When I first heard Domino on The Cramps’ landmark debut Gravest Hits EP, prompting the birth of psychobilly in 1979, I had no idea it was a Roy Orbison song.

It seemed impossible that the smooth crooner could possibly have made a twisted rockabilly tune as fucked-up as this. And he didn’t. But he wrote it – and the version he recorded for Sam Phillips at Sun Studios isn’t all that different.

Orbison had signed for Sun at the suggestion of Johnny Cash after they met on a local TV station where Roy’s band, The Teen Kings, were performing a song called Ooby Dooby.

Re-recording it in Memphis, Domino quickly gave them their first hit in 1956 and though The Teen Kings split up after one more single – Rockhouse – Orbison was signed to a solo deal.

But his heart was never really in rockabilly and after writing a couple of hits for other artists – Claudette for The Everly Brothers and Down The Line for Jerry Lee Lewis (Go! Go! Go! in Roy’s original version, channelling Elvis in the vocals), So Long I’m Gone for fellow Sun artist Warren Smith – he was able to buy himself out of his Sun contract and bring his balladeering style to RCA.

This was one of the songs originally recorded at Sun Studios in Memphis around 1957, following an earlier recording – A Cat Called Domino – made with a vocal group called The Roses at Buddy Holly’s producer Norman Petty’s studio in Clovis, New Mexico.

Coincidentally, The Cramps also recorded their cover version in Memphis, at Ardent Studios in 1977, produced by Alex Chilton, for the B-side of their debut single Human Fly.

It was originally released as a single on the Vengeance label before reappearing with their second single, Surfin’ Bird and its B-side, The Way I Walk, plus a cover of Ricky Nelson’s Lonesome Town, on the Gravest Hits EP released by Illegal Records in July 1979.

Surfin’ into sight as a punk band, with their leather jackets and spiky hair, The Cramps were clearly a rockabilly band, which must have been confusing for the punk-hating Teddy Boys at the time. 

And as well as creating wider interest in genuine rockabilly artists of the ’50s and ’60s like Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis, they spawned the new psychobilly hybrid that was soon followed by the likes of The Stray Cats and home-grown young bands like The Meteors and The Polecats.