WORDS BY DAVID WEST
In the Britain of the early 1980s, the rockabilly revival was in full swing. The Stray Cats were flying the flag for neo-rockabilly, but on the fringes of the rockin’ scene, a new sound was waiting for the lightning bolt to strike that would give it life. This musical Frankenstein’s monster was assembled with body parts and organs taken from rockabilly, garage rock, 1950’s B-movies, and the DIY-spirit of punk, and it took its name from a throwaway line in the Johnny Cash track One Piece At A Time. It was loud, lewd, and ferocious, and it answered to the name of psychobilly.
Nowadays Alan Wilson is the proprietor of the Western Star Recording Company and Western Star Records, but once upon a time he was frontman of The Sharks, one of the first wave of psychobilly bands. And before that, like most of the people who formed the nascent psychobilly scene, he was a rockabilly. “I don’t remember the first time I heard the name, but I definitely remember the first time I actually experienced psychobilly,” says Wilson. “I was doing a gig in Southampton Guild Hall, a rock’n’roll all-dayer. Sometime during the evening, the DJ played a track I’d never heard before, and the dancefloor just absolutely emptied of all the rockabillies. It cleared the floor except for about five guys who looked like rockabillies, but they weren’t dancing in a rockabilly fashion. I thought it was a fight. I was onstage getting ready to play, I thought, ‘Oh, no, there’s trouble.’ The record that they were dancing to, or wrecking to, whatever it became known as, was a Meteors single.”