Saturday Night Live

Saturday night and some of the real stuff for you- while I am preparing to play records for the good folk of Sheffield that happen to know my friend RPM, you can listen to this rather than settle down to watch that shite on the telly. This is last night's heroes The Cramps in a live performance for TV on what seems to be The Late Show around 1990 doing the mighty Bikini Girls With Machine Guns and Muleskinner Blues. Proceed with caution- at one point Lux strips off his shirt to reveal...., well, you'll have to see for yourselves.



What's Inside A Girl? live in Amsterdam- Lux might hog the attention but Ivy and her guitar are the real stars...



And a few years earlier on The Tube, What's Inside A Girl? again and Hot Pearl Snatch.



Can Your Pussy Do The Dog?

June Wilkinson and Mamie van Doren 'Bikini With No Top On Top'

I found this bizarre little 1964 song on the Lux and Ivy's Favourites online thing (eleven volumes of songs The Cramps liked). June Wilkinson and Mamie Van Doren were generously built (that's Mamie in the picture above, if you google image June Wilkinson you'll find a load of images I didn't think I should use, for proprieties sake) 1960s starlets of stage, screen, magazine and specialist photography. In this song they recount the time they went down to the beach in their bikini's with no top on top. This has obvious effects on the men on the beach, and their future acquisition of material goods and careers. I make no comment or judgement about any of this. All I do is recommend this fantastic piece of 1960s garage-kitsch to you.

bikini with no top on top.mp3

The Cramps 'Bikini Girls With Machine Guns'

I love The Cramps. I love the way Lux and Ivy took high camp, trash, pop-culture, B-Movie shlock, mixed it with punk and blues and treated it so seriously. Real outsider culture. Their early stuff is raw and dirty, gothic and cartoony. They also kept making good records- 1986's A Date With Elvis and 1990's Stay Sick have bigger budgets and more gloss but stand up really well alongside their earlier stuff. This is off Stay Sick, and sums up their aesthetic pretty well- Bikini Girls With Machine Guns.

03 Bikini Girls With Machine Guns.mp3