There has never been another band like Pig Rider, although there have been quite a few which were better, and an awful lot which were more successful. If you’re the sort of person who stores their albums by genre, you’re going to struggle with any of theirs; Pig Rider music is a genre all of its own.
There’s some heavy rock, but there are also simple ballads, bits of sly folk, occasional country and western pastiches, a few sea shanties, some prog rock and electronic stuff and some tracks that defy categorisation. The only thing all the songs have in common is some very strange and often very funny words.
Except the instrumental tracks, that is.
A poster from a 1970 school concert
Never mind the Rowlocks – Pete, John and Colin about to have their trumpet stolen
The band in 1973; Mike Granatt didn’t have a T-shirt
Although nearly 40 people played in Pig Rider in its various forms over the years, there have only been two ever-present members – Colin Kitchener and John Mayes, who founded the band at Sevenoaks School in Kent, England.
The pair met in 1965, and soon began haunting the music rooms at the school to hammer out current three-chord pop songs on pianos. Colin was already writing his own songs, but their first effort together began, weirdly, by writing down lots of chords and notes, putting numbers beside them and getting Pete Ferguson, a very unmusical friend, to call out random numbers from the far side of the room to give them both a chord sequence and the start note for each bar.
It worked brilliantly, and the resulting Waltz of the Homicidal Cabbage became a staple of the trio’s early performances.
From this unusual start John and Colin went on to write hundreds more songs, including a complete, and to date unperformed, opera for schools; a song-cycle about Luton, a town they knew almost nothing about; songs designed to be played backwards, songs which are slightly offensive and others which are too offensive to play at all, anywhere, ever. The only thing all these have in common is that most were heavily beer-assisted in both composition and performance.
After a number of other names (including ‘D Jabferg Flossyakkit’ and ‘Bob Scratch and his Country and South Eastern Spring Blues Band’) by the start of the 70s they had settled on ‘The Pig Rider Robinson Heterophony’ to perform under.
The first part of the name was a misreading from graffiti scratched into a school desk – it actually said ‘the Pig Rider rides on’ – and they thought they’d made up ‘Heterophony’ as a word meaning many tunes played at once (actually, they were right, that’s what it meant, but they hadn’t made it up).
After an attempt to build a seven-foot robot bassist called Peregrine Robinson to front the band failed the name was finally abbreviated to its current, and much easier to remember, form.
Although the band’s musical style has varied considerably over the 45 years since it was formed (it has been described as going “from joke folk to mock rock”), some of the key elements were already in place by this time – weird lyrics, easy-to-play chord sequences, Colin’s cavalier approach to timing and at least one band member who couldn’t play any musical instrument at all to make John sound good.
This important role, initially performed by Pete, was later competently handled in live gigs by Mike Granatt, who John and Colin met at London University, but perhaps the best of them all was Joe Buckett, whose enthusiastic percussion and singing is a highlight of the early recordings.
Heterophonies! Clockwise from top left: Colin, John, Joe, Ian, Jim and Nigel
Despite Pig Rider playing live some 20 times over the 60s and 70s with varying membership, names and success, recording was always the main activity of the band.
The first attempt, in 1968, now known as Never Mind the Rowlocks because of its cover featuring John, Colin and Pete holding canoe paddles, was simply, utterly and overpoweringly awful. Fortunately the band has the only copy.
The second album, Animals with Few Teeth and Small Brains, was a marginal improvement, and the first which the band had cut onto acetate. Although some of the songs were pretty good, the production quality was poor (and as they hadn’t recorded enough tracks some of them were reused backwards to fill the album) but the next two albums saw a step change.
Bloody Turkey Sandwiches and Heterophonies were recorded between 1973 and early 1975, with acetate copies pressed for band members. These albums had everything the band needed; a proper tape deck with the capability to double-track; some skilled musicians in Jim Bruce and Nigel Endersby to support John and Colin; the aforementioned Joe Buckett; and most importantly Ian Baker to produce, edit and where necessary translate the songs.
The recordings were made in Ian’s bedroom although cunning use of his reel- to-reel gave some extra atmosphere. Because there was usually only an hour or two available at each session one take was all that was normally allowed, which explains all the wrong notes and the bits where the singer obviously doesn’t know the words.
Colin never plated ukelele, and John couldn't play the accordion. But that's a heavy rock.
The hi-tech equipment in use to create an echo effect
A few of our instruments. Colin's guitars are missing, and the bouzouki and electric guitar at the back haven't been used yet.
After these two albums, normal life got in the way of the band’s rise to stardom, and it wasn’t until the early 1980s that Colin and John started recording again, now normally just as a duo. Over the next five years they produced six albums which were issued on cassette tape: The Saga of Eric the Pink (double); Stoat; Moroccan Pelican Stuffing; Marky-poos’ enormous thrust for stardom; Waltz ‘n’ All (double) and A Guide to Moroccan Flora Volume II. The Robinson Scratch Theory is a selection from these remarkable recordings.
As always, the songs were home recorded, each often only in a single session. Although occasionally one of them would turn up with a complete song, usually John or Colin would bring along an idea – perhaps a chorus and chord sequence, or even just a couple of lines. They would then quickly put the rest of the song and the arrangement together, usually inspired by a sensible amount of beer.
Once the song was complete they would start laying down the basics of the track before bouncing the recording back and forth between a reel-to-reel and cassette recorder to give them the chance to overdub four or five times. There was no mixing desk, but there were some interesting home-made boxes which allowed the use of incompatible equipment.
The Pig Rider sound in the 80s was usually generated by playing a core track on an electric piano, often through a fuzz pedal, and then overlaying more keyboards, a multitracked Wasp synthesiser, guitar solos, vocals and noises from any other instruments which happened to be lying around. Echo effects were created by sticking a microphone in front of a speaker playing the reel-to-reel output.
There was usually no percussion: if a tambourine wasn’t enough a keyboard preset might be used; sometimes an effect from a Casio calculator was pressed into service (Mabel’s Undercover Lover, Thanks for the Home Run Elijah) or the Wasp was multitracked up to half a dozen times (Life on Brighton Pier). Even a suitcase was employed (McStoat) before a cheap Mattel toy provided drums on the later tracks (the long fade out on I want to make a million ‘just happened’ while John was working out how to use the machine).
Occasionally songs were recorded that hadn’t even been written. Tracks like Big Joe, A Tribute to Glenn Miller, Elephants over Dingo Rock and McStoat were made up as they went along, although usually some additional tracks were added to complete the song.
As a result of this approach the band rarely played a song more than the once it took them to record it, although sometimes a completed track would be rejected in favour of a different arrangement. This meant that, in a rare direct comparison with the Beatles, they couldn’t play their later songs live, so on the few occasions they played in pubs around this time they went back to their songs from the early 70s.
Once these six albums were completed John and Colin started on Morris Dancing on the Hindenburg Line, now with the advantage of an Amstrad home studio to allow them 10-track recording – but then life got in the way again when with the album half-finished John’s job moved 500 miles to Scotland.
The album was finally finished in three days 15 years later in 2003, during which time they wrote three tracks in a lunchtime in a pub in Yetts o’Muckhart and recorded them that afternoon. The final gap in the album was filled when Colin sang a song onto a tape and posted it to John, who added the backing.
A reunion at the Oval in the 1990s. There is beer.
Another decade passed: there was still beer when John and Colin got together, but no music, although there was always a possibility of another album if John ever moved back to England. A concept album – The Great Big Pig In The Sky – was considered and a few bits of songs written for it (‘There’s a Great Big Pig in the Sky, and we’re all going to ride it when we die’), but there were no recording sessions.
As the band approached its 50th anniversary an honest appraisal would have been that the Pig Rider story was over, and that it probably hadn’t been a great success. Although they had produced eleven albums of home-recorded material, the highest ‘sale’ they ever achieved was six copies and they had never been paid more for a gig than it had cost them to get there – and that’s when they were paid at all. So that was that; or so they thought.
But there was life in the old pig yet; one of the early acetates had escaped into the wide world. A copy of Heterophonies had ended up being reviewed by Richard Falk in ‘Galactic Ramble’, a 2009 book every fan of 60s and 70s music should own.
Describing the music as ‘heavy lo-fi electric folk with lots of weird electronic effects’ and the album as ‘truly remarkable’, the review’s suggestion that there was only one known copy made the disc a true collectors’ item.
While the acetate continued its journey via Japan to Italy, Colin spotted Heterophonies on a website called rateyourmusic.com, and logged in to add a tracklist. This login was the clue collector Alexandre Mansuy had needed to track down the band, and in 2013 he finally managed to get in touch and let them know of the interest in the album, with the result that John and Colin were finally able to make some money from all their efforts through selling their copies of the acetates.
Alexandre also recommended the band’s music to Catalonia-based record company Guerssen, and as a result the very surprised members of the band found themselves signing a deal to release the two albums from the early 1970s, Bloody Turkey Sandwiches and Heterophonies.
This would have been success and recognition enough, but there was more to come when Alexandre put some of the band’s later tracks on his blog somewherethereismusic.com.
Almost immediately Guerssen were back, enthusing about the ‘raw sound, home-made vibe, primitive electronics and distorted guitar’ of this material and offering to release a compilation of Alexandre’s choices of some of the highlights from the band’s albums from the early 80s. Even more flattering was the decision that there was too much good stuff for the release to be only a single album, so it was to be a double – and the CD would have bonus tracks!
That’s the story of how Pig Rider rose from total obscurity to the threshold of international fame; and how they conclusively proved the Robinson Scratch Theory that any band which, while seeking a permanent identity, performs under names which contain the words ‘Robinson’ and ‘Scratch’, will take at least 45 years to make any money.
So what was the obvious thing to do? Reform the band, naturally, despite some members having not met in 40 years - and indeed, having only met a couple of times then!
An email conversation quickly drew Jim Bruce and Nigel Endersby back into the fold with John and Colin; the band's first reunion in November 2015 resulted in a jolly Christmas single and accompanying video, as well as plans for a new album and some gigs in 2016.
So watch this space! After what has already happened, surely nothing can be ruled out for the future of Pig Rider?