Album cover for The Cramps - File Under Sacred Music. Photo / Supplied
The seriously silly but fright-night funny, ridiculously retro but cutting- edge punks the Cramps just kept cracking out reductively simple covers of B-grade 50s rock 'n' roll, raw rockabilly and thrash-trash two-minute songs beamed in from sci-fi drive-in movies.
Their references, at the height of New York punk then New
Wave, were surf rock guitars, coffin-kickers like Screaming Jay Hawkins and menacing spook-crawlers like Ronnie Hawkins' classic cover of Bo Diddley's Who Do You Love.
The itinerant Cramps - fronted by Lux Interior, who died in 2009, and his wife/guitarist Poison Ivy - brought drama, leopardskin pants, humour and a necessary sense of history to the CBGB's punk scene.
While influencing garagebands, they never got mainstream attention like (Talking Heads, the Ramones and Television. But they were constantly moving, to Memphis to record with Alex Chilton (of the Box Tops/Big Star), to low-rent Hollywood, and they embraced Sun Studio echo and a distinctive sleaze factor.
This 22 song collection of ragged, cartoon rock 'n' roll imbued with a deep love and understanding of the genre is soaked in voodoo caricatures, rattling bones, rebel-kind thinking and reverb.
