Pig Iron Joe ruled the Highfields' blues seen for three long years between 2002-2005. This is his story.
The artist formerly known as Pig Iron Joe had a long slow birth. About five years ago I met
Dr Vibrato. He was on the run for stealing a Gun Club album
from her Majesty the Queen and I offered him sanctury in my home
shrine to Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Protected by such santified
power the peelers couldn't touch him. But, little did I know
what effect this chance meeting was to have on me and the world
of music.
Like two hopeless kings of cool we sat wrapped in our deliverme
jackets and surrounded by empty bottles of Louisiana Red. Searching
for
inspiration,
we tried
to contact
the soul of the nearly-dead bluesman T Model Ford. Yet, in a
freak event connected closely with being drunk, Dr. Vibrato accidentally
became possessed with the soul of Edith Piaf, who taught him
how to unlock the creative force within himself - other people's
songs.
Inspired by this creative fever, we drank more and created 2
albums worth of material by changing one or sometimes two words
in songs we liked.
Kicking some life into the spluttering engine of our 1958 Monkey
we headed off to Rome. Somewhere in Vatican City we
pushed our way into a blues club and forced the bemused
punters
to listen to us play punk rock versions of Irene and Commit
a Crime over and over again. The stratocaster loving
fools
hated
it,
but
we loved
it and went out looking for more.
And more came, falling off of the Alabama Train, there were
skinny drummers, dreadlocked low note fetishists, and princesses
from the top and bottom of the world.[who?] Pretty soon we were
all on the road frightening the paying public. Publicans refused
payment, rotten fruit was thrown and blues purist fundamentalists
made threats against our lives.
And then the world rediscovered the blues in 2002 and we were
there ready for them. We'd been playing this sort of music for
ages and
suddenly everyone started to see that we
were
actually
fantastic and not crap, as the “I saw Peter Green playing
a 9 string bass in 1968” bores kept saying.
We started to be asked to support American bands like the Soledad
Brothers and the Immortal Lee County Killers and seminal figures
like Holly Golightly and old school blues punks The Inmates.
Our demo became a cult item with dozens of copies being sent
off to oddball blues fans in Europe and the States and hits on
the website grew and grew.
But eventually overcome by his internal contradictions he imploded in a shower of stardust. Pig Iron No you might say.
