DEREK RIDGERS

For over four decades, British photographer Derek Ridgers has been capturing the rough edges of concerts, musicians, and their wildest fans. One late night in the ’80s, he turned his lens on the Cramps, and captured the psychobilly band sweating and screaming onstage.

“THIS IS THREE-QUARTERS of the rock band the Cramps harmonizing into one microphone. It was Sunday, April 6, 1986. The weather was overcast in Deinze, which is in Belgium. I remember that day very well because our trip was written up in the U.K. magazine Time Out, and I shot this photograph on commission for them. I’d traveled there early that morning from London with a coach-load of rabid, rockabilly Cramps fans. We headed back to London on the same coach after the gig ended, so it was a round trip of about 26 hours. The headline of the piece was ‘Hell on Wheels.’ It wasn’t really hell for me, but the journalist who wrote it was much less tolerant of spending that long in the company of a lot of overenthusiastic Cramps fanatics.

I was 35 at the time, and I was very lucky to get the job because I’d only been taking photographs professionally for three or four years. If I’d had a camera when I started going to concerts in my teens—when rock was far more fringe—I could have taken some incredible shots. I saw Jimi Hendrix in December of 1966, and I was so close that I could have operated his pedals for him.

The Cramps were a truly fantastic live band—one of the best I’d ever seen. They didn’t take themselves too seriously, but they took the music very seriously. Poison Ivy was hugely interested in vintage guitars. She was a great rhythm guitarist and, I think, still cruelly underrated. In any case, they certainly weren’t an all-ages band. Lux Interior would sometimes disrobe and wag his weenie at the audience.

I’m not sure a 72-year-old ex–rock-photographer is at all qualified to talk about the music scene today, but for me, the heyday of guitar-based rock was really the ’60s, and the genre properly came of age in the ’70s and ’80s. Since then, it’s been in a slow decline, endlessly repeating itself. I hope I don’t sound like an old curmudgeon, but I suspect I do. So much about life now is better than it was. Just not live rock.”