The Cramps may be drug-crazed maniacs hell-bent on frying your brains and ears. Or they may be polite, friendly citizens of Los Angeles. Who knows?

It's official; The Cramps have sold out.

For a start, Lux Interior, the manic singer, is engaged to Poison Ivy Rorschach, the guitar-strangling femme fatal of the band.

Marriage? For the two whose chief obsessions seem to be 1960s trash movies and shlock horror? Yes. Already they may be planning to wallpaper the spare bedroom with pink and blue teddies. You can't trust anybody these days.

And as for the other members of the band... well.

Nick Knox, the deranged drummer, wants to be a cowboy. And the new member of the band, pouting Fur, is the one thing they said The Cramps would never get - a bass player.

Is this the end? Has all the psychopathic B-movie stuff been just a device to get them noticed, a completely fake image? Has it been just a big thing to get attention?

Ivy: "Yeah, it's just a big thing."

Lux: "Let me show you my big thing."

Ivy: "It's an armadillo!"

Lux: "Oh shit, I've got an armadillo in my trousers!"


Glad we've got that sorted out. So tell me, Cramps, what does the band stand for nowadays?

Nick: "I gotta get another beer."

Fur: "Untruth, injustice and the unAmerican way."

Lux: "Being able to leap tall buildings in a single bound."


For the last ten years they've ploughed a manic path along the backroads of pop and, almost despite themselves, their brew of rockabilly and psycho humour has found a place in the hearts of thousands.

Witness, for instance, three sold-out nights at the Hammersmith Odeon and a ridiculously high chart placing for their latest waxing, A Date With Elvis. They've made the major league - here at least.

"In the States we're cult heroes," explained Ivy, "but over here I think we're more than that, for the moment anyway.

"In the States we're the victims of American record companies. I mean, A Date With Elvis didn't come out in America. Everywhere in the world but America, 'cause there are no independents there."


For a long time the band were independent of a bassist too. Their clang and trash noise stood out from the herd by virtue of its trebliness.

Now, though, they've got Fur, whose Fender Precision holds the bottom end tightly down.

Fur: "I was a friend of the band for a while, and we just sort of worked something out.

"It was easy putting bass lines on the songs. The music is real good to put guitar or bass parts to, it just fits anything."

Ivy: "Getting a bassist in isn't really a big change for us; we're still doing the older stuff in the set and I think now it sounds heavier and wickeder. In a way the line-up doesn't matter. I could see us with guitars again but at the moment we sound... swampier.

"We just evolved out of ignorance, and I guess that's the way we'll continue"


The Cramps have sparked off some very knowing imitations, though. The Guana Batz, Demented Are Go, and probably most of all The Meteors, have whipped a large chunk of the Cramps teen-death-sex-abilly appeal. How do the originals feel?

Ivy: "We haven't heard all of them. I mean, The Meteors, I guess they tried to rip off our style but missed the point and what's weird is I've read interviews where they claim they're not influenced by us but now they have a record out called Horrible Music For Horrible People..."

Lux: "A total rip-off of our Bad Music For Bad People and they told us when we played on the same bill as them that they weren't influenced by us in any way. And they said we were just a rip-off of Screaming Lord Sutch who we'd never heard of."

Ivy: "I've become a fan of what he's done but we had no contact with him till we came over here to play as The Cramps."

Lux: "With all these groups I never hear anything that's that good."

Ivy: "This garage revival - it's a great trend except these bands seem to dwell on specific aspects of the '60s or whatever, and what would be better is if they zeroed in on what was the essentials of the music rather than the trappings.

"Bands should strip it right down to the skeleton of the thing rather than the fashion and trying to mimic it, like the Japanese would.

"No band who are a real contemporary power and who are on the right path can get it all by mimicking - they're gonna have to figure out what the core of it was and what was the real commotion going on then was 'cause you can duplicate any kind of music and you can figure out how to recreate a sound but there's no point in doing that."

Lux: "Say something intelligent for chrissakes."

Fur: "My name? No."

Lux: "How about E=MC2?"

Fur: "Hey, that's pretty intelligent."


Bootlegs are a fact of life for The Cramps. Like so many independent bands their fans seem to come to gigs with a ticket in one hand and a tape recorder in the other. What do they think of them?

Lux: "They're all boring."

Ivy: "They're all terrible. The only good one we've heard pretends to be German, it's all written in German but it's really of a show we did in California. Really though, the bootlegs are disgusting. There are bootlegs of us doing soundchecks and talking to people..."

Fur: "But you couldn't have boots without bootlegs."

Lux: "I didn't pay boots for my bootlegs, I paid cold, hard cash."

Ivy: "We even have to buy our own bootlegs 'cause if we go to a record market where we've been told they have our bootlegs they hide them and all we wanna do is hear them or maybe buy them.

"We just did a radio show and that would make a good bootleg. It's for the Janice Long show on Radio One. We did How Far Can Too Far Go, Hot Pearl Snatch, Aloha From Hell and Woman Meat but the show was better than our album. We'd like to see a bootleg of that."

Talking of the album (as we nearly were), it was recorded in LA, where the gruesome foursome live these days. Ivy: "It was done at a place that used to be the United Western Studios which is where the Beach Boys did everything and Elvis used it. And it's still the same, it's maintained brilliantly.

"They've got this computer automation thing which no other studio has, but they've also got microphones from the 30s and 40s and all sorts of old stuff.

"It's good there because we could play live in separate rooms but still see each other. We could lock Nick away in his own drum booth and still play like it was live.

"We used a studio in Memphis a while ago which was great. It's the Phillips studio and they have a time lock on the doors so we were locked in and we had to stay there till about ten in the morning, so we just stayed around and recorded stuff.

"It's a weird place because they haven't changed it since the early 60s when it was built so it's painted in, like, American motel colours - orange and turquoise - and has like silhouettes of black jazz musicians on the wall and coke machines that do five cent or ten cent cokes.

"And it has bullet holes in the ceiling where Jerry Lee Lewis was shooting up the studio, well that's what we were told, but there are certainly lots of bullet holes."


At this point the interview goes a touch more casual. In other words Lux takes the sheet of carefully prepared questions and sets fire to it.

Lux: "Oh well, easy come, easy go."

Nick: "Not in my beer. No way."


So it's down to the technical stuff. Let's talk gear.

Fur: "I use a reissued '57 Fender Precision bass, they make 'em exactly the same with right kind of wood and they wire them exactly the same and there's just a real big difference between this one and the new ones. The new ones sounded like trash and the old ones weren't all that reliable so when I tried this one I grabbed it straight away.

"And I use an SWR bass amp. It's kind of a new technological thing and you can make it however you want. That's kinda cool."

Lux: Being a singer I can't answer these technical questions. Ask me about microphones."

Ivy: "I've got a Gretsch, a 6120. I really like it. I originally played a solidbody, but it got broken in half by a security man who, er, fell on it. But actually that was good because it made me get this guitar and now I can't go back to a solidbody."

But what about the weird guitars you're renowned for - like the striped Vox on the back of Smell Of Female? Ivy: "When we found it somebody had customised it, put Zebra fur on it. Then later we found another one. They belonged to some band who'd done all their guitars, old Vox Teardrops, in Zebra.

"That one looks better than it sounds. It's not a very good guitar for onstage use 'cause it's only got one sound. And that's like a cat screeching. It might be good for something but I don't know what."

Nick: "What drums do I use? Gretsch."

What model?

"Gretsch."

How many mikes do you use on the kit?

"Gretsch."

Really?

"Uh... no, actually I use one for everything."

Well, the technical angle might not be the best one anyway. How about a bit of deep and searching insight into the band's philosophy? For instance, why are all the songs about sex and death? Ivy: "Anyone who says our stuff goes over the top about sex or death has completely missed the point. I mean we don't just sing about vampires or whatever and anyone who says that should be hit on the head.

"All our songs are completely autobiographical. On Teenage Werewolf Lux is singing about what it's like to be a sexual monster teenager, y'know.

Hot Pearl Snatch is the name of a movie, like a sex exploitation movie from the 60s. Really early.

"Zombie Dance was written about the 70s, because there was a period where people didn't dance to rock'n'roll music. We've never done any songs about werewolves or horror stories."

So what are your biggest influences? Lux: "Einstein. No, it is for me! OK, I was lying. It's Freud, actually."

Have they sold out? Maybe not. Weirded out, though - now there's a thought...