The band’s fabled first gig was at Wormwood Scrubs Prison – true or false? “That was wishful thinking to be honest,” Baconstrip laughs. “We fibbed, sorry. We were romancing ourselves that we’re Johnny Cash-esque, rugged outlaws being put down by The Man. I mean, we’re butch and everything, but we’re just not committed enough to do the crime.”
They’ve also repeatedly told interviewers the band came into being after a scan of Scotland Yard’s most wanted list of musos. It could be true, but probably not given that Kamikaze UT and Baconstrip had played together in other outfits before. So, just how did it come to pass? “I saw The King on the dance floor before anything else,” Baconstrip recollects. “His Majesty had blagged his way into a three-day party called The Wild Weekend in an old holiday camp by the English seaside. By the second night, the crowd had drunk the bar dry and wrecked the dance floor. The King and I found out that we were both French (no one had ever told us before) and we hit it off right away. UT and I met on a night bus, which is how a lot of drink-loving band fans in London first meet. T.Bone discovered me living in his flat and Pepe was just one of those guys you always see floating around. It took just under a year to be ready to go, then things moved very quickly.”
What about the story where the band were pulled over by the Italian police who ended up buying a CD instead of pegging them? Apparently, this one’s true. “They stopped us out of boredom on a freezing cold mountain highway, not that far down from the snow on the peaks,” recalls Baconstrip. “After ages of trying to explain to them what we were all doing in Italy someone grabbed a CD to make it easier for them to understand, but by then Pepe the guitarist was about to go into hypothermia, so they took one look at his little blue trembling face and put their hands in their pockets out of sheer pity.”
A member of the band once joked in an interview that their sound was unlikely to change because it was the only thing that they could do. We can safely assume that’s not the case because they’re scorching musicians, but it does beg the question about whether the band have always shared affection for this type of music. “We probably like lots of different types of music,” Baconstrip reflects. “We all share the love for the kings of rock’n’roll though: Link Wray, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Charlie Feathers and Jerry Lee Lewis. When we started the band in 2006 we were not sure what would come up, but the kind of racket we did and have been doing since was the natural thing to play together. We really get our kicks making people dance at the shows, that’s a great communicative energy and we get lots of fun from doing that.”
The observation’s already been made that they owe a sonic debt to The Cramps, so it must have been an almighty kick supporting iconic former member Kid Congo Powers. “He’s a sweetheart and a legend of course,” confirms Baconstrip. “We were on a shared bill for one night only. You know that you’re only going to talk to the headliner one-on-one for a short time, so you learn to get to know other players very quickly. A lot of people with a name are renowned for being snotty, especially [with] what they call the ones ‘in the middle’; not superstars, but not nobodies either. It was a huge buzz that he’s such a nice guy and totally down to earth and a properly cool musician who deserves his popularity. He gives us $10 every time we say that in an interview.”
Let’s open it up to the floor – tell us your favourite stories about the band. “There are actually a few that involve UT walking back after a gig along a beach and suddenly disappearing for a moment,” Baconstrip recounts gleefully. “But then he suddenly reappears again, as if by magic. We don’t know how he does it. Another one I like was when we played a festival in Austria and Jesus Pudding, our sax player at the time, was blowing his sax like crazy during the show and was asking the soundman to make it louder because he said he couldn’t hear it well. He thought the PA or the sound man was crap, but after the gig he realised he left his little sax tool box inside the saxophone (in the “bell” I think it’s called). Then, more recently, after playing a festival in Amsterdam, Kamikaze UT locked himself out of the hotel room by accident and spent most of the night in the busy corridor of that big hotel, in his underpants, trying to get back in while the rest of were sound asleep.”
BY MEG CRAWFORD
