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‘It was like we’d signed up for a cult’: the weird, wild world of Butthole Surfers

The surviving members of the Texan psychedelic art rock noise band recall the drugs, fires, fights, scabies, dumpster-diving, naked dancing and primal screaming of their early days

Nudity, raging fires, belching smoke, blinding strobes, nightmare-inducing surgical videos, fights and firearms: these are some of the things you may have encountered at a Butthole Surfers show while being pummelled by a squealing cacophony of acid-fried psychedelic noise-rock, as a man tripping wildly in his underpants screams at you through a megaphone. Fusing noise rock with British post-punk sensibilities, tape manipulations, mangled vocals and warped psychedelia, the band – loved by everyone from Kurt Cobain to Orbital and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers – were unique from the off. The 66-year-old offers up lots of elongated pauses, silences and murmurs, as though constantly trying to kickstart his brain into action, and goes off on tangents about US rapper Post Malone, country act the Chicks and synth pop, while one question is met with him simply singing a Talking Heads song at me.

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