The Polecats
Band that plays Neo Rockabilly Music
The Polecats are an English rockabilly band formed at the end of the 1970s.
Career
The band formed in 1977 in north London. The original line-up, who played under the name "Cult Heroes", was Tim Worman (a.k.a. Tim Polecat, vocalist), Martin "Boz" Boorer (guitarist and vocalist), Phil Bloomberg (bassist), and Chris Hawkes (drummer). Finding difficulty persuading promoters to book them on the rockabilly circuit with a name sounding "too punk", they adopted Hawkes' suggested band name, the Polecats. Hawkes was later replaced by Neil Rooney, who was subsequently replaced by John Buck. The Polecats played rockabilly with a "punk sense of anarchy and helped revive the genre for a new generation in the early '80s."
The band were first signed by the fledgling British rockabilly record label Nervous Records, and recorded their first single "Rockabilly Guy" at guitarist Alan Warner's "Lane Studios" in 1979. Formerly with the "Foundations" band, Warner toured and recorded with the Polecats for about a year.
In 1980, the band signed to Mercury Records, and released their most successful LP, Polecats Are Go!. They had UK chart success with the David Bowie cover "John, I'm Only Dancing", a reworking of "Rockabilly Guy", and another cover version of the T-Rex (Marc Bolan) song "Jeepster".
“The Polecats” enters the record as band that plays Neo Rockabilly Music. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Polecats, Band and plays can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1779387. VIAF identifies the subject as 132839234. The Library of Congress control number is no98038671. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1977, 1979 and 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Polecats” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.