If you don’t already know Kev King, you’ll recognise him instantly if you’ve been to Bedlam Breakout, Psychobilly Freakout Festival, or any show with the Surfin Wombatz. The frequently-costumed MC, washboard player and vocalist is a stalwart of the UK Psychobilly scene, and has been for four decades. Here’s his take on his years at the centre of the scene:

There were four of us at school that were into Rock and Roll. My eldest brother bought a Buddy Holly box set and that really was probably the start of things for me. Buddy Holly is still one of my major loves as far as the music is concerned. He’s one of the people that I really wish I had the chance to have seen but obviously he was long gone by that stage. I would say Buddy Holly was what brought me into it.

My first ever gig that I ever went to see was Bill Haley and the Comets in 1979. He was obviously past his best but the whole thing was just mesmeric. It was unbelievably good. I had the pleasure of seeing various members of what I would call ‘The Greats’: Carl Perkins, Bo Diddley on numerous occasions…I actually had a conversation with Bo. He was just an ordinary guy really. You could tell that he had rough times and bits and pieces like that. Bo was another one of my favourites at the time.

I then started a Rock and Roll Disco type thing with me and two of my friends. The first gig that I ever did was at Chatham Town Hall in the Medway Towns in January 1981. The first band that I ever DJed for there was the Blue Cats. Weirdly, when I was in the venue early at Bedlam [this year], I saw The Blue Cats soundcheck. After they finished, I went up to the stage and I spoke to Clint. I said, ‘you won’t remember me, because we’re going an awful long while back, but I was the DJ for you guys in January of 1981’.  He said, ‘do you know what? I actually remember that! Ask me what my wife said to me this morning and I wouldn’t have a clue, but I remember that!’ They’re probably a better band now than what they were then, because they’re tighter. At later times we did stuff with Crazy Cavan and various other bands of that ilk. That was just purely us playing vinyl music. I hear about people being DJs and I’ve seen them sticking CDs in me. It just doesn’t seem natural to me but that’s what it is.

One of the things that I used to do at these Ted events, I would play stuff like Glenn Miller, Louis Jordan, people like that. I got quite a lot of stick about it at the time. But I used to say to people, ‘well, see, just actually listen to it a little bit and see where I’m coming from’. When they actually do listen to it and they think about it a little bit… it’s only rock and roll but under a different light. I’ve always been quite an instigator with that. I used to go up to London and I’d go to some of the clubs that were going. I’d hear stuff up there and then me and my mates, we’d go up and find some little specialist record shop somewhere in the outskirts of London, and we’d buy whatever we could, and I’d then start playing it in the things that I did. I still, to this day, love that music. 

We three guys, I suppose you’d call us Teddy Boys in that day. We then gradually moved on more towards the Rock and Roll side, although where rockabilly ends and Rock and Roll begins is very debatable. Most of what people now consider to be rockabilly was termed Rock and Roll back in the early days.

I have always maintained that whereas some people go into Psychobilly from the punk side of things, I obviously always went into it from the rockabilly side of stuff. For instance, when the Klub Foot kicked off, I didn’t know anything about it for the first few years. When one of my friends used to go, I used to particularly make a point of going to see Restless because were more on the rockabilly side of things. It has to be said, we would only really go on the Psychobilly nights as opposed to the Trash nights. I was never big into people like the Stingrays and things like that. Even though I grew up basically in and around the Medway towns, I wasn’t really in the Medway scene like the Milkshakes and Prisoners and people like that. I was aware of them, but didn’t really have much to do with it. Obviously back in the early eighties – around about 1981 –  the Meteors started to appear on the scene. I actually had the pleasure of seeing the original line up, probably more times than I’ve seen the Meteors since, to be perfectly honest. I didn’t fall out of love with them but, to me, they were never quite the same once Nigel and Mark left. It wasn’t the same sort of thing. 

I was at the famous incident at the Downham Tavern where it all kicked off between Fenech and Sparky. The rumour is that it was over a cheese sandwich. Sparky helped himself to a cheese sandwich out of the fridge that was supposedly earmarked for Fenech. Demented went on stage, did two numbers and then Fenech came on and beat the crap out of Sparky. That was the end of Demented onstage. 

[Speaking of Demented Are Go], a friend of mine started putting on gigs at the Anchor in Wingham. It’s a bit of a strange place. It’s a lovely country pub with a hall upstairs. You have to go upstairs to get there and the stairs are behind the bar. I can remember walking in there and Sparky was walking around these circles in the bar downstairs. I showed him where he had to go and all the rest of it. He’s one of these people that now, if he sees me, providing he’s not too off his tree, he’ll come bounding across the room to give me a huge hug and all this and that and the other. 

I carried on doing that for a few years, then I met my missus and settled down and had a couple of kids. I didn’t go to gigs for a long time although I always carried on playing the music. I never fell out of love with it. Then what happened about eighteen to twenty years ago was I happened to see that the Waltons were playing a gig down in Rochester, which is only an hour away from me. I said to Stuart, my son, ‘do you fancy going along?’ He’d been indoctrinated into it already. The first song we ever learned to sing was ‘Bloody’ by the Long Tall Texans. It couldn’t get away from me. It was there all the time and he’s got a love for it. Since then I’ve been back in it. 

I saw Bedlam advertised somewhere and me and Stuart decided that we was going to come up for one day. I think it was Bedlam 14, so we’re talking quite a number of years ago now. I think the Guana Batz were headlining. We thought we’d go up there and see it. I vividly remember we parked in the car park just up the road from where the Roadmender is. We were walking down the hill and there was a guy walking up towards us and he had this huge black eye. He’d obviously been in a pit the night before. Stuart took one look at that and said, ‘I’m never going in a pit’. He has been in a pit since, but he doesn’t do it very often. We just did the one night then, and we drove back the same day. 

I gradually got more and more involved. I was asked if I fancied doing a guest thing with the Surfin Wombatz at one of the Waltons’ birthday gigs they used to do. The then washboard player was supposed to be going in and having an operation, so he didn’t think he would be available. It turned out that he was available in the end, so we both did it, then he decided that he didn’t want to do it anymore. The original plan was that they’d be going to get guest washboard players in each time they did a gig. I was dragged into a two or three and it just exploded.

We started going to Bedlam on a regular basis. I started seeing that Bedlam had started doing a bit of a raffle to raised a bit of money for charity, and over the years, I’ve raised a lot of money for different charities, which is part of what I do. Particularly when it came to when Tiny died, and we decided that we was going to do the raffle, collect money to help towards his memorial gig and all bits and pieces like that so we sort of gathered a team around us to run that.

At the same time, Psycho Santa was going on up at Leamington Spa. We were originally supposed to play, but unfortunately due to circumstances we couldn’t, but I went anyway. In the past Paul from Jack O Bones always compèred  it, especially to a specific piece like that. This time he asked, could I help him out? I’ve done public speaking, virtually my whole life. I’ve debated with MPs, councillors, all sorts of different people. It holds no fear for me. I just basically stepped in and then ended up doing the entire weekend just to help out.

A lot of people like what I do when it comes to my compèring, because I probably show more enthusiasm than a lot of people do because the scene means so much to me. I also pride myself in that I don’t think anybody could watch me ever introduce a band or do the bit afterwards and tell whether I actually like the band or not. I don’t play favourites when it comes to that. It’s very much… If it’s my job to sort of get them to get a good reception, then that’s what I will do, whether I like them or not.

One Sunday morning at Bedlam and [a writer from Mad Music For Bad People magazine] made some comment to me about, ‘I suppose normally you’d be at Church’. I actually said to him, ‘yes, surprisingly enough, I normally would be’, which he found very, very strange to say the least. He ended up doing like a two page spread on about how I saw the connection between Psychobilly and Christianity. One of the things that I said then and I still stand by it to this day is that I actually said that the Psychobilly community is more Christian than most Christians think they are. People look after one another, whereas within the Church there’s an awful lot of backchat and they want to be top dog. There’s one point in time I did actually starting to become a licensed lay preacher. It fell through basically because for me it was too academically based. If you say to me ‘write a five thousand word dissertation on something’, I would struggle. If you say to me, ‘can you go up there and speak for an hour about something?’, I can do it. No problem at all. I’m a vocal person. I can speak for England, and I do. Sometimes say the wrong things. That’s just me. And if people can’t accept that, then that’s fair too.

[My advice to younger bands is to] persevere. It is difficult. It really is prepared to get recognised. I’m chuffed to bits that Deathcaps are on the up. I also got quite friendly recently in the last few years with The Zipheads. One other band that I want give a little bit of attention to is the Spike Direction Effect. They’re not psychobilly, but they’re a local bands to me who are good lads. 

For me, [the UK Psychobilly scene] is actually better now than what it was back then, possibly because I know so many more people. I can go to an event like Freakout –  I got to compère all of that last year and  I’m hoping to do the same this year – and I don’t necessarily see that much of the bands. I spend most of my time talking and just being with people who I get on with. It’s the camaraderie that there is amongst people. I think everybody has got egos, but it’s not really about the ego side of things. There is a pecking order, there is no doubt in that. Sometimes you think, is that particularly fair? It is what it is. What’s different about Psychobilly than what it is about a lot of other types of music is that people are just there to have fun, and they do. And I do. 

As told to Kate Allvey