The Gun Club were one of the most interesting bands to emerge after the first wave of punk began to fragment and roots music began to infect the LA punk scene.

Formed in the late Seventies, they fused the raw aggression of punk with the spirit of the blues, country and rockabilly.

For 16 years, they forged an idiosyncratic path, led by the charismatic Jeffrey Lee Pierce, their singer, songwriter and guitarist; a man for whom the adjective “troubled” could have been invented.

Like fellow travellers Nick Cave, who was treading a similar path on the other side of the ocean in The Birthday Party, and Mark Lanegan, who came along soon after, Pierce’s demons were right there on display in everything he did.

Born 69 years ago today, had he not died at the age of 37, it’s tempting to think he might have enjoyed a similar trajectory to the equally troubled Cave; perhaps he was just too volatile to have made it that far.

Pierce had charisma in spades; unfortunately, he also struggled with drugs and alcohol, and led an eccentric peripatetic lifestyle in which his various obsessions – with dinosaurs, with the Vietnam war, with Japanese horror films – were constant companions. 

His early influences were the glam and prog of his Seventies youth – Roxy Music, Genesis and Sparks – before a Bob Marley gig drew him to reggae, and to Jamaica.

On his return he became a music writer, focusing mainly on blues, rockabilly and reggae – he interviewed Marley under the nom de plume Ranking Jeffrey Lea.

As punk brought new sounds into his life, he became president of Blondie’s West Coast fan club and, after befriending Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, gave her a cassette of a song called Hanging On The Telephone by an obscure California band called The Nerves.

Soon he formed his own band with his guitarist friend Brian Tristan – aka Kid Congo Powers – called Creeping Ritual. They had become The Gun Club by the time of their 1981 debut album Fire Of Love, featuring two of their best known songs, Sex Beat and She’s Like Heroin To Me, as well as a cover of blues legend Robert Johnson’s Preachin’ Blues.

Their second album, Miami, was produced by Chris Stein. It concluded with this melancholic masterpiece, Mother Of Earth, whose lyric alludes to the demons Pierce spent much of his life fighting: “I’ve gone down the river of sadness, I’ve gone down the river of pain.”