The last Butthole Surfers LP, a big-along-stinky-ole-Texan-dick-up-a-redneck-cop's-ass of a punk rock epic, was slagged in the British music press. Well, fuck those people. You could see it coming a mile off.

The irony is, according to amiable drummer King Coffey, that half of 'Independent Worm Saloon' should have been on the previous Buttholes LP, 'Piouhgd'. Except that the tape machine broke and Rough Trade (their label at the time) were apparently climbing the walls, so the Surfers just gave them what they'd finished and made like it was the whole album. One probably shouldn't mistake Butthole Surfers for a band who give a shit.

Pocketing The Man's money (a good thing) coincided with the Surfers somehow becoming less worthy, less important, in the eyes of the critics (not a bad thing, just a depressingly predictable thing). Yet the Butthole sound will always remain utterly distinctive. They've been exposed to their own - and other people's - weirdness for too long now to do it any other way. Which is why, in this age of grunge carpet bombing, we need them more than ever.

Before you can carp, remember: as far a America is concerned, all we have offered the world in the way of a rock future is Brett Anderson's terminal case of builder's arse. Don't it make you want to fucking weep?

So anyway. In a pub. Frontman Gibby Haynes (who has checked into the band's London hotel as Satan, causing his record company certain communication problems) has disappeardd - to go dancing in one of the capital's top nightspots, maybe, or to catch a great movie, with a young friend. Which leaves us with a trio of Surfers in the form of King, ultra-dry guitarist Paul Leary and quiet, slightly freaked bassist Jeff Pinkus. What follows is, in no particular order, a rough guide to the wild, wired and weird world of Butthole.

1. The infamous van-Stipe incident
Paul: "We'd been using our old van as a trash dumpster for about six months, when it was too full to put any more trash in, we parked it in front of Michael's house and set it on fire. Yes, he saw it."
King: "And we allegedly spray-painted on the side, 'Michael Stipe, spread the hype, we still wanna suck your big long pipe. Allegedly."

2. Bad shows
(a) Tijuana, Mexico
Paul: "Instead of paying us at the end of the night, they beat the shit out of us, smashed all our
equipment and took all our money. And we were supposed to play the next night at the same club ... well, I guess we won't be back tomorrow, thanks anyway. What happened? Weell, the monitor woman turned everything off halfway through the gig and walked out, so I threw a beer at her and Gibby hit some kid over the head with a guitar. The kid doused a towel in ketchup and went and sat in front of some police, saying he wanted money and stuff. All of a sudden we were kissing the hood of a cop car for 45 minutes. They took Gibby round a corner, you could hear him yelling in the background ... Ooh! Aah! Ooh! Heh heh heh ..."
King: "We watched all our gear, guitars, amps, come flying out of the doors on to the sidewalk. And our crew person, she kept saying to the cops, You're hurting them ... and every time she said that, they hurt us more. Like, I'm not hurting 'em, this is hurting them! Then we lost Gibby and had to go to the American consulate and have them call up the jails. Yup, great place."
(b) Somewhere in Norway
King: "I think this was our first tour of Europe, Kramer was playing bass. We do this show on the
Godforsaken town, it was billed as being this band Shockabilly, except it wasn't, it was us, who no one there had heard of. The first 30 second we're on, half the audience leaves. So we made a rule, once people left the room they weren't allowed back in. Gibby stripped naked, we made this hideous noise, and he berated anyone who tried to come back into the hall."
Paul: "Actually, there were two peole who stayed standing against the back wall but they looked a bit out of it. I think they just couldn't find the exit. Oh, and the other part was where Gibby fond out where all the people had gone for beer and ran through the bar naked knocking everyone's drinks off the tables."
(c) London, Clarendon Hotel
Paul: "I was trying to find my shoe. I heard the band start the first song, and they didn't even know I was up there. Just trying to find my fucking shoe, guys ... and I heard a tape of that show, and it was bad. We did a really bad job."

3. Texas
Paul: "I'll tell you what sums up Texas - Stickmen With Rayguns, the scariest band I ever saw. The
singer's girlfriend spent the whole set trying to give him a blowjob, and he just kept hitting her. Then he stuck the mic up his ass, and the crowd got angry and he goes, I'll take you all on! So they come at him onstage, and he swings the mic stand and takes them all out. Then, one Christmas Eve, he held his grandparents hostage. Had the whole SWAT team around his house."
Jeff: "He got shot point blank by a speed dealer once. He just stood there ... the bullet bounced off his sternum, went right out again without hitting any vital organs. He was like, unfazed by it. One time he hit a guy over the head with an axe to get him to leave his house. The police said, You trying to kill him? and he said, Hell no! If I was trying to kill him, he'd be dead."
King: "For a while, the Austin scene was totally ruled by bands fronted by 300-pound drag queens. In fact, when Gibby started wearing dresses, I think he was just carrying on holding the drag queen torch. He used to pull slabs of liver out of his underwear."

4. Mark Farner, Paul's Pit Bull (named after the singer from '70s US band, Grand Funk Railroad)
King: "She's a cool dog. One outdoor show in Texas, she stood by Paul throughout the whole show. Think of it from her point of view, she sees all these people standing there facing us. She was trying to protect us."
Paul: "She's one of the ten most famous dogs in America, according to the Chicago Times. I took that as a great compliment until I tried to think of nine others. A journalist once asked me, How's Mark Farner? I said, my dog, or the singer from Grand Funk? And the journalist goes, My God! The singer from Grand Funk Railroad's called Mark Farner too?!?"

5. Kathleen, ex-Surfers Dancer
Paul: "Hell, Kathleen ... how long you got? Once in Florida we all went out on a boat with a bunch of honeymooning scuba divers - we were just snorkelling. They all run out of air and get back on the boat, while we carry on happily snorkelling, except Kathleen, who had got back on the boat with the honeymooners; then she shits in her hand and feeds it to the fish. So when we get back on the boat, we can't understand why everyone's huddled into a corner of the boat, staring at us. We're popping beers, going, This is great! We'll be back!"
King: "Kathleen wasn't speaking at this point of course, she was highly religious - except it was her own made up religion - and it involved a year of complete silence. Gibby asked her why she was doing it once, and she wrote on her little pad, Well, it's hard to say. Her other way of communicating was by this frantic, angry miming. When we were on the road, we always had to keep stopping at these family restaurants to let her go for a pee. So Kathleen - just wearing various rags, remember - would run into this family restaurant, squat on the floor in front of the staff and make this angry hand movement from her vagina to the floor. Every restaurant, she'd run it, motioning from her vagina ... and we had to eat in these places."
Paul: "My favourite Kathleen story is from a gig in California. She needed to getinto her stage costume, which involved stripping naked and covering her body in lime green foam. So she goes to the McDonald's across the street, into the toilet, where there's little kids and stuff, and starts stripping and covering herself in foam. We do the show, and afterwards she decides she needs to masturbate. So she goes to the women's toilet, gets in a cubicle and starts masturbating. A staff member goes in there, looks under, sees these two green hairy legs and decides it's a man. So she calls the bouncers, and they start beating on the door. But Kathleen is determined to finish masturbating, so she puts her feet up against the door and carries on. As they're breaking down the door she comes. These guys pull the door away to see a naked woman covered in lime green foam with her legs wide apart. She told us she was determined to
come that time ..."
Jeff: "When she accidentally broke her year of silence, the word that she said was 'Madonna'. I was reading ot this story from a magazine about Jodie Foster and Madonna having a fight and she looked up and went, Madonna? Oh, shit..."
Paul: "At the end of the tour, we dropped her off at her parents' house - they lived in a nice neighborhood. Her dad's already bummed out because Kathleen's brother had just announced that he was going to join a ballet troupe. Then Kathleen walked in - head shaved apart from a few stripes, wearing these dirty old glasses she'd found and men's underpants - and announced that Jesus was an alien, and was going to return in a UFO. He just got up and left the room without a word..."

6. John Paul Jones, ex-Led Zeppelin bassist (producer of 'Independent Worm Saloon')
Paul: "I was walking down the street at home (Austin, Texas) and this little kid chased me and goes, Aren't you Paul from the Butthole Surfers? Hey, man, I read in the Austin Chronicle that John Paul Jones was going to produce your next record. I go, Yeah, he was the bass player for Led Zeppelin. And the kid goes, Oh, man - I thought it was The Pope. Walked off all disappointed."

7. Bigfoot (Legendary Mysterious Mountain Creature)
Jeff: "We hung out witht the coolest guy in the north-west of America, this retired Park Ranger (Jim Hewkin, Bigfoot authority). He was drinking our beer, smoking our pot, telling us where Bigfoot hangs out. He told us he'd seen two female Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) sitting by a creek, and one took a shit in the creek and wiped herself with her hand. He got a big kick out of telling us. I think he realised what kind of people we were."
King: "When I was a kid I saw this film, The Mystery Of Bigfoot. It ended with this incredible scene, a family of Bigfoots hanging out in the wilderness, Ma and Pa Bigfoot and the kids, playing games and fishing and stuff. I remember thinking, This is incredible! Why isn't this on the news? I believe that there's been a government conspiracy to stamp out that film before it became common knowledge."

9. Good Shows
King: "Our final show at the Danceteria in New York was great. It was the one of the first shows when we had Kathleen. Her and Cabbage (Kathleen's girlfriend, who replaced the one-time second drummer Theresa) urinated into plastic baseball bats and and used them as piss-wands to anoint the crowd. They and Gibby were naked, rolling around and groping each other. We dismantled the PA as we played."
King: "The club owner went mad, telling us we'd never, ever play New York City again as long as we lived. The club closed after one month."
Jeff: "Actually, we playing NYC two nights later, right across town."

10. Butthole Surfers albums...
Are thrilling, unique and some of the most disturbing music you cold hope to buy. So go and buy them.