Turning point and Lee Lips joins

1999 was seen as a turning point for the Hogs. It was the year that Lee Lips first joined the band and the first introduction of horns to the Porkrock sound. The Time 4 Love single was recorded for a music video shortly after Lips joined. The single was extremely well received and placed in the top 5 of the national rock charts. Their new national popularity lead to the band getting out of Cape Town more and their first solo tour to Gauteng . This was when Hogs first met up with the two other main pioneers of the SA scene, Leek & The Bouncing Uptones from Pretoria and Fuzigish from Joburg. In late 1999 the band was invited to play at their first major mainstream festival at the 3 Passes Festival in Wolseley, Western Cape . The Hogs were supposed to play at 18:00 on the Friday night, however, dummer Mybergie had got arrested on the way to the festival for possession of illegal substances. The band eventually managed to get him out, but only in time to play the 22:00 headline slot. Mybergie claimed at the time, “This shows you, crime does pay.” In 2000 The band recorded the single Just a Lie for the Croakroom Records compilation. Croakroom was an independent label from Pretoria, owned and run by Andrew Wright (lead guitarist and vocalist for Leek and the Bouncing Uptones) and the compilation featured international bands such as Nofx , Millencolin and New Found Glory alongside South African bands such as Hog Hoggidy Hog, Fuzigish , Leek & the Bouncing Uptones, Pet Flyz (Pretoria), Humphrey the Teacup (Joburg), Crossingpoint (Durban) and The Vendetta Cartel (Joburg). A lot of the friendships and bonds made in these early days set the foundations for the infrastructure of the SA scene on a national level and paved the way for a touring circuit to be used much more frequently. In late 2000 the Hogs went into the studio to record a new album. By this stage the band already had a reputation as a formidable live act and apparently had wanted to recreate that on the album. Lips recalls, “We wanted to capture the live energy so we did everything exactly like we would have at a live show, right down to the two cases of beer and a bottle each of tequila and whiskey. Although it was a lot of fun, in the end it just sounded like a drunken mess.”