Human Fly - The Cramps

B-movie rock 'n' roll from Lux Interior and Poison Ivy Rorschach. It's like Shakin' Stevens with a Creutzfeldt-Jakob's cool jerk as directed by Russ Meyer... or the bit in the Fly with the inside-out monkey.

The Cramps mixture of Sun-era, reverb-heavy rockabilly, surf guitar and horror movie imagery is one of the great pop High Concepts...

A high concept right up there with the Jaffa Cake, Digimon, Stars In Their Eyes and that film where Mel Gibson can read women's minds after he drops a hairdryer in the bath.

Human Fly was the Cramps second single on Vengeance records, recorded after they relocated to the UK and cut some demos with Chris Spedding, standby Sex Pistol, guitarist for the Wombles and hit wonder with 'Motorbiking' - the song they always use on Look East or Spotlight South West for the local news story about the motorcycling vicar.

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See The Big Man Cry - Charlie Louvin

Satan Is Real, The Drunkard's Doom, Satan's Jeweled Crown and The Price on the Bottle (Is Just a Down-Payment) are just a few of the songs Charlie and Ira Louvin sang about the wrath of the Lord and the evils of alcohol.

As Charlie found solo success in the sixties, Ira, who sang "The word 'broadminded' is spelled S-I-N", struggled with Satan and the demon drink.

When Ira was killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver in 1965 he was wanted for driving under the influence himself and had three bullets lodged near his spine after his third wife had shot him 5 times after Ira had tried to strangle her with a telephone chord.

Years before rock 'n' roll attitude, Ira Louvin trashed his mandolin onstage. Years before the limited edition blueberry Breezer, Ira Louvin added sugary mixers and fruit juices to harsh bootleg liquor and drank himself half blind before the Lord.

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Manifesto & Book News

If it's ever been on K-Tel or Ronco, it's in. If it features hand claps, cow bells, syrupy orchestration, walls of sound, wrecking crews, sha-la-las, toothy teen idols, candy-based metaphors for carnal acts or lyrics about hugging, squeezing and rocking all night long, it's in.

Here's a shilling, don't spend it on gin and 'how's your father'



> Martin Lampen (latest book news, contact details and other stuff)

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