Jazz-Funk from straight outta the 'hood (well, Cheltenham...)
PIGBAG
Pigbag were a collective from my neck of the woods, Cheltenham rather than Gloucester, but to most of you that's probably close enough, however their heyday was in the years before I was going to gigs, so I never got to see them live. Maybe I wouldn't have, anyway, as their sound was a jazz/funk fusion - a hybrid of two genres neither of which I'm particularly intimate with, and consequently not something I'd be instinctively drawn to. They may even still be around - I found some relatively recent clips on Youtube when looking for an accompanying video - but if so I'd reckon that they're playing at the kinds of places that fall well below my radar.
If you don't recognise, the name of the record or the name of the band, there's a solid chance that you'll get that feeling of recognition when you hear the Ba Ba Ba-Baaa Ba Ba Ba Ba parping of the trumpet on Papa's Got A Brand New Pigbag. It's the kind of thing that will get used on sporting broadcasts, and has also been heavily sampled on a number other hits. It's the bass-line and percussion that starts this tune off - the bass follow the same structure as that trumpet riff, just mentioned. The the trumpet comes in bold as brass (pun intended) then literally all hell breaks loose - This is the kind of thing that people who don't like jazz complain about - the sax goes off on some wild meandering, barely melodic, bit of free-form nonsense, and this happens a few throughout the record with trumpet as well as saxophone. These are interspersed with the cool and iconic trumpet riff. What makes this more than some jazzy self-indulgence is that bass and percussion. They are both there in the background, insistent, driving, and mightily epic. They build an infectious groove that can lift even the most sedentary among us into movement, and it's an earworm too, with no lyrics to focus on that groove lodges in your head, and works it's way down into your body, and days after hearing it you find yourself bopping along to that rhythm, which has been ensnared in you subconscious. If that's not enough, the whole tune takes an unexpected turn at the end when the trumpets and saxes disappear, and even that bassline fades out and for the last 30 seconds everyone transitions into playing percussion, and it ends on an inferno of drums, bongos, and other scraping and rattling sounds - by all rights this should be awful, but its not, because the same groove that's infected you lives in these instruments and this percussive breakdown, somehow helps brings the experience to a satisfying conclusion.
On the backside of the the record is The Backside - an excellent pun taking opportunity grasped, and applaud the band for it. Could it be more that that though, perchance it'll be some ode to callipygian wondrousness, just for double the pun. No, the fact is that nothing could be further from the truth, this tune starts out with sound fragments and odd fractured elements of noise. It's disquieting and disturbing, it's the sound of desolation and the aftermath of an apocalypse. In the mix amongst all the odd wind and brass tones there's a distant wordless wailing and occasional screams - about two minutes in this dissipates and a funky bass rhythm starts up - it's short and fast and repeated phrase, supported by tom-toms and other percussion, it keeps repeating for a while then gradually speeds up and the record comes to the end. Whilst this is happening fragments of the earlier part of the record drift in and out of the background, then suddenly it's over.
Just Papa's got a Brand New Pigbag is enough to make this one of the more unlikely records to have been a big hit, but the b-side just makes that even stranger. A fantastic record, which is made up of one tune that will forever live in my head rent free, and another that is barely a tune, but nonetheless is capable of evoking powerful sensations.
Next time back to some melodic goth sounds...
