Lux Interior, front man with influential garage-punk act The Cramps, has died aged 62 due to an existing heart condition, the band's publicist announced yesterday.
Legend has it that Lux, real name Erick Lee Purkhiser, met his Cramps collaborator and later wife Poison Ivy, real name Kristy Wallace, when she was hitchhiking in California and he picked her up. They started The Cramps in 1972, and after relocating to New York became part of the burgeoning mid-70s punk scene that grew up around the legendary CBGBs club.
Although part of that community, in reality The Cramps were creating a scene all of their own, with songs and an act that was more camp, theatrical and sexual than that of many of their contemporaries.
Some say they spearheaded somewhat unsatisfactorily-titled genres like 'psychobilly' and 'horror rock', but while it's hard to label the music they created they were certainly influential in their own way, with bands like Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, The Horrors, The Black Lips and maybe even The White Stripes owing a little to Purkhiser and Wallace.
Various other guitarists and drummers were brought in over the band's thirty year career, with 2003's long player 'Fiends Of Dope Island' the thirteenth studio album of their career.
Their quirky (you could say weird) look and attitude meant they attracted a cult following, and a grainy recording of a live show they performed at Napa State Mental Hospital in 1978 certainly became cult viewing. And while they were probably at their peak in the early eighties, they continued to recruit new and loyal fans as the years went by, and even appeared in an episode of the nineties incarnation of 'Beverly Hills 90210'.