Cool Hunting

Spaghetti Western rockers Spindrift are making their way west where their reverberated guitars hang on a minor chord like a magenta sunset over a high desert playa. Unique to this tour, they've been granted permission to use imagery from the reclusive J.X. Williams, whose all-but-lost horror spectaculars changed cinema forever.

Director Noel L awrence, the keeper of William's archives, secured permission from the elder master of macabre who leads a quiet life painting landscapes from his secluded villa in the Swiss Alps.

For those unfamiliar with the filmmaker, J.X. Williams drew upon his own experiences with the mafia and the Red Scare blacklist to create the infamous 1965 shocker Peep Show that outed the cross-dressing FBI master J. Edgar Hoover for the first time. Following that film, Williams moved on to a run of pornographic horror films before his quiet exile to Switzerland. Catch a quick peek on his site.

And already the band's fanbase is reacting with a mixture of fascination and disgust.

"I gotta tell you... watching J.X. Williams on the big screen behind you guys last night was riveting," one woman wrote on the band's MySpace page. "My jaw dropped, you guys couldn't have timed it better or played a better tune. And oh, before I forget, that was a woman's labia being sewn up inside of a pentagram?”

News of this unlikely and rare collaboration wasn't announced until after the tour had already passed through the Eastern Seaboard but there's still time to catch them in Oklahoma, Colorado, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado where the band performs at the Monolith Festival on 13 September 2009.

You can also check out French channel Canal+'s capsule bio (with subtitles) on J.X. Williams and look out for the full-length documentary that's currentlyunderway.