When three future members of Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs first started jamming as teenagers in leafy Richmond in North Yorkshire, the locals became curious about the strange sludge and doom metal jams emanating from the church hall in the early hours. One night, the trio had a visit.
“Everyone suddenly stopped playing,” chuckles singer Matt Baty, who was the drummer in those days. “I looked round and there were two coppers standing in the room. We’d been making full-on noise and they must have come to check out if anything untoward was going on, and they found us.”
Thankfully, the local plod didn’t arrest them. “When they left they told us, ‘Keep on rocking,’” grins guitarist Sam Grant. “Which we have.”
Almost 15 years later, after word-of-mouth buzz and BBC 6 Music support, the now five-piece were the festival hit of last summer, playing a hypnotic mix of Black Sabbath-style “precious metal” and Jane’s Addiction with the repetition-based outsider rock of Can, Hawkwind and Sunn O))). Pigs x7’s tour is on hold due to coronavirus, but see them when they come back around in November – gigs tend to be incendiary, hard-rocking but awesomely entertaining affairs, with audience members wearing pig masks or clambering on stage and Baty, stripped to his shorts, howling cathartically.
“The policemen asked us, ‘Is everything all right?” he remembers. “I said no, we’re not all right. That’s why we’re doing this.” The frontman finds “solace in really loud music. I don’t meditate – maybe I should – but it feels like I’m achieving a similar state of consciousness. When the music’s so loud that you can’t think about anything else, all those niggling troubles just go.”
Band members talk of getting so lost in their playing that they have felt sick on stage, or come off with clenched jaws. “It’s therapy through noise,” explains bassist Johnny Hedley. “Whether we’re thrashing about or playing something slow and droney, the variety of expression mirrors how you feel internally.”
The mostly short-haired Pigs x7 don’t particularly look like regular metalheads, but discovered Sabbath and Motörhead from their parents’ collections before digging into extreme metal, Krautrock, noise and sonics. I meet them in February in Newcastle’s Trillians Rock Bar, fulcrum of the city’s metal scene for years. Shortly after relocating, Baty had a eureka moment in this very bar, when he came across local noise band Marzuraan, who were making, he says, “bottles shake off the shelves. My eyebrows were vibrating. Downtuned guitars. An awkward uncomfortable guy on vocals. It was a whole new world of music.”
Gradually, Baty realised he didn’t want to be the drummer any more, but the frontman, which coincided with a shift to more focused music than the original madcap plan to do “long psychedelic jams, with 10 drummers”, becoming a five-piece instead.
They acquired the band name while in Newcastle. The waggish Grant explains that it functions as “an ego inhibitor. Having a silly name stops you getting ahead of yourself or hungering for success and keeps you focused on making music you believe in.” Not that it hasn’t caused some issues. “We get people trying to sell us pigs,” deadpans Sykes, to howls of laughter. “It’s happened three times recently. A Brazilian guy saw the name on the internet and thought we were a livestock auction. I did ask for photos of his pigs, but I usually try and explain the situation early on, before I find myself ordering a herd of animals.”
A chat with Pigs is like their gigs, and careers from hilarity to something more profound. Baty is “humbled” by the fan letters from “people reciting lyrics back to me and telling me what they mean to them. Which is astounding, really”. On their new album, Viscerals, the song New Body is about low self-esteem, which – especially delivered by a guy performing almost naked – is quite unusual in the metal canon.
“The topless thing started shortly after I switched to vocals,” Baty explains. “Having been a drummer it was unfamiliar territory, so during early gigs I tried to cover myself up by wearing a kaftan with a hood. Then one night the mic lead got caught in the hood and I ended up with my arms suspended over my head. I thought, ‘Never again’.” As the gigs became hotter, he found himself unbuttoning. “It felt symbolic of unburdening. So now I’m down to my shorts, but I’m not going on stage in a loincloth”.
Freedom from societal constraints – whether in clothing, musical convention or health and safety laws on stage – is a recurring theme. Hedley sees their music as “an escape from a period of time where socially things are very difficult”.
Many of Baty’s lyrics concern religion. Having been an avid churchgoer in childhood, and attending a Catholic school, three years ago he accompanied his mum to mass for Christmas, and found it “really bleak. Like ‘Enjoy Christmas, but remember you’re a sinner and you’re going to hell’. It reminded me what I grew up with. I had a lovely childhood but all this is ingrained; I was taught about sin and purgatory, which are very heavy duty concepts for a child to try and process.” He’s at pains to point out that references to the seven deadly sins on 2018’s King of Cowards and new songs such as Crazy in Blood “really aren’t bashing religion. I’m just trying to make sense of why – aged eight – I was asking about who we are and why we die.”
The singer has a theory about why audiences are connecting with his band’s catharsis-through-precious-metal. “It’s like there’s an arc,” he decides. “At the start of life, you’re dealing with grand ideas and ‘the world is bigger than me’. Then at the end of your life you’re dealing all this again, sometimes assisted by religion. And in the confusing middle of life – which is where we are – there’s us.”
• Viscerals is out now on Rocket Recordings.
