By the time I saw them live, Andrew Wilson had gone from the Cruisers and super-fan to full band member, 1987-ish I think. I remember selling a pair of vintage motorcycle boots in order to go and buy Maximum Security and the first two albums – Whose Been Sleeping in My Brain and Acid Bath – as soon as I straightened out, and the Fiends became another one of those life-long musical passions. My first encounter was hearing their third hypnotic album, Maximum Security (1985), at a biker party at a house by a cemetery while in a deranged state of mind. I’m ashamed to say I wasn’t in at the birth. Lux and Ivyĭiscovering Alien Sex Fiend was similarly revelatory. Often imitated but never bettered, The Cramps departed this plane when founding member and lead singer Lux Interior died suddenly in 2009 – next to Elvis, the most significant rock ’n’ roll death in history. Like Never Mind the Bollocks, that one warped me forever and I count seeing The Cramps on stage as one of the high points of my life. His Inner City Unit covered ‘The Crusher’ and he advised me to seek out the first Cramps album, Songs the Lord Taught Us (1979). I got into them through hanging around with Nik Turner from Hawkwind on the free festival circuit. When I first heard The Cramps, my thought was literally: ‘Where have you been all my life?’ Here was punk, goth, garage and wild rockabilly all smashed together, dark and dirty like sex and horror. Similarly, The Damned directed me to the early Nuggets collections and into the wonderful world of American garage music. Thanks to The Clash covering ‘Brand New Cadillac’ I’d discovered Vince Taylor and was beginning to find my way into more esoteric rockabilly, aided by Mick Robinson, proprietor of the great Alleycats record shop in Norwich, and seaside rock ’n’ roll festivals I survived because of a café racing BSA and several of my bike gang being former-teds. I liked Elvis’ Sun recordings, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard and, most of all, Gene Vincent. Although I was a biker, I wasn’t overly bothered by hard rock and heavy metal (aside from Alice, Motörhead and quite a long Hawkwind phase), but I loved the music of the rockers and the second generation teds and rockabillies that proliferated in Norwich, and who, paradoxically, I spent most of my teens fighting. (I suspect that Andrew might have been the same.) Having grown up adoring Alice Cooper and David Bowie, before being amazed by The Fall, The Damned, The Clash and The Sex Pistols, I was ready for goth music before anyone called it that – the dark sensibility that exuded from the first Bauhaus album, In the Flat Field, the mesmeric ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, and early Siouxsie and the Banshees. I started to really admire him, though, after reading his candid autobiography, Once Upon a Fiend, co-written with Pete McKenna in 2000.Īlongside John Lydon’s iconic projects, the bands that really defined my gloriously mis-spent youth in the late-70s and early-80s, beyond all others, were The Cramps and Alien Sex Fiend. The Teenage Werewolves are a Cramps tribute band from Sacremento that I’ve discovered and fallen in love with relatively recently (through Ratty in fact), but I’ve been aware of Andrew Wilson since his tenure with the Fiends. (And I rarely admit that.) My gift was a night of retro goth and wild rockabilly: the final night of The Teenage Werewolves’ British tour, ably supported by our very own Dr Diablo and The Rodent Show, otherwise known as Schubert Hill and Andrew Wilson, ‘Rat Fink Jr’ himself, late of The Turnpike Cruisers, UFX, Vince Ripper & The Rodent Show, and, most significantly, the legendary Alien Sex Fiend. Lovely man that he is, he went for it, so before we could head for Camden, we had to stop at a tattoo parlour.īut I digress. I suggested she ask him to draw one on her hand then I’d pay for it to be tattooed. I knew she was a bit apprehensive, so my card to her was a drawing of the old Jacoby Papa Roach skull doodle for moral support. Because they’re one of her favourite bands, if not the favourite, we sprung for a ‘meet ’n’ greet’. The night before, Gracie had seen Papa Roach in our hometown while I did a movie night with our boy. We were there because it was our ninth wedding anniversary.Īlthough we’d exchanged home-made cards on the day (Thursday), which ended as ever with a take-out, a bottle of wine and a Netflix binge, instead of going with romantic gifts we had bought each other concerts. Last Sunday night found me in Camden Town with Gracie, standing in a cold queue outside The Underworld Club between a guy from Tottenham with Gene Vincent painted on the back of his leather, the oldest punk in the world, and some young bloke who’d just joined an indie band I now can’t remember the name of.
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