Back in 1995 I somehow stumbled upon the 90ies Surf-Revival while traveling through the US (allthough I know that the Mummies and others have been doing Surftrash-music since way longer, and that even Swiss bands have played surf-instrumentals before they became fullblown Punks back in the 80ies). In Portland I went to see the Satan's Pilgrims (nice dresses, and hair-don´ts), in the Recordshops I found stuff of "Los Straitjackets" and the first single of "Sir Bald Diddley &His Honorable Big Wigs". What really turned me on back then, was to discover the huge amount of instrumental surf-music from the early Sixties. Along with that Surf-Revival came another Tiki-Revival. Otto von Strohheim just started his "Tiki-News", writing about a guy (Sven Kirsten) looking for someone to release his researches on the Tikiculture (Sven finally made it to Taschen and released "The Book Of Tiki" some years later). In the thriftstores of San Francisco in 1995 you could still find really cheap Original-Hawaiian-Shirts - by now you can't even pay to look at that stuff anymore.
Ah well ... I ended up comming home to Switzerland with two huge bags filled with Surfmusic ("Strumming Mental"-Records, Pyramids, etc. and more and so forth), and started doing Surf-Dance-Nighs, calling my self "DJ El Tiki", ... most people hated it (except some ol´Punks, the Psyched-Out-Ones and Garage-Fans). I didn't care too much about that, for me the relation between psychedelic music and instrumental surf was obvious (listen to "Luzifer Sam", by the Floyd i.e.) and so I mixed the records of those genres into each other and enjoyed it like crazy and some friends like Brother Panti-Christ, Beatman and Gringo Star did aswell - and that's enough folks to hang out and get loaded with ...

People say, that folks of Bern/Switzerland are slow ... that's kinda true when it comes to culture sometimes. The movie "Pulp Fiction" got popular by the beginning of 1996 in Switzerland, and suddenly everybody and their granma wanted me to play "Misirlou" at my Surf-Parties ... Guess that's when it started to turn me off ... and I returned to playing Garagepunk (ans Soul and Rocksteady, and Punk and and and) more and more and stopped doing Surf-Parties. The name "El Tiki" stuck with me though since then, and I still like it. So that's that

IF YOU ARE INTO REAL AUTHENTIC TIKI-STUFF, dig this:

If you ever end up in Berlin, hungover on a sunday morning, or even sober just not into shopping and drinking .... then check out the museum of ethnology in Berlin Dahlem. It's supereasy to find, because there's a subway-station called "Dahlem" just some 5min from the museum. This place will seriously blow your mind ...