Lux Interior: Singer with The Cramps

While The Cramps frontman Lux Interior often disputed the fact that he and his wife and partner in crime, Poison Ivy, invented the psychobilly genre, the American group certainly blended garage rock, trash culture and horror movie references in a unique way. When they crawled out of the New York club CBGB's in the second half of the Seventies, they looked and sounded scuzzier and sleazier than The Ramones – and no one quite knew what to make of them.

"People talked about us as though we were doing something really arty and unusual," Interior told Mojo magazine in 2003. "But we always thought the things that turned us on were probably exactly what turned a band like The Sonics on. We could have been playing this exact same music in the Sixties and people would be dancing to it and thinking, 'Yeah, this is great, but so what? It's not art. It's not avant-garde. It's just rock'n'roll.'"

Much like The Ramones, who shared many of their influences – and covered The Trashmen's garage-rock classic "Surfin' Bird", The Cramps' set closer and first 45 release in 1978 – they distilled rock'n'roll to its very essence and had a much bigger cultural impact in Europe than in the U S, certainly at the beginning of their career, though they eventually became a cult in their own country, too. Their US profile rose considerably after an appearance in an episode of Beverly Hills 90210 entitled "Gypsies, Cramps and Fleas" in 1995, and when Ivy was asked to voice a character in the cartoon series SpongeBob SquarePants.

Over the years, The Cramps' primeval garage-punk has influenced bands like The Meteors, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Queens of the Stone Age, The White Stripes, The Raveonettes and The Horrors.

Born Erick Lee Purkhiser in Stow, near Akron, Ohio, in 1946, he was introduced to the rock'n'roll of Elvis Presley and the surf music of Dick Dale and Link Wray by his older brother, Mike. Worried about being drafted and sent to Vietnam after his graduation, he volunteered to join the Navy but was discharged because of a drugs bust. He ended up in Sacramento,California, and, as the story goes, picked up Ivy – née Kristy Wallace – hitch-hiking in 1972. The two met up again when they both enrolled in an Art & Shamanism course at the City College and they hit it off, moving in together right away.

An avid Alice Cooper fan, he was also into, he said, "the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, a lot of the blacker, darker side of rock'n'roll. Horror movies, sex. It wasn't so much of a jump for us to become a band. We were both collecting old 45s from junk stores, and we just thought that maybe we could do that same thing with rockabilly that the Rolling Stones and Pretty Things did with R&B in the Sixties. We just had to learn how to play songs."

After spending some time back in Ohio, the couple saw a picture of CBGB's in Rock Scene magazine and decided to travel to New York in 1975. "We were thinking that everybody walked around looking like the New York Dolls. And of course, nobody did. It was all jeans and boring," said the vocalist, who toyed with the idea of calling himself Vip Vop and Raven Beauty before taking up the stage name Lux Interior from a car commercial. He met Bryan Gregory at the Musical Maze record store, where they both worked, and convinced him to learn the guitar. They started rehearsing, with Gregory's younger sister on drums completing the original line-up, and made their live debut supporting The Dead Boys at CBGB's.

However, it was Nick Knox's arrival behind the kit at the end of 1977 which really helped to cement the group's fuzzy, psychotic sound. Soon, Ivy quit her job as a dominatrix and The Cramps went down to Memphis to record their first single with Alex Chilton, of The Box Tops and Big Star fame. In June 1978, the band also played a memorable concert at the Napa State Mental Institute in California, an experiment which was captured on grainy black-and-white film and has since passed into rock lore, even inspiring a 25th-anniversary reconstruction staged with British musicians by the artists Iain Forsythe and Jane Pollard at London's ICA.

In 1979, Miles Copeland, then managing The Police and Squeeze, licensed The Cramps' first two singles – "Surfin' Bird" and the self-penned "Human Fly" – and issued them as the Gravest Hits EP on his Illegal Records label. The same year, they supported The Police on a British tour and became NME cover stars at the expense of the headliners. UK audiences fell for the twangy twin guitar attack of the flame-haired Ivy and the lugubrious Gregory, the basic drumming of Knox, and most of all the lanky Interior's kamikaze stage persona. When he wasn't yelping or hollering, this Elvis Presley-from-Hell would try and outdo his hero, Iggy Pop, with antics like crowd-surfing, microphone swallowing or stripping down to just his underpants (and occasionally a bra and high heels). In 1980, Songs the Lord Taught Us, The Cramps' full-length debut, containing evocative titles like "Garbage Man", "I Was a Teenage Werewolf", "Zombie Dance" and covers of "Tear It Up" and "Fever", again produced by Alex Chilton, topped the independent charts.

Gregory left under a cloud but, after relocating to Los Angeles, they recruited guitarist Kid Congo Powers in time to record Psychedelic Jungle for Copeland's IRS imprint, and toured Britain again in 1981. I remember first meeting the group that year and being the butt of one of Interior's jokes. When I asked him to compile a Top Ten of his favourite records, he proceeded to grab my note pad and write out a list including Napoleon XIV's "They're Coming to Take Me Away Ha-Haaa!" scribbled backwards, which was somehow fitting since the B-side of the 45 was indeed the A-side played backwards.

Sadly, Copeland's machinations and a lengthy legal dispute over unpaid royalties prevented The Cramps from releasing any new material until the end of 1983. The live mini-album Smell of Female reached the Top 75 but their career had lost some of its momentum and was then dogged by the appearance of compilation albums of their early material. Still, in 1985, "Can Your Pussy Do the Dog" briefly charted while, the following year, A Date With Elvis became their first Top 40 album in the UK. "We always liked B films," Interior noted. "Lots of times we've turned film titles into lyrics."

In 1990, the insanely catchy "Bikini Girls with Machine Guns" made the singles charts, a rare feat for The Cramps. Wary of long-term record deals, they preferred to license their releases to Ace's Big Beat label in the UK or Enigma in the US and were also briefly signed to Alan McGee'sCreation Records for the Flame Job album in 1994 before reviving their own Vengeance label for Fiends ofDope Island (2003) and How to Make a Monster (2004).

Not that The Cramps cared much about record sales as long as they had enough money to buy obscure singles and vintage clothes, all gathered in their treasure trove of a house in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale. The band, whose line-up often changed around Ivy and Interior, appeared at Hallowe'en bashes in the US and remained a big concert draw all over Europe. "Our audiences are mostly very young, kids under 20," he said. "They get the point right away. They understand". Their most recent UK appearance was at the Astoria in London in August 2006.

Interior maintained that The Cramps wanted "to bring back some sick humour to rock'n'roll. It's way too healthy these days. It's horrible, it's obnoxious. All these rock stars doing good all over the world. At first, I thought it was kind of funny. But then it started to give me a creepy feeling."

In 1987 Interior was rumoured to have died from a heroin overdose. He later reflected: "Somehow, just hearing that you've sold so many records doesn't hit you quite as much as when a lot of people call you up and are obviously really broken up because you've died." Sadly, this time Interior is not about to come back from the dead like a character in one of his songs.

Pierre Perrone

Erick Lee Purkhiser (Lux Interior), singer, songwriter: born Stow, Ohio 21 October 1946; married Kristy Wallace (Poison Ivy); died Glendale, California 4 February 2009.