had even had a few lessons and Neil had access to a proper guitar and it was then that we started thinking ambitiously. What if the Big Pigs were to go electric? I don't quite remember how it came about but we were given permission to practice in the school gym at lunchtimes. Daily we'd rush the four hundred or so yards to my house, pick up our equipment, set it up, rehearse and take the stuff back again all in the lunch hour with no lunch for ourselves. There were two major setbacks to this. The daily one was that there would be a constant stream of people wandering in attracted by the noise. They all knew more than us, could play better than us and often demanded a go and, if given one, would prove themselves right. The other, much graver problem was Johnny. He was a key member of our band and a close friend to both Neil and me. I think he is even a distant cousin of Neils. The problem was that he worked fifteen miles away so lunchtime sessions were out of the question. Looking back on it it would have been so easy to take all our gear, which wasn't that much, to Neil's house, which was enormous, and practice there at weekends. At the time, though, I think Neil and I wanted 'everything now' at whatever the cost. We had found that another friend, Steve (Se!), had a great natural drumming skill and with my brother's snare drum augmented with another borrowed one and a hi-hat cymbal he was able to come up with a pretty good sound. But who would tell Johnny? It fell upon me and it took me ages to muster up the courage to dial his number. I laid down the facts over the phone, not quite believing I was doing it. Not only was he a founding member of the band - that was enough in itself- but he was one of my best friends for God's sake. Johnny's disappointment and sense of betrayal was almost tangible. My feeling of self-loathing made me feel sick. He could have got angry, quite rightly. He could have called me a self-serving treacherous bastard, again quite rightly. But that just wasn't his way. He accepted my bombshell with great dignity and ended up making it easier for me, which I really did not deserve. To begin with our lunchtime practice sessions were mostly concerned with playing the music. It
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was understood that when we did play live (there were no 'ifs' now) that I would sing while playing bass and I had indeed bought a microphone with this in mind. We couldn't wait to be up there, strutting our stuff but we were seriously hampered as there weren't many places in the town to play. With this in mind I tentatively suggested playing at the local church youth club. The other major problem was that we had very little amplification at our disposal. It turned out that this was easily circumvented because there were lots of similar minded friends of ours who had formed bands or were beginning to do so. Once we had fixed a date with the youth club the die was cast and we began to panic. As the Sunday of the gig approached I had to concede that I couldn't sing and play even my rudimentary bass lines at the same time and so we recruited Phil Williamson, one of Carmarthen's proto-punks. We didn't have time to rehearse with him and he had to learn all the songs from the tape we'd made what now seemed like years ago. To his credit he winged it wonderfully on the night. The day of the gig I spent mostly whizzing around the countryside picking up pieces of equipment we were to borrow. I had passed my driving test by then and it was unfortunate that it hadn't been earlier because then Johnny could still have been involved. Finally we stood in front of a largely cynical audience. The self-consciously trendy curate of St Peter's Church stood at the microphone and addressed the audience of the regular Sunday night youth club members and a rag-tag assortment of our friends. 'Tonight,' he announced in a public speaking style, more appropriate to the boxing ring than the pulpit, 'making their first ever live appearance please give a big hand for the BIG PIG PORKERS!!'