Psychobilly

by Craig Brackenridge

Introduction by Alan Wilson – The Sharks/Western Star
Recording Company

“Once, late at night on BBC2, I saw a film that was made in Stevenage in the late 1960’s. It starred that bloke from ‘Mind Your Language’ and it was full of fresh looking dolly birds and young geezers having a good time. Everything looked fresh & new, the shops and houses were sparkling clean and people were shagging at parties and zipping about in sports cars, laughing and generally having a good time. Its not like that in 1986. Coming home from the chippy near the town square tonight I had to dodge a mob of blonde-streaked trendies who were hanging around the bus station looking for trouble. Then I brushed passed some begging junkies in a reeking underpass and finally reached my house, where I settled down in my room where the walls are so thin I can hear my Dad scratching his arse in the room next door. Don’t get me wrong, I am not some whining, socially deprived youth or a victim of some pot-smoking social engineers. I have a great life. I love Stevenage. My mum and dad got the New Town dream but I got something a lot more worthwhile. I got Psychobilly!”

Stevenage. 1986. The Psychobilly disease is spreading across the UK and Harry Powell and his mates have got it bad. They are followers of the brutal blend of Rockabilly & Punk that is seeping across Britain’s musical underground and from the Klub Foot to Scarborough Scooter Rally, they will go anywhere for wrecking and rumpo.

Along with the booze, brawls and bunk-ups, Harry finds something even more special but a dark secret within the crew threatens to tear them apart. However, no matter what they face, their lives revolve around the adrenalin-fuelled, pounding beat of Psychobilly.

Although set in 1987, ‘Psychobilly’ takes its influence from the 1970’s golden age of British pulp fiction when publishers such as New English Library canonised every aspect of working-class street culture in lurid paperbacks which delivered sex & violence to the masses in regular instalments.

It’s not all boots ‘n’ bovver though as ‘Psychobilly’ also draws on the knockabout humour and sexual shenanigans of other knuckle-shuffling pulp novels such as Timothy Lea’s highly successful ‘Confessions of…’ books.

If you understand the Psychobilly subculture then this is recommended reading. If you don’t… just think of it as ‘Gregory’s Girl’ with top-shelf magazine strength smut or ‘Quadrophenia’ with quiffs.

Craig Brackenridge has been writing about cinematic sleaze and demented Rock ‘n’ Roll since 1995 and his first novel ‘Psychobilly’ is solid slab of youth culture pulp soaked in knee-trembling smut. The book you can read with one hand!