Having released the first ever UK punk single New Rose in 1976, and punk’s first album Damned Damned Damned the following year; and then singlehandedly launching the gothic movement with their 1980 The Black Album, it can safely be said that The Damned are damn near completely responsible for influencing the vast majority of independent music we hear and feel nowadays.
35 years later, The Damned are celebrating their longevity and prowess with tongue-in-cheek punk anthems by engaging in their 35th Anniversary World Tour, which will stop here in Australia in January. How cool is that?
Captain Sensible, founding member and guitarist of these iconoclastic British punkers, reminisces fondly when I tell him that it was watching The Damned guest-star on an episode of The Young Ones in 1984 that really got me into “interesting” music. “We were really pleased to have been invited on the program. It was glorious TV, you know?” he laughs with an easy-going raspyness. “It was anarchic and fun and it was, you know, everything a TV program should be – it wasn’t boring, like a lot of the shit that’s on TV at the moment.”
And it’s that statement from the one and only Sensible that perfectly encapsulates what The Damned themselves are all about – anarchic and fun, and never boring. Sensible reminds me that throughout their storied career – and all the ups and downs their path has taken them on along the way – The Damned have always been their own beast.
“I think people would expect, with a band like The Damned, you get what the band are into at the time,” he explains, “and the band is not done for commercial reasons. I mean, everything we do … we’ve been so bloody lucky in that we basically can do what we want and do all the experimenting with our albums without the record labels breathing down our necks.
“A producer tried cornering us once, while we were doing The Black Album sessions, and we said to the guy, ‘Hello, who are you?’ and he said, ‘I’m the producer; I’ve been sent down by Roger [Armstrong, founder of Chiswick Records],’ and we said, ‘We really don’t want to have a producer on this record, we’re gonna make it ourselves,’ and he said, ‘Nobody produces their own albums – you play your music, and the producer produces!’ So we said, ‘We’re The Damned – nobody tells us what to do!’
“It’s one of those things, really. The band is like a gang. Nobody can impose their laws on us. Right or wrong, we’ve done our thing. Have we made mistakes? Sure! But mistakes are made by people who are trying to push themselves and their technical abilities – and you can hear [mistakes] on the records. We’re not pissing around; we try to make the very best records we possibly can.”
When I point out to Sensible that at least when The Damned have made mistakes (their 1977 album Music For Pleasure, produced by Pink Floyd’s drummer Nick Mason – they’d originally clamoured for Syd Barrett – is a notable example), they’ve at least been interesting mistakes, Sensible gets fired up. “Yeah, sure!” he exclaims. “And I’ll tell you what, that’s what I hate about records these days – everything’s so perfect with the software used in recording these days; in the hands of the wrong people (i.e., almost everyone in the studio), you can really make everything sound so perfect and so devoid of any mistakes, that it takes all the fun and interest out of it.
“You know, on Beatles records, there were mistakes! John’s guitar – there were bum notes. You can hear Ringo dropping a cigarette packet on the floor, and you can hear George Harrison giggling whilst doing back-up vocals. This is what we want on records! We don’t want perfection … it’s overrated and boring.
“The world is crying out for a band that’ll break the rules, that’ll do something crazy,” he continues, on a roll. “For me, punk rock is just garage rock, really. It’s garage bands trying to the best of their abilities to master the four or five chords it takes to make the music; and once you’re too good, it starts to get a bit too perfect.
“I just wanna hear raw bands, you know. I want to hear good bands, like in the early days of punk. I want to hear The Saints, from Australia – they were just magnificent, and one of the greatest bands in the world … that’s what we need! I want to hear raspy, raw real music played by a bunch of people absolutely going for it as if their lives depended on it. I don’t want to hear formula bloody punk rock, it bores me to death. I want to hear stuff like the MC5, I want to hear The Saints, I want to hear early Stooges – that’s great!”
Throughout the last 35 years, and with all the history and magic a length of time like that will inevitably entail, The Damned have done their own thing their own way – and along the way spawned countless bands and styles. I ask Sensible how it feels to have been such a dominating influence on the musical diaspora. “Crikey, I have no idea,” he chuckles, “we only made music to please ourselves – it was never done for any reason or trying to create a movement or even to make money! We weren’t even thinking about money; we were thinking about making the most spectacular albums … I mean, we weren’t even trained musicians.
“It was an amazing time,” he muses, “the most creative period in my life. But we really stretched ourselves, is what I’m trying to say. They were some great albums; they sound so much better than we had any right to sound, to be quite honest!”
