Credit: One Little Indian

As the snow melts in Kensington Gardens, the reed-like Dan Sartain relaxes in the over-heated public bar of the Columbia Hotel. He’s looking a trifle peeky. The twenty-four year old rockabilly punk looks paler than usual, evoking a silent movie star charm with his swash of black hair and pencil thin moustache. It is the day after his sold-out gig at the 100 Club and the end of the British leg of his tour; he has a right to look fragile.  The two hour show was rather extraordinary; “I’d been up 24 hours. I was real proud of myself ‘cause after the first song, I wanted to quit. I really felt like I was going to have a heart attack. But every time I felt like that, I dug down harder.  It made me try harder than I normally do. It made me rip!”

Dan is over from Birmingham, Alabama touring his second album, ‘Join Dan Sartain’ which features an image of Dan with a gun to his head. The cover of the debut LP, ‘Dan Sartain vs The Serpientes’, featured him looking like a young, barbiturates-fuelled Johnny Cash but with a noose around his neck. All the artwork is by Sartain. The question of his toying with Southern Gothic arises but Dan’s dark inspiration apparently doesn’t hail from Faulkner or blues or country, though he admits to liking the “creepy old songs” of Leadbelly. With a glint in his eye, he claims his inspiration is “mostly from fuckin’ Satan, man. I fuckin’ like Satan. Satan is my friend. Definitely!  I’m claiming to be a devil worshipper. Me and my ol’ lady were talkin’ about it and the crazy Christians in America they’re worried about devil worshippers. They think devil worshippers exist. I’ve met every kind of weirdo but I never met an honest to god devil worshipper. I love Satan! I want to go to Hell when I die. I’m going to start reading all those Aleister Crowley books and I’m going to worship Satan full on!”

After a drag on his cigarette, Sartain changes tack a bit, “If I didn’t have music and art to put all the negative thoughts into I would be crazy. The difference between an artist and a crazy person is the artist has some where to put it. If I wasn’t doing this I probably would be some guy with skulls on my t-shirt and dark, and mysterious all the time. I don’t have to do that- I can smile.”