In Sickness and in Health is a wonderful album and, indeed, I would be inclined to place it in the top three psychobilly albums of all time. It had been recorded in Cardiff and it was recorded on Betamax because that was deemed to provide the best sound quality. 

The musical director of this album was Dick Thomas and this LP stands as a testament to his brilliance. The album still sounds as fresh today as it did 40 years ago. It is an indispensable disc that fundamentally changed the psychobilly scene. Demented Are Go, despite the drug abuse and bad behaviour, had recorded a masterpiece and had emerged as a serious headline act. 

Mark says that the songs for the first album were the product of, “LSD [and] comics. Swamp Thing was our favourite…comics and skating and getting fucked up, [and] horror.’ He suggests that the Cramps and Screaming Lord Sutch were perhaps his biggest musical influences.

The album kicks off with a cover version of the Gene Vincent classic Be Bop A Lula and what a cover it is. The song begins with a crescendo and Ant Thomas absolutely pummelling his snare before the inimitable voice of Mark Phillips declares Be Bop A Lula she’s my baby’. The song actually isn’t played that fast but it has an extraordinary groove that was to become a hallmark of the band. And, of course Mark tampered with lyrics, so ‘she’s the girl in the red blue jeans was changed to ‘she’s the girl in the latex jeans, she’s the girl of my wet dreams’. Live, where Mark had sung ‘open your legs and go, go, go’, this was changed to ‘open your piss flaps and go, go, go.’ As a statement of intent it is positively arresting and effectively redefined the world of psychobilly.

The next track is still very much a part of the band’s live set. ‘Pervy in the Park’ is a masterpiece with an incredible middle eight ‘love is like a flower, smell it and you feel alright’. Live, Mark sometimes struggles to know how many times to repeats the line ‘Pervy in the Park’, as seen on the Jettisounds video ‘Sick, Sick, Sick’ which depicts the band at its finest at the Klub Foot. ‘Pervy In The Park’ was written when Mark saw his friend Simon, with little round dark glasses, sitting in Victoria Park in the middle of Penarth, leering at the girls. Mark says that he and Richard Jones, Demented’s first bass player, or Anthony, just started coming out with the song. 

‘I Was Born on a Busted Hymen’ is a fantastic song. From the opening line ‘Looking up the crevice on an unborn child, the blood and the afterbirth to drive me wild,’ it is clear that nothing was off limits in terms of song content. The idea for the song was from Mark’s former girlfriend, Christine Rooney, who used to sing the line at the piano.

‘Holy Hack Jack’, which was released as a 12” single, is probably the pick of the album. It remains a firm favourite with fans and gave one band their name: the Sick Sick Sinners from Brazil. ‘He’s got a sheath made of plastic planted over his head, forty gallons of petrol gonna burn you all dead…’ and so begins the finest slice of Demented, with the chorus of ‘Sick, Sick’ being one of the most memorable in psychobilly history. The song also contains two very nice, yet restrained solos from Dick. Of ‘Holy Hack Jack’, Mark is very succinct about it’s subject matter: ‘Just a perverted paedophile priest.’

Most of the album was recorded in Cardiff, but then another couple of tracks were done in Luton with Pete Gage. Ant had been out to Belgium because someone had bought him a ticket to get out and see The Cramps on a bus trip. When he got back, he had to go straight to Luton and they’d recorded everything with a click track, “and ‘Frenzied Beat’ was an absolute bastard because of the stoppy-starty bit at the end”.  Playing to a click-track was demanding. It was, as he says, ‘a pain in the arse to play on’. Ant still remembers this album fondly because he says it was the album he learnt to play on. Indeed, he had to be persuaded to play bass drum on half the tracks because he “didn’t do that sort of thing”. Simon Crowfoot of Torment also played bass on ‘Frenzied Beat’. The album credits Simon as playing bass on ‘Rubber Love’ but the sleeve notes are incorrect: “Probably due to too many Purple Hazes I am actually playing on the track called Frenzied Beat.” 

‘Pickled and Preserved’ is a necrophiliac take on ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’ . ‘Fuck her in the bathtub, fuck in the sink, I can fuck her anytime even though she stinks,’ all to a hillbilly tune. It works as a nice repost to The Meteors’ ‘Sick Things.’

A cover of the Osmonds’ ‘Crazy Horses’ polishes off the first side of this exceptional album in real style.

‘Transvestite Blues’ is a magnificent song that opens the second side of this record. ‘Put on the make-up, put on the rouge, put on the lipstick high-heeled shoe, look in the mirror and what do I see, goddamn woman with hairy knees’. This is an absolute gem of a song, that has its roots in the transvestism of Mark’s uncle.

‘Rubber Buccaneer’ is a song written about Mark by his good friend Steve ‘Shitter’ Shields. The music on the song is quite delightful with Dick really surpassing himself.

Next is a cover of a Mack Self song, ‘Vibrate’, which has that Demented groove. The Meteors recorded the song too on their next album, Sewertime Blues, but if P. Paul Fenech really believed that his version was better, then, he was engaging in major league delusions. The Demented version is an absolute joy of a cover.

‘Nuke Mutants’ is such a splendid song that it even had its own dance where people would skip round the dance floor with arms above their head in the shape of a mushroom to drawn attention to the mushroom cloud that would accompany the dystopian nuclear holocaust that Mark hallucinated while tripping on LSD.. The song also benefits from the sublime fiddle-playing of Simon Cohen. Mark recalls, “‘Nuke Mutants’ is another one where we took serious amounts of LSD, me, Rob Mincham, Charlotte Paul. We took these love heart window panes and these black micro dots, and we’d created this room with flashing disco lights and put a big rubber mattress in the middle. It was really fucking mental when we were tripping out. I imagined that there were ants crawling over me. We had hired a film which we started watching [about] SS Concentration Camps. All of us had bad trips and thought that it was the end of the world: we could feel the radiation, but in reality it was just the sun coming up. My mate had been picking his spots and I thought that they were radiation welts and they were bleeding, it was like ‘oh my God, you’ve got it you’ve got the radiation sickness’. I could hear ‘do not drink the contaminated water head for high ground’, I must have imagined it. I thought if I’m gonna die I’ll go out in the garden and the sun was getting hotter, so I was like ‘oh well, we’ll all be nuke mutants tomorrow.”

‘PVC Chair’ is an absolute winner of a track that remains a live favourite. The song tells the story of Mark’s early relationship with cousin Ant. It is a frantically paced song that never fails to get the crowd going.

‘Don’t Go In the Woods’ is a song that Mark wrote after being chased down a train track one night. It is a song that is short on words but the words are used delightfully by Mr. Phillips to create a wonderful song.

Oliver Baroni, perhaps the most eloquent man in psychobillly, writes that he first discovered Demented Are Go in his “very early teens. The ‘In Sickness and In Health’ album was featured on the rack in my local record store I went to that had all the rockin’ and psycho stuff. Visually, already, it stuck out – probably due to Mark’s direct look into the camera. I gave it a listen and within the first couple of bars of Be Bop A Lula I knew: This is DIFFERENT. I also knew that this was a watershed moment in rockabilly history. From now on, if you were into psychobilly, it would mean a commitment. Up until DAG, a lot of rockabilly guys could claim to ‘like’ psychobilly, because most stuff was basically rockabilly played faster. ‘In Sickness And In Health’ changed everything.”

Of In Sickness and In Health, record producer extraordinaire, Iestyn Polson, says, “that album’s amazing. It sounds like nothing I’ve ever fucking heard in my entire life. It jumps out of the speakers in a way a record should do. What an absolutely amazing fucking record!’ 

Nick Kemp

If you like Nick writing about Demented Are Go, check out ‘Kicked Out Of Hell: A History Of Demented Are Go’, available in paperback and ebook!