Roy & the Devil’s Motorcycle

Elias Raschle, Alain Perret Gentil and Olifr

For almost the past 30 years, Roy and the Devil’s Motorcycle have been tenaciously and joyously doing their own thing. The 3 brothers picked up guitars and aimed to set their, and our, little worlds on fire. All this time and attitude have given them a raw power, where reverb, distortion and harmonics swirl and boil, lurch and whip in the melting pot.

Initially, their influences seem obvious: old, dusty blues records, gospel, dirty garage, Spacemen 3, 13th Floor Elevators, the Velvets, Souled American, Gibson bros; but dig deeper and their love of free-running experimentalists like Lee “Scratch” Perry, Red Krayola and Godz becomes disorientatingly clear.

After a few singles on the super-underground Record Junkie label, they unleashed their raging punk-blues FORGOTTEN MILLION SELLERS cult classic l.p. on the Swiss primitive Voodoo Rhythm label in 1998. Some maturing (and only a little mellowing) led to the scorched-earth soundtrack BECAUSE OF WOMEN in 2006. By this time they’d already been regularly touring across the continent, playing with the likes of Acid Mothers Temple, Sonic Boom/Spectrum, Black Lips, Disappears, Strange Boys, Psychic TV, and Martin Rev (SUICIDE).

Continuing to cut their own path at their home studio in rural Switzerland, the band released knife-cut crystalline TELL IT TO THE PEOPLE in 2012. This LP caught the ears of J Spaceman and the band toured across Europe with Spiritulaized later that year. 2013 studio efforts concentrated on the soundtrack to Adrian Winkler’s biopic about the original Swiss Hells’ angel, “Tino, Frozen Angel” (2014). Their fifth studio album named by “Im Reich der Wilden Tiere (No Milk No Sugar)” (Voodoo Rhythm Records) was released in spring 2021.