Swine fever
Autodidact post-punk’s potent debut. By Andrew Male. The Nightingales ★★★★
Pigs On Purpose CALL OF THE VOID. CD/DL/LP
ONE OF THE many fascinating aspects of King Rocker, Michael Cumming and Stewart Lee’s delightful 2021 profile of Nightingales frontman Robert Lloyd, was its refusal to shoehorn his band into any scene or sub-culture and instead to see this group of post-punk, post-pub, postindustrial prolix ranters as having few acolytes and little cultural sway; an island of brilliance in a sea of average. The weird thing is, that’s not how I remember it. My cool school friend Simon bought
Pigs On Purpose on release in 1982 after a rave review by Dave McCullough in Sounds magazine. We knew nothing about The Prefects – the derisive Birmingham punks fronted by Lloyd pre-Nightingales – but we liked this sound. As bookish contrarians we looked down our noses at heavy metal. But from the opening track, the aggrieved and verbose Blood For Dirt, with its piercing guitars and a demand for cheaper bus fares, this felt like our metal.
Importantly, it was funny. Not at the band’s expense but knowingly arch. Here were songs concerned with the prosaic vernacular minutiae of egg boxes, shared flats, petty cash, pints of bitter and outof-date bread; droll British kitchen-sink playlets delivered in a weary, mordant bellow; the majestic summoning call of the barroom autodidact.
Also significant was the sound; angular, driving and ugly, just the music to irritate your peers. Thanks to older brothers, we already knew about Beefheart, but this sounded like the Captain stripped of the blues and all surreal desert poetry, played with cheap urgency on mail order guitars and cardboard drums; Corporal Fray Bentos and his Desperate Quartet.
Everything sounds much beefier here, but no less tasty. You also get an extra disc of singles and demos from around the same time (including The Prefects’ scabrous Bristol Road Leads To Dachau) and some Eeyore-esque linernotes from Rob Lloyd which suggest that Pigs On Purpose failed to have much influence. Nonsense. As catalogued in John Robb’s 2009 book, Death To Trad Rock!, by 1985 there was a healthy DIY post-punk scene which saw bands such as A Witness, Pigbros, Big Flame and Bogshed, drawing less from the chilly, art-punk sounds of PiL, Wire or Magazine and directly from the verbose, working-class cheap-vox aggro of The Nightingales. In fact, it’s a sound whose non-conformist path can be traced up to the present day, not just in the current Nightingales but in bands such as Idles, Fontaines D.C., Black Country, New Road, and Squid, tapping into something vital, alive and true. Maybe Lee and Lloyd resist this version of history, happier to be recognised as unrecognised, a singular voice. Which Lloyd is, but he’s also an influential one.