The Longpigs - the great forgotten band of the 90s

My abiding memory of Crispin Hunt, the 95% cheekbone singer with 90s cult rockers Longpigs, is the time we gatecrashed the Booker prize-winner's party with a goldfish. We'd stumbled in looking for the toilets (long story) carrying a fish, complete with bowl, that we'd stolen from an Action Man launch around the corner (longer story). Cornering that year's victor, Graham Swift, who was cheerfully scoffing sausage and mash on his own on a quiet window seat, we did the two things you must never do at Booker prize-winner's parties. Crispin asked him what his book was about. I started telling him about the book I was writing. We cleared the room of disgusted literati within 10 minutes.

I'd known Crispin was a born rock star the minute I met him. Interviewing Longpigs in a New York bar in the spring of 1996, no sooner had I clicked on the tape than, with a heroic disregard for media training and a lax grasp of the phrase "off the record", he told me he'd just woken up with a hard drug hangover to discover his wallet had been stolen by a gaggle of Times Square hookers. "When you're abroad, you've got to have adventures," he grinned.

He exuded such rock'n'roll charisma and unfettered charm that you barely noticed the gruff rockabilly guitarist grumbling alongside him, a man who'd go on to be Richard Hawley.

No, it was Crispin's character that encapsulated the music of Longpigs' 1996 debut The Sun Is Often Out: the febrile hyena-yelps and graceful guitar churn of She Said; Jesus Christ, all roaring Britrock abandon lashed to epic grandstanding; the heart-wringing howls of the profoundly moving On And On, like a spurned romantic trying to tear out and eat his own misery. It was music as suave, scandalous and full of ballsy bravado as Hunt himself, and for a few months their stylish noise-pop was at a post-Britpop vanguard, helping lay the tarmac along which the likes of Muse would drive space-rock thundertanks to stadium glory.

Unfortunately, like so many late-90s guitar squealers, OK Computer did for their second album. Over the following years I watched Crispin change from Manhattan-demolishing wild child to devoted family man, and today his Keef-lite light is hidden away amid the backroom world of production and song-writing: he's been working with Jake Bugg, Ellie Goulding and Florence. Richard Hawley, on the other hand, is now a lauded psych-country solo legend who's nearly won so many awards that I'd almost like to present the award for the Artist Most Regularly Nominated Then Snubbed For Awards to … Ben Howard. But a new retrospective, On And On: The Anthology, is the finest reminder yet that late-90s British rock wasn't all Kula Shaker, Reef and the Seahorses; that it had slivers of finesse. If only someone could tell me what became of poor Swifty the goldfish.

Longpigs' On And On: The Anthology is released on 29 Apr