The Fleshtones credentials have not made a great difference to their reception in our own fair isle, however. Despite the trash-on-delivery aesthetic manifest in the product of labels such as Flicknife, the neo- garage blast of The Fleshtones and their ilk does not find a natural home in British hearts.
"The response has been fair," concedes bassist Jan Marek Pakulski. "Occasionally people have wandered into a club and found us playing there. Exeter last night was great, though that might have had something to do with the 20p admission. In Birmingham, the cool, happening folks were over the other side of town. A new club was opening."
Before their own Screaming Skull tour, the Tones played selected support dates with tour heroes The Alarm. Fans of ‘48 Guns’ did not click to ‘The Dreg’ or ‘Theme From ‘The Vindicators’’.
Peter: "The trouble with the music we play is that only drips and drabs of this aesthetic have leaked into the British scene. Of course you have bands like The Barracudas and The Milkshakes, but really a homegrown artist has to do it before it can take off. The Clash came close with ‘Should I Stay’, but it wasn’t exactly the right thing.
"The difference between English and American attitudes is enormous, in terms of what’s expected of you, what you’re supposed to look like. When we first came over, our press release described us as ‘strange-looking blokes’. This time they thought they’d try labelling us ‘psychobilly’."
Keith Streng doesn’t know what that means. I tell him it means all the bands The Cramps spawned. In fact, I tell The Fleshtones a lot of things to make them feel better. I hate to see a demoralised group.

The truth is I’ve had my own reservations. Their four albums Roman Gods, Upfront, Hexbreaker, and the ROIR cassette Blast Off! have left me feeling quite jolly but crying out for some songs. Far as I could see, there wasn’t a craftsman, a Peter Case, in the band. They had their inspired moments, ‘American Beat’, ‘Shadow Line’, but there was nothing outside of strictly good-time boundaries. Could they write a classic single like ‘Shake Some Action’ or ‘A Million Miles Away’, I wondered.
Yet to ponder such a thing is to miss a point. The Fleshtones are essentially, and absolutely, a live experience. That is their trade: demolishing stages. They are crazed go-go action men, playing psychotic R&B and mad, gibbering surf crawls.
Monday at the Marquee, for example, was a Hallowe’en to rival the most sweaty, stomping Cramp of an eve, a priapic, pile-driving pillage of the senses in which songs were literally torn from their roots, dismembered, then somehow glued together again. It made me think that going back to the garages was probably the only rational way of countering/subverting both the arena rockists and the video perm wavers.
Zaremba live is an amalgam of Sky Saxon and P.J. Proby, bounding through bizarre variations on classic ’60s dances The Turkey Rot? The Smashed Potato? bashing a tambourine against his mike stand, and letting loose a voice that sounds like a low common denomination of Lou Reed, Buddy Holly, Joey Ramone, and Lux Interior. Behind him Streng scraps out warped splinters of sub-Mosrite guitar, Pakulski pummels a dense bass, Gordon Spaeth heaves into harp and sax, and Billy Milhizer beats living daylight from his kit. It’s non-stop frenzy from start to finish.
After a killer version of ‘Baby Don’t You Do It’ (following the epic opener on The Band’s ‘Rock Of Ages’), The Fleshtones, drums, sax’n’all flee through the audience, around the bar, out of the Marquee entrance, and disappear somewhere down Wardour Street.
Billy: "People here don’t seem able to break out of their moulds. They close off their options and feel uncomfortable about having fun. It’s like the critical reaction to us at the Taking Liberties show (at the Rainbow in 1981) - you know, I really enjoyed them, but I hated myself for it. They don’t know whether to enjoy something or not. They probably think we’re very childish."
Peter: "You see, we’re scenemakers, unashamedly. We pride ourselves on being able to draw a totally incongruous audience of different types businessmen, science students, your average thrillseeker. The scenes here seem very inflexible. There’s no overlapping.
"I mean, there’s always one maverick, some kid from the science squad, who comes backstage, but ... but no, I think we’re learning a lot from this tour. It’s forced us to think a little more about how we approach the stage. We’re changing our whole tactics, trying to be a lot more blunt, bludgeoning. We’ve learned that it don’t pay to be nice guys."
Did you feel you were in a field of your own when you started out? "Not really. I mean, remember that The Ramones and The Dictators had already been around a while. Everyone was going back to the ’60s. When I first saw the Talking Heads, they were still playing Troggs covers, and Television used to do that 13th Floor Elevators song ‘Fire Engine’. I think we were probably just the most primitive."
Keith: "No, The Cramps were more primitive. I saw ’em at CB’s supporting Suicide, and that was the wildest thing I’ve ever seen."
What about bands who just restage the past in meticulous detail, like The Chesterfield Kings?
Peter: "There’s bands who do that, sure. The Kings are a bit too scholarly, they’ve kind of reduced it to a science. The only scientists we like are the mad ones, the ones whose theories will never work!"
Billy: "In what we do, there is a particular inspiration, but there’s no particular style. We take other forms of music and incorporate them."
Peter: "It’s not so much a style as an aesthetic. Like, ‘California Sun’ and ‘Little Girl’ are not identical records, but they share certain, let’s say, properties. We adapt styles. For instance, our most successful record was our dance version of ‘Roman Gods’."
Which is, indeed, a fully funky brass-blown storm replete with gritty thumb-banged bass and handslap percussion. Not something The Chesterfield Kings would do.