INTERVIEW: Bal Stingray

It’s a chilly evening in November, and we’re relaxing in the Green Room at New Cross Inn, out of the rain. In a couple of hours, Bal Stingray (or Bal Croce, as he’s known offstage) will be headlining Friday night at this year’s Psychobilly Freakout Festival, bringing garage goodness to kick start the weekend.

“Obviously people want to hear Sting-Rays stuff, but I also try and mix, put in a couple of tracks. The stuff that we do, it’s like the stuff we used to do, but isn’t. So it’s not all just stuff that we’ve done in the past. I think we’re doing a Bunker Hill track, ‘The Girl Can’t Dance’, and the Contours song ‘Do You Love Me?’ which the Sonics also covered. Do you know that one?” He asks, before he breaks into song. “Do you love me? Do you love me? Now, that one I can do! Yeah, it was just stuff I listened to, stuff that was great, stuff we would have covered back in the day had we known it. I’m the same guy that was in the band then, I know there’s only any difference. Alec [Palao]’s not involved, but he came up on stage with us. There’s no hard feelings, and he came up and did three or four numbers with us every night, which was great. That was the first time I think all the four original Sting-Rays were on stage together since, what was it, 1980 or something?”

When he’s asked about his time in the Sting -Rays, Croce answers in a flash. ”It’s brilliant. I mean, basically, we were never big Psychobilly fans, but we were huge Meteors fans when they first started with that first EP and ‘Radioactive Kid’. But the other bands I think we were really into at the time would have been the Deltas and the Shaking Pyramids. I was saying to someone today, I was listening to a copy of the first gig we ever did and I hadn’t realised it was all rockabilly. We didn’t do any garage.

I remember we were doing a rehearsal after that first gig and we were trying to do a Sonny Bird’s song called ‘Sadie’s Back in Town’, and we couldn’t really get it, it wasn’t working. But Alec went, oh, the chords are the same as the 13th Floor Elevators’ ‘You’re Going To Miss Me’. Let’s try that. So we started doing that and then we were like, ‘oh, let’s do some more garage as well’, because we were listening to all the Pebbles and all that stuff anyway. So we started mixing some rockabilly and garage, and we were very lucky; I mean, we worked hard, we gigged a lot and we got a bit of recognition and sort of became a bit of a name.

I think after the Meteors we were the first, [or] one of the first bands on that scene. I mean, we were predated the Guana Batz or Demented Are Go. The Deltas weren’t really part of it, they did play the Klub Foot later on. But there was all the Klub Foot bands, all the other bands that came along like Frenzy within a year of us starting. But we were all part of that and we were lucky, we had the headline [slot at the Klub Foot]. But equally, I remember when the Guana Batz started, they supported us a couple of times, and then within six months they were headlining and we were supporting them because they were that much more popular.

The thing is: Klub Foot wasn’t a psychobilly club. I think it was heavy metal, later on it evolved and all these bands started forming and everyone wanted to play the Klub Foot. People used to come from all over England. I think they had a licence for eighteen hundred people; I’m pretty sure the night we recorded that first ’At The Klub Foot’, there was about two thousand five hundred people in there. You couldn’t get to the bar, you couldn’t go anywhere, sweat was pouring down the walls, it was great!

We’re very lucky that some people are really passionate about us. But I was saying to someone tonight, when we went on at the Klub Foot, there’d be loads of people going, ‘the Sting – Rays were on, we rushed to the front’, but equally, the other half of the people were going, ‘oh, the Sting – Rays were on, let’s go to the bar’. Some people really liked us, because we were a bit different, some people hated us. And I think that’s where we still stand really.

Now, Croce’s back in his new, yet familiar, incarnation. “What happened was Darren from Trashwax ran up and said, can I reissue your Ug and the Cave album – the band I had after the Sting-Rays, with Mark still in the back. I was like, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah!’ Then he said, ‘why don’t you do a gig?’ I’d stop gigging for thirty years, and I said, ‘well, one guitarist lives in Italy, the other one’s in London, drummer’s in Hastings, and I live in Cornwall, and none of us played together for thirty years’. So I wrote a set list, everyone rehearsed at home on their own. We went out to Spain, we had a couple of rehearsals before the gig, and did the gig, and it was brilliant! I really enjoyed it. I was like, ‘all right, I’m going to do some more gigs’.

[I thought], Why don’t we redo the Sting-Rays? we can do a bit of Ug and the Cavemen, then a bit of Sting-Rays. But we can’t be called the Sting-Rays, because Alec’s doing it. So I rang Alec up, and I said, ‘do you mind if we go out as Bal Stingray and his Goo Goo Mucks?’”

The rest is history. Now, he’s looking forward to taking the show to Bedlam Breakout in 2026. “It’s just an entire thing like Bedlam, it’s just so nice. All the people on the scene, they’re so lovely. It’s really, I mean, it’s so funny, but you know, they’re all still wearing, peroxide jeans, and covered in tattoos, and Demented Are Go badges, and then they have to pull their glasses out to read the program to see who’s on, or whatever the label is on a record they’re buying. But it seems like that real meat-headed thing that was in the early days, that’s gone, and most of the people are brilliant. The best thing is it’s such a nice atmosphere. And yeah, we just chat with the people about the music we love. It’s really nice to get together.”