10. The CrampsOff the Bone
There was a whole scene of psychobilly British music when The Cramps came over to play. We went to see them when I was 16 years old and it such a great show. I saw them three times on that tour and went see them the next year as well when they were over again. It was amazing live. Absolutely wild, like nothing I’d ever seen. You’ve got like Lux Interior with the spandex leather trousers, topless, sweating, rolling all over the floor. [Poison] Ivy was just this amazing looking woman and I quite liked the fact that they were a couple, and that Lux interior would spend half the gig sort of prostrated at her feet worshipping her. It does just seem really sexy to me. If you’d have looked out at the audience, it would have been a shitload of really sweaty blokes, pummelling the shit out of each other, but onstage there’s this wild love story being played out.
The other funny sort of factoid was my mum lives in Los Angeles, and when we were 17, Emma came out and had a holiday with me there. We went see this band called The Hollywood Hillbillies at this place called The Fetish Club. There was this bizarre supporting act. I remember this girl with a mohawk, and they had a perch with a chicken on it on stage. She was playing her music and it was very hillbilly. I was like, ‘what the fuck is this?’ When The Cramps came back to the UK and toured in 1986, she was in the band, so I had one up on the music snobs because I could go ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve seen her original band actually’.
