Pig City:
From the Saints to Savage Garden
by Andrew Stafford

‘Passionate in its detail and fair in its judgement, Pig City tells the story of Brisbane from the seventies to the noughties better than any book I know.’

‘Pig City completely blew the doors off the Brisbane music scene for me when it was first released twenty years ago and opened my eyes to a scene that grew and flourished during a particularly shameful time in Queensland’s political history. It is still an absolute must read for any Australian music lover today’

‘Twenty years on, Pig City reminds us of how deeply the political undercurrents impacted the cultural output of Brisbane’s artists, and how the pioneers of the scene (unknowingly) laid the platform for the bands to come.’

‘Brisbane was once a town that people died in but did not believe in, a place that people fled for other cities and countries to take their songs to the world. That Brisbane vanished – everything changed – and Pig City tells you how.’

‘Pig City is the definitive document charting the ragged grassroots and weeds of the Brisbane music scene narrative – from the 70s through the street level struggles of the Bjelke-Petersen government’s police state, to have it land in the cultivated pop neutrality of Savage Garden. Andrew brings rake and hoe to clear the way through it all and provide the avid reader a music scape of revelations.’

‘A bona fide time capsule of the politics and music of a unique period in Australian history, and a classic that will still be talked about for decades to come.’

‘No one told a better history than Andrew Stafford of a time and place where everything happened at once, and when we were once all one.’

‘There are only a few authors who captured what was unique to Brisbane in the 1990s – John Birmingham, Andrew McGahan – and Pig City earned Andrew Stafford a spot next to them. It is always the first book I recommend about Brisbane.’

‘I read Pig City in 2005, as part of my induction into the musical history of Brisbane. I couldn’t put it down. Any city lucky enough to be honoured with such a chronicle is a very lucky place.’

‘Pig City burst onto the literary landscape like a meteor: unexpected, urgent and HOT… Many have attempted to follow the model of academic rigour blended with lively prose and timely memoir, but few have succeeded as well as Stafford. An Australian classic.’

‘Pig City had a profound impact on Violent Soho, and on all of us as individuals. It gave us a sense of pride in the musical history of our city, so much so we started putting our postcode (4122) on everything — Mansfield, Brisbane!’