One night in 1976, Fred Schneider was in Atlanta at a club called 2001. “It was a real cheesy place,” the B-52s singer tells Classic Rock. “Instead of a light show, they just showed slides on a screen. And the slides were of babies and puppies, and weirdly, lobsters on a grill [laughs]. It made no sense to be at a disco and be seeing that stuff!” But Schneider says inspiration struck. “I thought: ‘Wow, rock this, rock that, rock lobster!’”

Using that title, Schneider wrote a poem, free-associating about undersea creatures, beach party movies and even a Coppertone tanning butter commercial (“Pass the butter, please!”). He brought the idea back to Athens, where, a few months before, he and four “nerdy friends” had started a band. Named after the 50s-style bouffant hairdos singers Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson loved, they called themselves The B-52s. After playing a few house parties, doing covers, they got serious about writing their own songs.

And they did it in a disused funeral home.

“It was actually a bloodletting room,” Schneider says with a laugh. “It was a concrete room, with one tiny window, and canals at the side, where the bloodletting once happened. It had no heat. I remember Kate playing the keyboards with mittens on. It didn’t even have electricity. We had to run a line to the restaurant next door. I think rent was like fifteen or twenty bucks a month. But we were troopers. People say: ‘Oh, you had it so easy.’ Not really.”

“It was scary and cold in there, but it’s all we could afford,” Kate Pierson told me. “That’s where we wrote Planet Claire, Dance This Mess Around and Rock Lobster – all our early songs.”

Schneider remembers guitarist Ricky Wilson having the spy-surf riff that started the song. “Ricky is very underappreciated as a guitarist, but he was totally admired by most of the bands that we came up with,” he says.

Indeed, the guitarist had a distinct, angular style, with aggro precision and open tunings (“Inspired by Joni Mitchell,” Pierson says). For Rock Lobster he deliberately removed the two middle strings from his Mosrite Ventures guitar. It gave the remaining ones an odd resonance. Pierson says of the riff: “It’s a song that when that starts, you know what’s coming.”

The B-52s songwriting method was to start with a riff or title, then just jam. Schneider says: “We’d jam and jam miles of tape. We’d make up a lot of parts, then try to string them all together. Rock Lobster has got an especially strange structure to it. It’s not verse-chorus. I mean in the six-and-a-half-minute version on the album, there are all kinds of sections.”

As its almost prog structure unfolds, Rock Lobster gets fathoms deep with the surreal (‘Here comes a bikini whale’) and the humorous (‘Put on your nose guard, put on the lifeguard’). And given that all but one of the band members were gay, it also sneaks in some gender-bending. “Yes, I sing: ‘Boys in bikinis and girls in surfboards,’” Schneider says. Though I’m not sure why the girls were in surfboards, rather than on them [laughs]. It’s just the way I write. I can’t always explain it.”

The band recorded the first version of the song at Stone Mountain Studio, near Atlanta, and released it on DB, an indie label started by their friend Danny Beard. They pressed up a run of 45s and consigned them to any record store that would sell them. Some of those stores were in Greenwich Village, where the punk/new wave scene was happening at clubs like CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City. In New York alone the band sold 2000 copies of the single within a few months.

Lots of buzz and a bidding war between labels ended with them signing to Warner Brothers. The band flew to the Bahamas to make their debut album with producer Chris Blackwell, owner of Island Records, who had a studio there. They hoped he’d give them a “big, full sound”. But when they heard the playbacks they were shocked. “It sounded really thin and rinky-dink,” Schneider recalls. “But I guess that’s what people like about us.”

The band’s big breakthrough came with a performance of Rock Lobster on US TV show Saturday Night Live (Dave Grohl later said it “opened a whole new world” for him). Schneider remembers: “When we played it on Saturday Night Live, people in the audience immediately stood up. There were no signs or directions from the TV crew to do that. We just get people going. And that’s how we started, because we weren’t practised entertainers by any stretch of the imagination.”

Fifty years on, they’re certainly more practised, and Rock Lobster is a beloved part of their set on their ongoing tour. “I never get tired of doing the song,” Schneider says. “But we’ve got to make it fun for the band on stage, fun for the people in the audience, and get them all going. I feel like that’s my job. I’m not the best singer in the world by any means. People might think: ‘Oh, he thinks he can sing.’ But I don’t. And who cares? I do what I do, and it works.”

Over the years, Rock Lobster has been omnipresent in pop culture, appearing in countless TV shows, movies and video games, including Family Guy, Knocked Up and Rock Band 3.

I asked Schneider if he thought the song’s kookiness had prevented The B-52s from being taken more seriously.

“Maybe, but we don’t care,” he replied. “We know who we are. And we always struck a chord with all the people who are different: gay people, introverts, outsiders. They’ve all told us how our music opened up their whole appreciation for music and art and other ways of looking at things.” Kate Pierson told me: “And even when we were singing about lobsters and volcanoes, we always sang like our lives depended on it.”