I started out just as Elvis was going into the army, Jerry Lee Lewis married his 14-year-old cousin, and Little Richard became a priest.
I didn't realize how many true Rockabilly fans there were here in America.
Elvis Presley, The Everly Brothers, and a lot of American artists were my greatest influences.
I was raised on Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly and discovered the Stray Cats when I was 11 or 12 years old.
If you went to school in Nashville, you were aware of all those '60s rockabilly people.
With the Stray Cats at least, we really took the music somewhere else. First, we wrote our own songs. That's a real weak point in modern classics if you do rockabilly or blues.
I was very keen on people like Elvis, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Gene Vincent.
For every rockabilly festival staged here, there are 10 held overseas.
I'm a hybrid-genre person, which a lot of people find confusing. I grew up listening to American country music and rock n' roll made between 1955 and 1959. The Everly Brothers and Chuck Berry were my first musical loves and are still what I am most moved by. Roy Orbison came a little bit later.
To me, rockabilly music paralleled punk's energy and feeling, but the players were much better.
For me, rockabilly is very, very exciting music. It's electric and kind of wild, you know? It's 'make your hairs stand up on the back of your neck' kind of music.
