S2 EP1: Blur with Josh Widdicombe Whoo-hoo! There’s no other way we’d like series 2 to kick off than here, talking about Blur with the literal mastermind of the band, seat-seeking Sunday sceptic Josh Widdicombe. Well, here’s our lucky day: after watching/livestreaming/latestreaming the the new album at the (yes please) Hammersmith Apollo, we tuck into the Ballad of Darren, the jealousy of Tim and the price of Phil. We have pigged the Blur gig that we thought we’d never pig, and this is...

The pigs are back in the trough and familiar roles have been assumed ahead of next week’s official return: Alex has devised, formatted and tiered the new Patreon, and Ivo has put written some song titles on small scraps of paper and put them into bucket hats for a quiz. Click the link below to find out the hours of extra pig tails and other swill we’ll be trotting out each month for £3.80/£5/£10,000. Lay me down business class, headphones and a sleeping mask! www.patreon.com/GigPigs The...

Proposals, printed lyrics, and promised lands: the pigs recount their respective trips to the circus (literal: Maximus, metaphorical: BST Hyde Park’s tiered standing) to watch the Boss this summer, in an episode that arguably hits a bit harder than last week’s game of “guess the Really Hot Chili Peppers setlist”. Dedicated to our friends around the river bend, and all those remembering them. The Extra Swill playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/45NNtgh2FbvR4emjWbAVQh Emails and...

Look at that title and tell me these boys aren’t serious. The purge steps up this week as Alex and Ivo discuss Live Aspects but also Non Live Aspects of their hoariest mid noughties chestnuts: one more chance to rank the Chamber Bullets’ non album singles, whether the Great Scots could have had it so much better with a bit more emotional weight, a largely revelation free black hole of chat on the Cydonian Knights, and why the Really Hot Chili Peppers can’t turn on their telly. The Extra...

The podcast may be in flux between seasons, but this shouldn’t stop us getting our talons into one of the jewels (exact jewel ranking TBC) in the “UK festivals that you can camp at” crown. Arguably not the most total review of the sumptuous Suffolk smorgasbord, compromised by admin and rain and cold Saturday night pragmatism, but with enough regrets and soup-based hypotheticals to tide us over until Alex goes to Green Man and Ivo berates him about what he did and didn’t see there. The Extra...

It’s the final Gig Pigs Proper of the series and we’re going (sn)out with a bang(er)! Two guests with four Arctic Monkeys gigs this year (and many more before) between them, tackling the mardiest rock debate of our times: whether the new songs make perfect sense or if they should just snap out of it??!! This pod there’ll be some love (serial Alex fancier Mhairi Beveridge!), this pod there’ll be a ruckus yeah regardless of what’s gone before (dip dwelling solitaire enthusiast Maisie Adam!)....

Pod on! Pod on! Pod on! Pod on! You’re cuing up a future award-winning interview about the Hives with prolific sketcher / Eurovisionner / elephant pianist Sean Burke. The Swedish rock and lol stars brought their vast catalogue of gold to the Kingston Pryzm and Ivo, Alex and Sean were about as involved as you can be without getting up onstage to play bass. Download extra swill, rate and leave review, just add it to the list of things that you are gonna do. The Extra Swill...

Welcome to the jungle! Ivo’s back from Somerset to hoarsely rant about his escapades, but does Alex wanna know? With some texted contributions from other pigs on the farm, we think it’s going to be a long long pod (actually quite short by our standards). Rate, review and roll on Latitude! The Extra Swill playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/45NNtgh2FbvR4emjWbAVQh Emails and recommendations in the usual places - [email protected] Follow us! @ivo_graham @alexkealy A 'Keep It...

If I saw you at the gig, would I have you in my pig tonight? This week KG and the PW run this and other urgent questions past fantastic comedian and Forum stalwart Sean McLoughlin. What did he make of Ontarian marriage enthusiasts Alvvays? Was it a good time? Or was it highly inappropriate? Enjoy/review/subscribe! The Extra Swill playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/45NNtgh2FbvR4emjWbAVQh Emails and recommendations in the usual places - [email protected] Follow...

Do you think Gig Pigs will last forever? No, of course not, but we’re well into double figures (hear that Joel?), and podding the way we want i.e. after the gig and full of discount Itsu. This week’s nightcapper was the brilliant Sarah Keyworth, who watched Long Island genre-hopper Caroline Rose with us at Heaven and then stayed up (art of) remembering it with us until the wee smalls. More of the same next week! Enjoy/review/subscribe! The Extra Swill...

S1 E15: Foals with Nathan D’Arcy Roberts If inhaling fourteen episodes of aggressively niche music chat hadn’t given you a clear enough picture of what Alex and Ivo were into, you’d really have our number after this one: the deepest of dives, from the top of the world to the bottom of the ocean, into a band we’ve loved for our total lives forever, alongside antidote-immune second album electric bloomer Nathan D’Arcy Roberts. It’s time to talk about what went down last month in Kingston, and,...

S1 E14: Rick Simpson's KID A with Matt Stronge You can try the best you can, you can try the best you can, but could you recognise a jazz reinterpretation of a song off Kid A if you didn’t have the album’s chronology pointing the way? Producer, photographer and general sidepig-in-chief Matt Stronge reckons he could, and this isn’t even a band he knows a lot about! So please laugh until your head comes off at our cultured if confusing night out, and the various dubious tangents/texts/trips...

Here we go again, my love, you’ve got so much time to spend. And we’re asking for more of it than we used to, to be fair, with our last sub-60 episode feeling a long time ago. But which (and this IS a rhetorical question) of these material gifts would you get rid of? Ania Magliano’s Bastille epic? Ivo’s Fareham tangents? Alex’s life-changing and (at time of writing) year-topping news? And that’s before we’ve even got into the main business of Georgia running up that hill, (about) working that...

Does anybody really know the secret, or the combination for this pod and where they keep it? This week Ivo and Alex took old nu metalhead and chiselled singer-unmasker Joel Dommett to seek out these answers at Wembley Arena (formerly Brixton Academy). It was Limp Bizkit’s way or the highway, and sure, Alex chose the highway (the metropolitan line), but not before a solid hour and a half of doing it all for the nookie. Needless to say some of this filth will be on the Swill and if you’re...

Jesus Christ girl, someone’s got to help us pig! And this week, the superbly well-travelled Harriet Kemsley (Leeds Castle! MSG! Carcassonne!) joined us to watch (some of) deadpan crooner Father John Misty and pick over the fear/fun/pure comedy of it all several weeks later. Alongside the usual tangents into board games and tree based side projects, the real story of this ep were the real licks baby for Ivo “dog’s favourite customer” Graham. Oh baby don’t be alarmed, this is just our...

In Alex’s living room, (three days) after the concert: we take you, take you to the Lafayette, where we watched Canadian indie darlings Stars in the company of Irish indie darling Andrew Nolan back in February. No jetpacks, stunt or otherwise, but colossal choruses from (crucially) ACROSS the canon, a glorious jumble of guests, and the pure triumph of being live and alive: what we’re trying to say, without having to say, what we want to say - we loved this gig! Come out with us tonight, come...

A podcast in the grip of greatness! Anecdotes that feel found, not written! Oh, that we could dream of the same reviews that Big Thief got at the Apollo two weeks ago, a series of surprisingly loud folk-rock masterpieces (one of them Masterpiece) in between a Guinness-brokered supertable and a triumphant Belushi’s afters. We were so lucky to discuss this and more with gentleman scholar, prescient musical legend-collector, and newly christened Pod Saviour of the UK Nish Kumar, who went to this...

She moves with a (fit for) purpose, and what magnificent purpose. GPGPGP hits its eighth episode (NOT including double eps!) and this one took us to Shoreditch’s Village Underground to watch anarchist visionaries Black Midi in the company of comedian, producer, karaokist and fellow noughties indie almanac Rajiv Karia. This episode features more chat about Bugsy Malone and the board game Ticket To Ride than you might well expect: only one of these decisions was on us. Give it a little love by...

Not like we’re counting the pods / but it’s been seven (if you count the Sanders double as one). This week sees us at the Apollo once more, watching Caroline Polachek’s Valentine’s graduation to the big leagues alongside comedian, writer and pre-dusk V Festival photographer Rhiannon Shaw (with friend of the pod and Girl Guide survivor Izzy Bromfield (bunny)riding shotgun). Caroline’s encore featured confetti cannons: this podcast’s encore features a truly Shakespearean breakdown. Please enjoy...

Throes of joy in the jaws of defeatism: aka, moments of ecstasy in a mosh pit that we were pretty sure we would be avoiding at all costs. (And Alex mostly did to be fair). Episode six of the pod saw the much-trailed First Venture Out Of The Comfort Zone, but we couldn’t really have asked for a more generous guide into worlds of metal, punk and the various microgenres in between than long-standing tinnitus seeker Ed Gamble. An appropriately uncompromising 78 minutes on this one and while yes...

S1 E5: Self Esteem with Lou Sanders (Part 1) Part of being funny, is having some sincerity, and using both of them wisely! This week’s noble attempt involved Alex (long life ahead of him) and Ivo (enjoy it while it lasts) retiring with Historic immediacy to the latter’s home, discussing the magnificent Self Esteem in the marvellous and mischievous company of OG GP Lou Sanders (Taskmaster, Unforgivable, Channel 4’s Blair-era Glastonbury coverage), and hoping the best podcast afters of our life...

S1 E5: Self Esteem with Lou Sanders (Part 2) Part of being funny, is having some sincerity, and using both of them wisely! This week’s noble attempt involved Alex (long life ahead of him) and Ivo (enjoy it while it lasts) retiring with Historic immediacy to the latter’s home, discussing the magnificent Self Esteem in the marvellous and mischievous company of OG GP Lou Sanders (Taskmaster, Unforgivable, Channel 4’s Blair-era Glastonbury coverage), and hoping the best podcast afters of our life...

So sentimental? Not sentimental, no. That’s the respective attitudes of hosts and guest towards this week’s musical offering: Ivo a decade-plus devotee, Alex familiar and curious for more, Tom Rosenthal cheerily dismissive of the band that have soundtracked some of his finest half hours. But what a jaunt! Please enjoy these wayward tales of the Cochons de Concert on their first international outing: it’s never been like this, it’s never been like this, it’s never been like this, no! Emails...

I don’t care if Monday’s blue, Tuesday’s grey and Wednesday too, Thursday here’s a pod for you, it’s Celya AB talking about The Cure! (And Indochine, St Vincent and her brother’s illegal entry into a battle of the bands). We went to see the godfathers of goth with Celya in December and were already bursting with tenderstem broccoli before the choc ice multipack of the second encore: we hope you find our own ratios similarly pleasing and will listen/review/recommend again and again and again...

Hello new world, all the boys and girls, we got some true stories to tell. Stories of a trip to watch the most important rapper of his generation, with diversions to Malaysia, Glastonbury, Nando’s, and the myriad outer planets of the regretosphere. We were extremely lucky to have Phil “Roger’s cousin” Wang invite us to watch Kendrick Lamar in November 2022 and then agree to chat about it a few weeks later: without further ado, and ideally without any of the Continuity Croaks of episode one,...