Blodwyn Pig’s Ahead Rings Out album cover featuring a pig wearing headphones and sunglasses.

Blodwyn Pig’s Ahead Rings Out: British Blues, Jazz & Pork

September 30, 2026

One of the joys of stopping by The Vogue a couple times a week is that you never know when a small treasure trove of similarly grouped records will be dropped off. A vein of goodness in a specific genre. Currently, Lou is prospecting for the following:

1960s Garage Rock
1970s Jazz rock fusion
1970s British punk
1980s New Wave
Late 1980s Rap
1990s Grunge

Hope springs eternal. You must constantly dig through the bins. And wouldn’t you know it; Lou was happy to find a selection of British blues. Not the early Rolling Stones or The Yardbirds or Cream or Led Zeppelin. You already have those on vinyl and CD. This stuff dug a little bit deeper. John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers. With Eric Clapton. And Peter Green. And Mick Taylor. How about that line up of guitarists? Take that The Yardbirds. There was some early Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green. Some Graham Bond Organization. Some Ten Years After.

This was fortuitous because Lou had watched some YouTube videos on the second-tier British blues bands and Lou liked what he heard. Lou loves himself some Alvin Lee and Rory Gallagher. They are to Lou’s taste. He is on the lookout for some Gary Moore. Sitting in the bin at The Vogue was the first album by another band that gets overlooked in British blues: Blodwyn Pig. Formed by Mick Abrahams, who left Jethro Tull after their debut, This Was, Blodwyn Pig is good eating. This makes sense since Jethro Tull’s only good albums are when they were a British blues band. Lou has a copy of Stand Up. This shit stands up. Solid blues rock.

Now Lou must admit that he enjoys later Fleetwood Mac more than the early Peter Green blues shit. Oh, well. Buckingham and Nicks really took them to another level. Fuck Hotel California and Dark Side of the Moon. (Overrated, give Lou “Echoes” all day. That is Pink Floyd at their best.) For the mega-selling albums, Lou will take Rumors in a heartbeat. It is absolutely fantastic. Not a bad song on it.

Lou is a Shake n’ Bake man, by the way. In his youth, he used to eat the shit out of the packet. Is it just Lou or was Shake n’ Bake just better back in the day? The coating used to get crispy out of the oven. Nowadays there is no crisp. The crisp probably came from some cancer-causing chemical that has been banned. Chinese egg rolls used to taste better as well. And McDonald’s French fries. They changed the cooking oil or the tallow or something, so Lou hears. Lou does not use pork chops when he Shake n’ Bakes. He likes to use boneless Southern country pork ribs with tons of fat on them. Cook them at 400 degrees for 50 minutes. They melt in your mouth.

Recently, Lou tried to make burnt ends with the boneless ribs with a brown sugar-based rub and barbeque sauce. He cooked them at 350 for 30 minutes and then 275 for a few hours. A complete failure. Burnt ends should be tender and juicy. Lou’s ends were more like rock candy or sweetened jerky. Could be that the ribs did not have enough fat in them to render down? Or Lou cooked them too long at too high a temperature. Back to the drawing board.

Speaking of pork, did you know that glam rock has a heavy dose of pork to season its flavor? Pork by Andy Warhol that is. Pork was an avant-garde play derived from the taped conversations of Brigid Berlin. Anthony Ingrassia adapted the conversations into a play that itself drew on the Theatre of the Ridiculous. Like Hair and Oh, Calcutta, Pork had nudity and sex galore and was a campy romp. The play was a sensation off-Broadway and eventually went overseas to London, where David Bowie admired its style and substance. Cast members like Cherry Vanilla became part of Bowie’s circle and were signed onto his production company, MainMan. Like Warhol, Bowie was a vampire and he sucked all the juice out of Pork. Ziggy Stardust developed in part from here and the rest is history.

Blodwyn Pig is not glam, but it is much more than straightforward British blues. Ahead Rings Out, the band’s first album, uses blues as a foundation for explorations of jazz and progressive rock. It is truly groundbreaking stuff. There are tons of lesser-known bands in this vein, like Groundhogs, that never broke it big, like Yes, Genesis, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The bands that broke seem to have shed the blues and embraced classical music. The only prog behemoth that Lou can bear is Jethro Tull and that may be because there is some blues going on there.

Ahead Rings Out was a delight from start to finish. Lou loves the cover art, which reminds him of the pig logo for the bootleg label Trademark of Quality. This is a real revelation. It is something of a forgotten album. Colin Larkin listed it at number 15 in his all-time 50 Long Forgotten Gems. This is jazz rock fusion in its infancy. Like with Frank Zappa at the time. Listen to “The Modern Alchemist” with saxophone madness by Jack Lancaster and tell Lou that you do not hear the work of Mahavishnu Orchestra, Eleventh House, and a host of other jazz rock giants. “Ain’t Ya Comin’ Home, Babe? is proto-heavy metal.

The problem with the album, if there is one, and maybe the reason the band has slipped through the cracks, is that there are so many different styles, which the band does well in all cases, that listener could not get a grip on a signature sound. The album shakes and bakes with finger-licking licks. Lou will have another order for sure. He is on the lookout for other Blodwyn Pig albums. There are few. In its original incarnation, they only recorded one follow-up album, Getting to This in 1970. Sooner or later, it will turn up at The Vogue. Good shit always does. Lou just has to keep his nose in the trough. Oink, Oink, my good man.

— Lou Waxman