Pigbag

Chris Hamlin was studying fashion at the local art college when he hatched Pigbag in Cheltenham toward the end of 1980, roping in his old Birmingham friend Roger Freeman, a multi-instrumentalist, along with trumpeter Chris Lee and James Johnstone, a record shop assistant who played guitar and had only just picked up the alto sax. They jammed in parks and anywhere else that would have them, but mostly in Hamlin's flat in Beech House, and when the racket needed a spine they called in two of Johnstone's school friends, both from the band Hardware, Andrew "Chip" Carpenter on drums and Mark "Miff" Smith on bass.

Out of those sessions came "Papa's Got A Brand New Pigbag", grown from an idea Hamlin and Johnstone had been kicking around before the band even existed, and it became the tune everyone knows them by. It is post-punk that wants you sweating: honking brass, clattering percussion and a bassline that won't sit still, with jazz blown right through the middle of it.

The lineup kept swelling, with Ollie Moore on tenor sax, Freeman on trombone, Simon Underwood and singer Angela Jaeger among the names, and the records came out on Y Records. It was a short, hot burst: by 1983 Pigbag were finished.

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