03/06/2026
🫶
The Cramps just announced “Gravest Gravy,” a previously unreleased album recorded in 1977 with Alex Chilton. So here’s another photo from our 2005 shoot with the psychobilly/punk legends, when Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream did a joint interview with them for Under the Radar’s eighth issue.
Our co-publisher Wendy Lynch Redfern photographed husband-and-wife duo Lux Interior and Poison Ivy at their wonderfully kitschy, retro Los Angeles home. Lux sadly passed away just four years later, making this one of their later photo shoots together.
“Gravest Gravy” is culled from an October 1977 session at Ardent Studios. Some songs from those sessions surfaced as singles or B-sides (“Surfin’ Bird,” “The Way I Walk,” “Human Fly,” and “Domino”), but several recordings have remained unreleased until now. The album—which Ian MacKaye of Fugazi and Henry Rollins had a hand in—is due out August 21 via Vengeance Records and its first single, “TV Set,” arrived this week alongside a music video.
Check it out here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K3cc9BMqmU
Bobby Gillespie said this about The Cramps in the new press release announcing the album:
“The Cramps created an occult sound world that you could escape into, full of rockabilly voodoo guitar damage from Poison Ivy Rorschach, with bug eyed psychotic wailings and swampsnake utterances from Lux Interior, driven into a backwoods frenzy by the pounding of Nick Knox’s zombie death drums and Bryan Gregory’s barbed wire feral guitar scrapings. It only took me one hit of witnessing them play live in Glasgow aged 17 in 1979 opening for The Police and I’ve been hooked ever since. Stay Sick / Turn Blue.”
Under the Radar’s legacy isn’t quite as long as The Cramps’ (or Primal Scream’s), but this December we celebrate the 25th anniversary of our first issue. Help keep the magazine in print, where it belongs. Rising printing costs and declining advertising revenue make that harder every year, but with the support of readers like you, we can keep going.
Issue 8 is long out of print and its articles aren’t online. Subscribe to make sure you don’t miss a future collector’s issue.
Subscribe for 50% off and support truly independent music journalism here:
https://www.undertheradarmag.com/news/escape_the_feed_rediscover_music_in_print