Interview by Jumana Farouky
Photo by Andy Willsher

In the summer 2005 issue of Under the Radar there is a big special section on the mid-90s Britpop scene. In that section there is an interview with Crispin Hunt of Longpigs. Below are the extra quotes that we couldn’t fit into the article in the summer 2005 issue. The best quotes are found in the issue.

Longpigs were formed in 1994 by vocalist Crispin Hunt, guitarist Richard Hawley, bassist Simon Stafford, and drummer Dee Boyle. After label woes, the Sheffield band finally released their debut album, The Sun Is Often Out, on U2’s Mother Records, at the height of Britpop in 1996. Record label closures on both sides of the Atlantic impeded Longpigs’ bid for the big time, but the band still built up critical acclaim and a devoted fan base. Constant touring, the poor reception that greeted 1999’s sophomore album, Mobile Home, and the folding of Mother Records were all reasons why Longpigs called it day in 2000. Hunt recorded demos for a solo album that never got made because of yet more major label woes. In 2004 he teamed up with Howie B. to record the electronic art project Mayonnaise. Now married with one child, Hunt has also been writing songs for U.K. pop stars, and has a new pop band named Gramercy.

Under the Radar: I was a huge Longpigs fan.

Crispin Hunt: There aren’t very many of you around. I always wanted Longpigs to be like I thought Echo and the Bunnymen were when I was growing up. And it was, really, because Echo and the Bunnymen used to sell 120,000 albums and that would be massive. So when we sold that many I thought, “My god, we’re enormous.” But unfortunately Oasis started selling 120 million records, so it put everything into place. But I always wanted Longpigs to be deliberately left-wing and deliberately…I didn’t want it to be too mainstream. And luckily we did a very good job! So Longpigs was a funny thing. We were quite successful at the time. It was really good fun, that period of Britpop. But Britpop as a really arrogant and self-centered anti-grunge rebellion – a not very typically British reaction. It was a real “We don’t like your grunge!” It was a really gay reaction, not in the derogatory sense, but in a girlie sense, with Suede and Pulp. And it was an old-fashioned British, the campness to it, was comedy, in a way. And so were Oasis. They were comedy sneering Beatles, whereas the American bands, Nirvana and Soundgarden and stuff were really very straight up.

UTR: There was no sense of irony…

Crispin: It was very genuine felt stuff. So it was refreshing as a reaction, but it’s not the reaction that the British usually try and do. We usually try and emulate the Americans and this was a really reactionary reaction. But it was really necessary for England at the time and it coincided with this--I don’t know how it came about, but I was living here in Notting Hill--and it coincided with the film Notting Hill coming out. England suddenly, because of Blair getting in in 1997, suddenly there was a rebirth feeling. A great friend of mine called Phil Savage, who was of Savage and Best press agents, coined the phrase Britpop, and I loathe him for it. because it tarred us all with exactly the same brush. Americans, I think, understood it more how it really should have been which was just British bands from Britain. A new British invasion. Whereas in England it has this very camp, Blur singing about English parks, cod-mod, sub-Kinks-style thing about it, which felt really punk at the time and felt really good. And it hit with New Labour getting in, the economy turning up a little bit, and England had a honeymoon period where we just went “We are fantastic!” and you felt like you were in the center of the world, living in Notting Hill and being on the front cover of the NME, you felt like that was it, “The world is here and everyone’s looking at it.” Which I don’t suppose they were, but it was a kick at the time and it was thrilling. We felt important and felt like horrible people like Chris Evans on TGI Friday–it felt like he was doing interesting and modern broadcasting and was slightly risqué. And of course it wasn’t. Now, of course, it’s dissolved into its own cliché. But at the time it felt pretty good. And the music was really necessary for England. It was a kind of renaissance that I think was an inevitable reaction to the ‘80s being so bloody awful. We had to look back. There was no way of looking forward. Everyone realized we’d reached a dead-end street at the end of the ‘80s. And a whole generation of people looked back, myself included, to a combination of what we were getting from America, which was Nirvana and Soundgarden, and our own heritage, The Beatles, The Kinks and a sort of more stylized version of what we were getting from everywhere else. We thought we were quite stylized, and quite comedy. Although we may not have liked to laugh at ourselves at the time, but it was quite comedy, all the skinny t-shirts, that Jarvis Cocker look. Jarvis Cocker is a really funny man. When he stops being funny he’s not at all entertaining, when he takes himself too seriously. But when he’s trying to be entertaining, he’s an immensely funny character and profound with it. So there.

UTR: Did you consider yourselves a Britpop band?

Crispin: Not at all. I found it really uncomfortable. And we got lumped very much within it, because everybody did if you were one of those bands. So if you weren’t trying to necessarily do that, which we weren’t. We may well looking back at it have sounded like all the other spiky bands, but we thought we were being quite modern and new. We weren’t doing what Blur were doing, which was really going for a hazy English summer afternoon style. It was an annoying thing to be clumped in with but you also knew it was useful in a sense. It was part of a movement, that it was “okay, if it’s going to be happening, then that’s okay.” Like The Beatles were considered mod when they first came out and rode on that for a little while. And they blatantly weren’t. But what it means in America, that period of British bands, there were some fantastically good things around. Suede had their moments when they were just brilliant. And same with Pulp. The English are at their best when they laugh at themselves a bit, so it’s got to have that comedy element. It was quite funny. And the English, we take people to our hearts if they laugh at themselves and we loathe them if they don’t. If they’re just successful and good, we don’t like it. It’s that whole cliché of Americans like you if you’re successful, because they think you’ll take them with you, and the English hate you because they think you’ll leave them behind. But then there were dreadful bits about it like Menswear. I’m big friends with Chris [Gentry] the guitarist. They were fun at the time, but they were pretty dreadful really. That was the archetype of it. But it was a big buzz. And Oasis, again, although kind of cod-Beatles, are a fantastic band. They make a fantastic sound. We played with them really, really early on. Annoyingly, because Longpigs got signed to Elektra records. Elektra tried to reopen in England and we got signed to them just after Oasis originally got signed to Creation and we were going to have our first single out three weeks after Oasis were going to release their first single, which would have been before Radiohead. So, we certainly wouldn’t have been Radiohead-sound-alikes, they would’ve been Longpigs-sound-alikes. But unfortunately Elektra folded three weeks before we were going to release the first single. So that never happened and it took us like a year and a half to get out of that deal and into another one. So then we became part of rather than the vanguard of it. so that was really frustrating. And it was pretty much the same record.

UTR: So you think you would have been much more successful?

Crispin: Yeah, because I think we would have been one of the first to have done that. But it’s the way of the world so you just have to get on with those things.

UTR: Did that ever carry on when you guys broke up? Did you ever think, “We would have made it if Elektra hadn’t folded?”

Crispin: You always say ‘if’ and ‘what’ and ‘who.’ It would have undoubtedly made an enormous difference had “She Said” have come out three weeks after Oasis’s “Cigarettes and Alcohol.” It would have made a much bigger splash, it would have been a new sound and it would have been a new thing, so who knows what would have happened. But six months of sleepless nights later, I was absolutely fine with it [laughs]. At the time, it was really painful. And we couldn’t get out of the Electra deal and finally got out of that and signed to U2’s Mother label. Who were pretty good at first and then became a dreadful label and folded, after we released our second album. And to go through that again was too boring, so that was when we split up. That was the end…

UTR: Britpop didn’t last very long…

Crispin: That was because it was a bit of a joke. It wasn’t really founded on anything. It was a conceit invented by…there were a few bands like Menswear that really were following a kind of style. But the rest of it, it wasn’t really a movement as such. It was a conceit invented by Phil Savage in order to give this growing amount of interesting and good British bands that were around some kind of a label. And also the British music press at that time, and still is, but maybe not so now because they’ve been once bitten twice shy about it, but at the time they were very, very into creating new movements. Melody Maker, long may it rot in hell, used to try to have a New Romantic revival and stuff. And my friend Phil Savage coined Britpop as a deliberate conceit. He did the press for Suede and Pulp. And that was one of the mistakes of the British press. I suppose it wasn’t a mistake because it was an easy tag to go to America with, but I don’t think Americans interpreted it in the same way. I think they just saw it as good British bands coming over. But it never really…forgive me if I’m wrong, but apart from Oasis who sold so many records, but not by American standards particularly huge. We’d had a Top 10 alternative hit in America and sold 200,000 records or something, which is nothing. It felt like quite a lot, but it was absolutely nothing by American standards.

UTR: There’s always this small population of Americans who are real anglophiles and Britpop was…

Crispin: A centerpoint for them. I always think they’re very wise and clever, Americans that are anglophiles [laughs]. We saw an awful lot of them and we did a lot of touring in America and it was very evident. It was quite strange to see these people who looked like they were from Camden turning up in Salt Lake City. And they would be friends with everybody. They would know Suede and Menswear and Oasis. That was the scene. And that was bizarre and thrilling to see going on in America, but I was very aware that it was probably only a kind of suburban niche market. It was only ever going to be a suburb of what was the market in America. It wasn’t normal Americans going…it was definitely an inlet, a sub-stream of people around. Which made it quite clear that we weren’t going to be the next Nirvana.

UTR: A lot say they didn’t want to be big, but it seems to me one of the reasons you make music is…

Crispin: To be huge. No, it was disappointing. I remember when there was a time when we had ‘On and On’ which was almost a hit in America. It was number one on Dallas alternative radio or something like that. And when it was on the way up, that was incredibly exciting. The radio people from Island would phone in and go, ‘we got another 2,000 plays this week.’ That was a real thrill. There was a one month period where we thought, “oh my god, this might actually go big and happen.” And then Island records shut down, as well. We’d been very unlucky with our record companies. And Island records over there had that great cull day where they went from employing 400 people to employing 40 people in one night and that was right in the middle of our ascendancy. And it just started descending from there because there was nobody working the record. But that’s just the nature of record companies, they’re forever chopping themselves to pieces and folding and redesigning themselves and employing the people who failed at their last jobs to even bigger jobs, two weeks later. But I’m not bitter! [laughs]. It was brilliant. Britpop’s not going to be anything special. It’s not going to be a period that people write about as a great period of British music. It’s interesting to go back and look on, and especially seeing as now there are an awful lot of really good bands coming out of Britain –well, Razorlight, one really good band. And what’s happening in America, all these bands like the Strokes and the Killers, who are plainly from that little tribe of anglophiles, who are over here, they’ve changed a lot and now English bands are trying to look like that. It’s ping-ponging, as it always did. There’s a new band called Pink Grease who are trying to be the Ramones.

UTR: Is that ultimate legacy of Britpop?

Crispin: I suppose so. It’s definitely coming back. The Killers are a Britpop band. They don’t even look like an American band. They look and they sound like they’re from the Britpop era. Same with the Strokes, although the Strokes sound like Television, who I absolutely adore. But that’s a good thing to sound like. We sounded like Television, I hope. Everybody wants to sound like Television.

UTR: So there are no negative repercussions? It left a lot of bands in its wake.

Crispin: It sort of grabbed a lot of people and pulled them along. And then because it was inherently quite uncomfortable and unfashionable, it was a retrogressive thing, harping back to the ‘60s. At a time when the whole of the rest of the world was dressing up in day-glo and dancing all night to dance music, which is where it should really have gone. I don’t know how this gang of black skinny t-shirted Britpop people came out. But we obviously did. There was some kind of zeitgeist with it, because we all felt the same thing and all started making the same music at about the same time, so there was a contemporariness that obviously was a reaction to dance music. But it was very belligerent in that sense. It was very annoyingly un-modern. It was a very old fashioned type of thing. And when there’s a bit of a wave like that, and the record companies go out and sign a whole lot of people…it did leave an awful lot of people in its wake. I’m one of them and I’m friends with many others. But it was a great wake to have gone on. I had four or five years where I was a rock star. That was fantastic. There’s the exceptions that prove the rule, like Michael Stipe and Bono, who are quite embarrassing when you see them on Top of the Pops. It’s like, “Granny, go home.” They’re still making great music, but there’s something a little bit unsavory about it. It’s like the ancient old aunt that you get dancing leerily with young men at weddings. Michael Stipe and Bono are very much like that. I see U2 on CDUK, which is children’s television. There’s something really quite unsavory about it, something undignified about being that old. But there is the exception. The Stones have done it and now that they’re 70 everyone thinks it’s really cool again. They’ve suddenly turned into John Lee Hooker. But when they were 50, everyone was going, “Ick. This is unsavory.” And Dylan, who is rubbish, but has carried on, and Van Morrisson, who is rubbish, but has carried on. But then it starts moving to a new brand of music, and it has to become more arty, and more adult and more Radio 2.

UTR: Blur, for example, that’s exactly what they’ve done. Radiohead.

Crispin: Radiohead I think are a fantastic band and really interesting. But occasionally on their more arty records it’s very ‘Emperor’s New Clothes,’ they can afford to do these arty records and everyone goes, “Oh, isn’t this wonderful.” “No, it’s not really wonderful.” I get annoyed with Thom Yorke’s contrived, “Ooh well you’re out to get us” teenage persecution complex. He’s got two kids and a wife, if he’s still thinking like that he needs a good slap.

UTR: And then we’ve got Oasis who are still doing exactly what they were doing ten years ago, but it’s just not selling as well…

Crispin: But it will be interesting to see with this “Lyla” thing, which is just, as an exercise in Oasisism, it’s “Lola” by The Kinks and “Layla” by Eric Clapton. It’s like, “Good God, how much more of a rip-off can you get.” But it’s quite a great song. And it was produced by the guy who produced Marilyn Manson and it’s the best-sounding record that they’ve made in a long time, if not ever. And I’m quite into them for that. I think they’re quite funny. And they never were rocket scientists in any case. That’s their bag. And there is still a lad market that will go and buy that. Not one that I ever wanted to be anything about. The Oasis thing was in contradiction to the rest of Britpop really. It was a real football market that Oasis got, which was probably why they were much more successful than everyone else. But Pulp and Suede, who were the antithesis of that, weren’t a football market at all. They were much too poncy. And Radiohead did quite well I think because of their name. It could allow all of the dancey people to like them. You weren’t allowed to like Suede because that was too obviously a poncy Britpop thing, but Radiohead sounded like Propellerheads or something, sounded like they were dance DJs, so it was kosher for normal people. You were talking about the anglophile clique in America that liked it, it was sort of the same as that in England. There were really only about 40,000 people that were going out and buying those singles, but that would propel you into the Top 10 of the charts. Seeing as Echo and the Bunnymen were gods and were only selling 60,000 records, so Longpigs selling twice as many as that, it did quite well.

UTR: This was a time when American music was king over here.

Crispin: And deservedly so. Nirvana has proved to be a truly…[tape ends]

UTR: Who were your biggest competitors?

Crispin: I thought we were more in competition with Radiohead, really. That was why it was annoying to get ganged with the Britpop thing. We were automatically done as Suede and Pulp, but I thought we were trying to be quite serious and adventury, arty music, kind of beautiful songs and beautiful tunes and experimenting in noise. Some of it was good old-fashioned belligerent fun, but at the time I thought was quite special. But then everybody thinks their own band is quite special. So that was the sort or market we were going for. And had we released a record before Radiohead, it would have been very different. But we didn’t. So that was the annoying thing about being put in this gang. And as a result, one of the annoying things of being put under that tag, if you didn’t look like Menswear, some of the more crass journalists from the NME and Melody Maker would consider you as being a crap Britpop band. When you were going, “Wait a second, we’re not trying to be like Menswear or Blur. We’re not trying to dress up like The Kinks, we’re trying to do something else.” But we would get judged on how Kinksy you looked, which was frustrating. But it did as much good for us as it did bad for us. And I think in America it had the opposite effect for us, because it didn’t have the same implications as it had over here. Britain’s fashion is always incredibly cliquey, it’s very mod and rock, dance and then Britpop as a reaction to that. I don’t know because I don’t really read the NME, but hopefully that was the end of…being the end of 20th century British pop, it was the end of a bit. I don’t think the press, fashion and society won’t be able to get away with, use those references so freely. Won’t be able to understand what Blur was doing when it was doing Parklife, and Jarvis when he was doing “Common People.” When I first heard it – the Longpigs are from Sheffield, so we knew Pulp quite well. And Richard the guitarist went on to play with Pulp. When I first heard “Common People” I couldn’t believe it. I thought this is really crass. Good God, what are you saying here? But that was the whole point of it, sort of inverted snobbery. I don’t know whether Britain will be…there was a particular time when we were looking at ourselves in a particular way and were particularly, annoyingly…Vanity Fair having Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit lying in a bed with the Union Jack. How Britain got away with being so pleased with itself was both cheeky, which it thought it was, and also I don’t think those circumstances will come around again in a while.

UTR: British bands are doing quite well over in the States, like Kasabian…

Crispin: I don’t like Kasabian very much. They’re perfectly alright but they’re sort of sub-Happy Mondays for me. They do admit that. I’m really glad, and they deserve to be, because there’s a lot of good things coming out at the moment. I like Libertines and Razorlight, especially. Suddenly there’s an awful lot of good things again. I hope in a way that they’re allowed to not be flagged as something. I hope that they’re just allowed to be a bunch of good bands. That they aren’t all forced to conform to one set of rules. Which is what Britpop did a little bit in England. It forced you to play that role, even though that maybe not the role that you wanted to be in. they could be the kids who would come see our gigs ten years ago. They would have been about 15 then.

UTR: So tell me what happened after Longpigs.

Crispin: Longpigs shut down in 2000…something. Then it took us a year to get free from the contract. So it was one of those go away and pretend you’re not doing anything otherwise you won’t get free from the contract. So I went and pretended I wasn’t doing anything. Then I almost got a solo deal with Hutch records which would have been very cool. But then, again, just my luck, the very day that Dave Boyd got the sack from the head of Virgin, as I delivered my demos, so that all went wrong. Then I got thoroughly pissed off with it, to be frank, I got really, really sick and tired… the glamour of playing the Astoria to a bunch of kids in Pulp t-shirts, it stops being so brilliant once you’ve done it three or four times. And so I wanted to do the Howie [B.] thing. I wanted to get into more music like that. And Mayonnaise is really just a bunch of demos that we put together, but it’s more fun and more interesting. And I write horrible cheesy pop songs for people like Emma Bunton [ex-Spice Girls] and Mark Owen. And I work in politics, which I’m very happy doing. I’ve got a record coming out which is more of an advert, under the name Gramercy, which is very American. It’s deliberately adult–Crosby, Stills & Nash done by Air is the idea of it, and it works quite well. It’s more of an advert for – I’m doing it with these two other writers and we intend to be the next Bee Gees in that we’re going to write everybody’s pop songs for them. And this is an advert for the pop songs…

UTR: You don’t miss it?

Crispin: I do. But it has to change. I had a really good time and I played Wembley Stadium and Giants Stadium, which was phenomenally fantastic. But it’ll have to be a different kind of thing now. I don’t want to do children’s entertainment any more. I want to do adult entertainment. I’ll write pop songs for 12 year olds, which I love doing because suddenly you can just detach yourself from it and suddenly its an art form and a storytelling, rather than a “here is my bleeding heart.” It has to have a little bit of bleeding heart in it, but it can be slightly paled, in a way.

UTR: And you're married with children…

Crispin: And I’m married and I’ve got one kid, just new. He’s a boy. I wanted a girl but I’m so deeply in love with my boy now, it’s stupid. I was so terrified of having children, but I’ve just been so phenomenally in love since I’ve first seen him. You don’t have any choice whether to like it or not. Silas, that’s his name. As in Silas Marner, the novel, my wife’s favorite book. He’s an anti-hero, he’s not a good character. But she’s from the West Country so she liked the idea.

UTR: It’s not like you have the most normal name either.

Crispin: No, Crispin, dreadful name. It’s alright as a small boy, but as an adult it’s very difficult to live with. So now one has to concentrate on being Burt Bacharach rather than being Kurt Cobain, it’s a different discipline and a different dream.

UTR: What about the rest of the Longpigs? I know Richard Hawley…

Crispin: Has records coming out. Which I think are…he has a fantastic band and apart from that it’s appallingly mediocre stuff.

UTR: Do you guys talk?

Crispin: Not really. We don’t really like each other much. Well we’re okay. We spent too long with each other and it was quite a relief…he’s a lovely boy Rich. I think I probably know him too well to be able to have an objective decision on what his music sounds like. All I hear is him crooning away and, uh, turn it off. Just like when you hear your mum singing, it’s your mum, it’s not a voice. We got on quite well. Everyone has their periods of fighting. You can’t do that, you can’t spend that long in each other’s pockets without falling in and out. But on the whole we were pretty good. But it was enough time. Seven years is…it has to be really really worth your while to carry on doing that. People who are in bands that last 10 or 15 years, it has to be either your desperate livelihood or a really good amount of money and you can have separate tour vans. Like The Rolling Stones, where you meet and smile because it’s a million quid every time you do it. It’s quite long enough to spend with someone else.

UTR: Did the Longpigs make you rich?

Crispin: It made me, a bit. I felt quite rich. I’ve got a nice house. I have to work but not as hard as some. But I spent a lot of money, too. That was part of the joy of it. I was rich for a while. I spent well, I suppose. As George Best said, “Wine, women and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.” I had a realy good time. Not rich by big amounts but by my standards, I was rich. And by my friends’ standards, for a while. But they’ve all caught up with me now because they all went into the city and stuff like that. They’re all stinking rich now and I’m an impoverished artists. But I’ll reap my revenge some day.

UTR: What about the other two?

Crispin: Simon is up in Sheffield, the bass player. Who I’m still good friends with. He’s doing bits of music, he’s a fantastic jazz pianist. Dee the drummer, the old original drummer, I don’t really see him very often. We did unfortunately fall out. He put a glass in my face and gave me a scar. Only because he drank too much and that was one of the failings of being on tour. Always on the rider there would be a bottle of vodka and a bottle of whiskey. It started off just dipping into it, and by the end of being seven years on tour, it was finishing it. He got too drunk and got to the point where he got stupid when he got drunk. So we fought over something and he lashed out. So I don’t see him. That was the end of our friendship, which was a shame because he was my best friend within the band. We were the lovers of it. It was our little dream and we kept it together. I’m not sure what he’s doing. I don’t know. The last I heard he was working in a horses’ stables, which couldn’t happen to a nicer man. But you either end up as a tribute band, going on like The Hollies now, going around with three of the original members when they’re all 50, playing clubs, which is a living. Or you stop and get a proper job and do something else and say that was fantastic. From the age of 23 to 32 I was in a rock band and that was great. But now I write horrible cheesy pop songs and reform the House of Commons. It’s good. And make bizarre arty records with interesting people like Howie. Howie is a phenomenally and fantastically inspirational man.

UTR: How did you two hook up?

Crispin: Longpigs played on U2’s Pop tour, the lemon tour, and he was playing there and we made friends then. We just carried on. He’s an extremely brilliant person, he’s one of my favorite people that I’ve ever met. You leave being with Howie and you feel like you’re a bigger thing than before you met him. He’s a brilliant man. Troubled in his own way, but brilliant.

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(7/2005)