Zig Zag Wanderer

Zig Zag Wanderer lives in Stoke and is a massive Captain Beefheart fan, which is probably something you can tell within about six seconds of meeting him. His dad toured with the Captain back in the 60s, so Zig’s musical education was less 'Now That’s What I Call Music' and more someone shouting “FAST AND BULBOUS” from the back bedroom while trying to tune a guitar with a pair of pliers. There’s also a family story about John Peel once lending his dad a fiver for a steak and kidney pudding, which feels like exactly the sort of thing that would happen when you’re knocking about with Captain Beefheart in the late 60s. Nobody knows if the fiver was ever paid back. Zig says it doesn’t matter. “Peel knew what he was doing”.

Beefheart eventually knocked music on the head and disappeared into the desert to paint, which Zig reckons makes perfect sense. Why spend your life making increasingly baffling noises for people in pubs when you can go and paint pictures in the middle of nowhere and not have anyone asking you to play Safe As Milk? Zig’s particularly fond of the desert because it never changes. Same sand, same rocks, same massive sky. No new-builds. No traffic calming. No one putting a vape shop where the old Woolworths used to be. Just endless beige, which is basically his idea of heaven. He says Stoke has got a bit of that about it if you squint hard enough, although we’re not sure he’s ever actually tried this.

When he’s not contemplating the geological stability of the American Southwest, Zig can generally be found listening to Trout Mask Replica at a volume that suggests he’s trying to contact something underground. He dresses like he’s permanently halfway through a journey that nobody else knows the destination of, and has the sort of stare you get from someone who has spent too long thinking about whether a cactus has got a soul. His life philosophy is fairly straightforward: music should be strange, deserts should be empty and steak and kidney puddings should probably cost more than a fiver these days. Fair enough. We can get behind most of that.