From its beginning as a men’s online streetwear store and blog, This Greedy Pig has grown into a multi-faceted entity comprised of a digital publication, print shop, record label and radio show. Their latest project, Fantasy 12, explores the intersection between the musical and the visual with artists and photographers reimagining famous album artwork for the walls of the Copper House Gallery. We spoke to founders Greg Spring and Russell Simmons about going out on their own, getting all their stuff nicked and what this exhibition is all about.
Tell us a bit about how you met and founded This Greedy Pig?
Russell: I think we met the week before a Chemical Brothers concert through Jack Olohan (of Radiomade), on a roof, with a sherry taken, at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning.
Greg: Then we started the company in 2011, originally it was a clothing thing. We just wanted a place to buy the kind of streetwear stuff that we would wear but couldn’t find in Ireland.
Russell: We had known each other about 5 or 6 years at this point. When we went on holidays to Berlin together we saw a couple of things over there that sparked our interest and that germinated for a while before we decided that we wanted to do our own thing. We thought there was a market for clothing in Ireland. Most men seemed to be wearing SuperDry so we thought there was a niche to be exposed there.
What were you both working in beforehand?
Russell: I was working at a tech start-up…they had a product that was very, very boring. I was slogging away at it and Greg was slogging away in a bank and I don’t think we really got anything on a spiritual level from what we were doing. It was fairly boring work.
Greg: It was horrendous, so we got this going on the side and it was just something we were doing in our evenings. Then we started DJing together. I actually picked it up after losing all my money through bank shares so I decided to get a pair of decks. We started DJing out together and then the blog was attached to the shop to give people another reason to go onto the site. We started by just talking about the music we were into and DJing out more and it just grew from there really.
How did the initial blog start to branch off into the other areas of the business?
Greg: At the start we were selling some prints through This Greedy Pig but they were sort of squirreled away at the back of the site. The thing that spurred the move over to Hen’s Teeth was really a bunch of glamourpusses breaking into our office and stealing all our stock. We got all of our stuff nicked about 18 months ago.
Russell: They didn’t steal any of the prints though!
Greg: Yeah, they only took the clothes and we still see them probably once a week. It was a group from a wet hostel a few doors down from us. It’s an incredible facility but we had a few problems as a result, there were a few attempted break-ins and then on the third attempt they came in and took all of the clothes. Within two days I actually saw a woman wearing one of our hoodies. Then a few days later Jack Olohan saw someone near Grogan’s with a satchel of the stuff, just handing it out. As much as getting all your stock nicked and not having insurance because it had just lapsed was not the most palatable, it kind of forced our hand and spelt the death knell for the clothing side of the business.
Russell: It became a bit of a weight to carry and we were interested in exploring other things. So we thought, ok let’s move on and keep the blog and we’d like to develop the prints further. We started to think there was so much going on that it might be easier for us to market and talk about it if the brand was a separate thing.
Getting onto Fantasy 12 – where did the idea come from?
Greg: It was about November time last year and I was talking to Jeff Jank, the Art Director from Stone’s Throw and we were talking about stuff for the publication. We chatted about the process of working with artists to create visual treatments for their records and about working with people like Madlib, who was just the dream, hands off to a fault and totally trusted him to visually interpret the music. Then he said the flipside of that was working with Aloe Blacc who was just a complete pain in the ass. They went through 100 iterations of the record and the one that he settled on was not very good. It just got me thinking that there’s this assumption that the working relationship between a musician and an artist is going to be perfectly symbiotic but actually a musician is just another client who doesn’t know what they want.
The initial idea for Fantasy 12 was ‘the cutting room floor’, so we reached out to labels like DFA, Warp, Luaka Bop and some of our favourite independent labels and asked them to submit work that didn’t see the light of day. Some labels were into it, some weren’t and some saw it as problematic releasing work that hadn’t been released so we changed the brief to being ‘Fantasy 12’ and began approaching artists instead of labels who had worked on some of our favourite record covers and asked them to reinterpret another one in their own style.
Take us through the programme of events that are happening alongside the exhibition?
Greg: Well it’s four days from October 13th – 16th. The 13th is the opening at the Copper House Gallery so we’re going to be going there live on RTE 2XM and we’ve got Nick Gazin who is the Vice Art Editor playing live from the venue. Then on the 14th we’ve got Edan the DJ and Handsome Paddy and Mark Murphy playing in the Sugar Club and then on the Saturday we’ve got Alex Nut, who is NTS Radio affiliated and Eglo Records and Colm K coming up from Cork. Jim Carroll is also going to do a Banter panel discussion with Nick Gazin and Vlad Sepetov who did Kendrick Lamar’s ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ cover as well as Paul Diddy from Luaka Bop so that’s going to be on the Saturday.
Can you tell us what is happening next with it?
Greg: So we’ve just confirmed that it will be going to Galway Design Week in November and Bonafide Magazine in London, which is a hip hop magazine have actually contacted us and want to bring the show to London to the Jazz Café in Camden which is a really iconic venue.
What is coming up next for you guys?
Russell: Well the White Collar Boy single release is coming on The Pig’s Ear in November, followed by a vinyl album release in early 2017. We are also working on new club space the Wah Wah Club with Hidden Agenda which is opening at the end of September and we’ll have a residency there. The style of it will be less like the big room stuff you might find in bigger venues and will be more like the back room or the side room vibes of a club.
Greg: With acts like Henry Wu, Invisible City Editions and Cut Man.
Russell: We’re also launching our full-service creative agency in early October and it’s a good extension of what we’ve been doing for a long time with This Greedy Pig and Hen’s Teeth so we’re looking forward to doing it in collaboration with other people.
Beck’s have a longstanding involvement in artistic movements around the word and have recently launched a new campaign called BeKreativ, which is showcasing creative talent from around Ireland for the next few years. Check out Beck’s BeKreativ campaign at #BeKreativ and bekreativ.ie
