Young's Heart Runs Free

Brian Young claims he’s in competition with bandmate Laurence McKeown to see which Sabrejet will be the first to cover themselves entirely in tattoos. Given Brian’s devotion to the rockabilly cause, it would be a brave man who bets against him.

With the skin art, clothes (patched leather jacket, worker boots and turned-up jeans), and – most strikingly – the magnificent, head-turning quiff, he looks every inch the unacknowledged music legend. Which, of course, is exactly how it should be.
We will hopefully have an opportunity next year to talk about his days with Rudi – the gifts from Marc Bolan, the bringing of punk to Belfast, the amazing run of singles: to hear all about this most wonderful, important and under-appreciated of bands.
But it’s been almost 30 years since Rudi split, and in the time since, the man has been busy making and playing music on his own terms. Yes, he’ll speak about the punk days if asked (and there are few more eloquent and perceptive commentators on the subject), but while Brian’s role in punk (and punk’s role in Brian’s life) should never be underplayed, it would also be wrong to define him solely by it.
The last decade has found Brian devoting himself to self-confessed ‘greaser kings’, The Sabrejets – a rockabilly four-piece saturated in Sun Records aesthetics and Johnny Thunders attitude. Recorded output has been minimal – but if Bob Dylan thinks his schedule is never-ending, a glance at the Sabrejet gig-list would leave him feeling like a lightweight.
Listen to Brian talk on the matter, and it’s clear why: the guy’s on a mission.
“There’s an awful lot of snobbery attached to rockabilly music,” he says. “Poison Ivy from The Cramps said that rockabillys were forward-looking people, they wrote forward-looking songs, used state-of-the-art equipment. Eddie Cochran was a pioneer – if he had lived into the ‘60s, I’m sure he would have been making really amazing sounding records. People go on about Americana, and how authentic it is: give me a break. It’s university Americana written by hippies. Those guys would run a mile from blue-collar America. Rockabilly gets sneered at as redneck music but that’s such bollocks. How can you be racist if your heroes are Little Richard and Chuck Berry? And there are loads of amazing female rockabilly musicians. It’s a very adventurous and liberating music.”
Sin-Sational, The Sabrejets’ new album, is a chest-out, unapologetic avowal of these values. Yes, there’s an undeniable peacock strut to the music, lyrically, though (whether in the re-casting of Australian tattooist Cindy Ray as feminist icon, or the machismo-puncturing, ‘I Dig Chicks’) there’s more going on than meets the eye. Likewise, the handful of covers that appear – Thunders, The Ramones and The Outcasts – may seem like obvious choices, but Brian’s clear about the point he’s wanting to make.
“Punk came out of glam and rock ‘n’ roll,” he says. “People are very quick to talk about glam, but they never mention rock ‘n’ roll. I got into rockabilly through T-Rex and The New York Dolls. It was such a big influence on their songs. They covered tunes like ‘Summertime Blues’ and ‘Pills’. But there was a lot of crossover in the early days. McLaren dressed like a Ted, That’ll Be The Day was out, there were some amazing rock ‘n’ roll reunion tours, and you’d bands like Dr. Feelgood. For all punk’s ‘smash the system’ rhetoric, it stole an awful lot of imagery from The Teddy Boys. I mean, the mohican is just a version of quiff, really. And the small labels, multi-band tours – rockabillys were doing that long before punk.”
It would be no injustice to find Brian Young playing to much bigger audiences now, but you’ll hear little in the way of belly-aching from the man himself. In fact, liberated from the toxic industry demands that did for his first band, you suspect he couldn’t be happier.
“Once you get past the stage of wanting to be famous,” he proffers, “it becomes much easier. Youth has a lot of advantages, but it isn’t everything. We work all week and play weekends. As soon as you’re dependent on it for a living, you get tempted. Once you’re on a label, you have to do what you’re told. I got disillusioned with the music business after Rudi, but I came out the other side. You don’t have to be part of that world, you don’t have to compete. Today we’re not dealing with booking agents or anything like that – it’s all individuals, putting up their own money. It’s full of people doing it for the love. I get enjoyment writing songs, playing gigs – that’s enough for me. I can do my own thing.”

Sin-Sational is out now on Raucous Records. The Sabrejets play The Globe, Georges Street, Dublin on Sunday November 2