Cheetah Chrome was “a one-man hurricane tearing up the musical landscape with his feral guitar riffs and manic energy.” That’s how his old bandmates from The Dead Boys paid tribute to the punk pioneer following his death at the age of 71. 

I never got to see or hear his first band Rocket From The Tombs in their original lineup because they never released any music, never toured the UK, and broke up when I was still at school.

But I did see early gigs by both the bands they spawned when they split – Pere Ubu and The Dead Boys.  And in 2004 former members reunited – supplemented by Television’s Richard Lloyd in place of original guitarist Peter Laughner, who died in 1977 – to record the songs they used to play under the title Rocket Redux. 

And in 2015 I finally got to see elements of both when Rocket From The Tombs reunited briefly and played at a brewery by London Fields. Sadly they did not include Cheetah Chrome, who has died at the age of 71.

I now learn that Cheeetah’s real name was the rather more prosaic Eugene O’Connor. After the end of The Dead Boys he played guitar on Ronnie Spector’s 1980 solo debut, and then with Nico, before moving to Nashville.

He had several bands of his own, Cheetah Chrome And The Casualties, Cheetah Chrome And The Ghetto Dogs, and more recently performed with members of Joan Jett’s band The Blackhearts.

His death puts paid to plans being laid for a Dead Boys tour to mark the 50th anniversary of their debut album – though that would have been without singer Stiv Bators, who died in 1990 after being struck by a taxi in Paris.

David Thomas, the singer in Rocket From The Tombs and Pere Ubu – known in RFTT as Crocus Behemoth – died in April 2026.