HE’S a hardened English rocker, one of the original Stiff Records signings who’s worked with Nick Lowe and Ian Dury. She’s a New York singer-songwriter who grew up among the electric Seventies punk scene of the city.

The somewhat eclectic pairing of Eric Goulden, aka Wreckless Eric, and his wife and musical partner, Amy Rigby, come to the Railway Hotel, in Southend, this weekend.

Tricky to pigeonhole and as likely to threaten disco mixed in with garage and a filmic psychedelic interlude, Eric admits it’s their lack of neat packaging and marketability that appeals to their dedicated cult following.

“What makes us great is what makes us unsuccessful,” he laughs.

“We used to live in France and they hated us. They said you’re not rockabilly, you’re not rock’n’roll, you’re not country enough for the country people, you’re not trashy enough for the trash people and you’re not Sixties enough for the garage people. Then we’d have a beatbox come on and they’d hate that and go, ‘That’s not music, that’s a drum machine’. ”

Following the rules isn’t something either of them are used to. While Eric was one of Stiff Records first signings, Amy was touring in her all-female folk pop outfit, the Shams, while raising her daughter, as well as enjoying a successful solo career.

Describing some of his early experiences on the Brit scene Eric says: “I grew up in the south, but I was an art student in the early Seventies in Hull. “I was always playing music. It got me interested in playing music more than I was interested in being a painter. Everyone was saying to me, ‘You should go to London’, so I did.

“I got there and Stiff records had just started up. I thought they were the kind of people who might like my stuff, so I went along and gave them a cassette,”

Eric was promptly signed and had a hit with (I’d Go) the Whole Wide World – despite mistaking legendary producer and musician Nick Lowe for the tea boy on his first trip to the offices.

“He was saying, ‘I just love the stuff on the cassette. It’s great, if it’s OK with you I want to produce the record for you’,” Eric recalls.

“He was just so nice. He was wearing a suit and he looked so young. And I’m thinking, ‘Funny, they’ve got the office boy to produce the record’, because in between he was answering the phone and stuff.

“I didn’t know anyone who wore a suit except if they worked in an office and I didn’t realise it was him.”

Meanwhile, across the pond, Amy, also at art college, was absorbed in the Seventies music scene of New York, where names like the Ramones, the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol were at the heart of a music and fashion boom.

Amy says: “I was planning to be more of a visual artist.

“But it was a very exciting music time in New York in the late Seventies. I started going out to see music every night at places like CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City.

“I’d see all these great bands that were coming out of New York and all these great young British bands that were coming over. “I didn’t decide then I wanted to start a band, but music became much more just my life than visual art and out of that I started playing.”

Developing a country sound – as her acoustic guitar didn’t disturb the neighbours in her tenement block of flats – she always kept the energy of the punk scene that influenced her in her music and began to make a name for herself as a songwriter and performer.

She formed the Shams with some of her girlfriends She says: “I had my daughter then and they could kind of help me out with her – it was a really nice time in my life”

Amy also forged a solo career, releasing hit album Diary of a Mod Housewife in 1996, and met Eric coincidentally in Hull, years after he’d left the town.

She played a gig in a pub there and covered his most famous song.

“I’d heard Whole Wide World when it came out in the Seventies,” she explains. “I heard it again in the Nineties and I was like ‘Wreckless Eric, I remember him, I love this stuff’.

“I started playing Whole Wide World – it would always connect with someone in the the audience.

“This promoter in Hull knew I played that song and he said, ‘Wreckless Eric is going to be up here for a festival. I’ll put your gig on and have him DJ for you’. “I didn’t know it at the time, but that pub was the first place he’d played Whole Wide World.”

The couple, now married, began playing together and forging their unique sound according to Eric as a way to spend time together, as he lived in the UK and she in the States.

Now both based in New York, they’ve just released their third album – A Working Museum – which they say is their best yet, and they’ll be showcasing tunes from it when they perform at the Railway.

Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby play at the Railway Hotel, Clifftown Road, Southend, on Saturday at 8pm. Entry is £5 on the door.