Damned: 50 years beyond the labels of punk, goth and psychedelia
“For me the point of punk was to be creative and do something for yourself. I was a toilet cleaner and five minutes later I was destroying a guitar on stage and girls thought I was attractive. So punk was my salvation.” In this statement by Captain Sensible in a recent interview with the “Guardian” there is perhaps the most honest key to reading the principle of Damned. In a fifty-year career, to be celebrated this year, the band has crossed punk, psychedelia, goth and pop without ever becoming an embalmed institution, choosing instead risk, change and, often, chaos. Today the story of the Damned returns to intertwine with the present through “Not like everybody else”, the new covers album out January 23rd as an affectionate and necessary tribute to Brian Jamesfounding guitarist and central figure in the birth of the group, who passed away on March 6, 2025.
“Not like everybody else”
Recorded in just five daysbetween enthusiasm and creative impulse, at the Revolver Studio in Los Angeles, “Not like everybody else” finds the Damned in their historical and expanded formation, with Dave Vanian to the voice, Captain Sensible on the guitar, Rat Scabies on the battery, Paul Gray on bass, with contributions from the longtime keyboard player Monty Oxymoron. A return to the raw and immediate energy of the origins, made even more significant by the fact that the album marks the first time in forty years in which Rat Scabies returns to the studio with the band. Dedicated to the memory of Brian James“Not like everybody else” is a personal and celebratory workwith which the band reinterprets “songs that made Brian fall in love with music firstly, when as a kid he started saving his pocket money and buying singles”, as Captain Sensible explained in an interview with “Punknews”: “We knew some of these songs, obviously; the rest of the list was provided to us by his wife Minna — with even a few surprises.” In the chat Sensibile also said: “When I met Brian for the first time I was a fan of glam rock. I could play a little, but my tastes weren’t exactly aligned to be a bass player in the kind of band he was putting together. As he sat me in front of a record player and made me listen to MC5, Stooges and New York Dolls on a loop, to replace the glam with something dirtier and rougher,” Sensible pointed out, before adding, “Having never played most of these songs and with no rehearsals, five days seemed a little optimistic, but the band are quick learners and we tackled the songs one after the other, all five of us in this retro studio full of vintage guitars and keyboards. I know that today many recordings are done remotely, with participants perhaps on different continents, but the Damned prefer to do it the old fashioned way, all together in a big old noisy room. I think you can hear the enthusiasm and fun of those sessions on the record”.
“Not like everybody else” is a sort of journey into the formative listening of the Damned, with covers of the Kinks, Rolling Stones, Creation, Lollipop Shoppe, Stooges and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. “The one thing we all agree on musically are the garage bands of the 60s,” Sensible said in the chat for the “Guardian”: “They did everything to sound their best, but with more passion and less technique they created this wonderful sound.” On the choice of songs to re-read, Captain Sensible told “Punknews”: “The mid-70s weren’t a great time for music. Glam had become stale and the big prog bands were boring audiences to death with pointless guitar virtuosity and ten-minute drum solos. Not to mention the terrible lyrics of bands like Yes and Genesis, with all that nonsense about magicians and astral projection. That was the mainstream stuff of the time, but there were more interesting bands playing smaller clubs and pubs: the Groundhogs, Stray and the wonderful Pink Fairies (who gave me the name Sensible!). While in the United States there were the Stooges and the MC5.” When asked about what is the importance of Pink Floyd for the Damnedrecalling that the band wanted Syd Barrett as producer for their second album before they ended up working with Nick Mason, Sensible continued: “As unlikely as it may seem, we had the same publisher as Pink Floyd and I think, even in ’77, they were still a little embarrassed that the band had become megastars while their former leader was at home in Cambridge painting pictures and then destroying them. So, when we asked if Syd could produce our second album, they seized the opportunity to try to bring him back to music. And incredibly he agreed, but when it came time for the sessions he couldn’t show up, for one reason or another.”
“Not like everybody else” moves like a sentimental map. It starts from the soulful and nervous energy of “There’s a ghost in my house” by R. Dean Taylor, transformed into a tense and immediate opening, and then dives into the urban imaginary of “Summer in the city” by Loving Spoonful and in the mod beat of “Making time” by Creation. The rougher side emerges with “Gimme danger” by the Stooges, which reaffirms the band’s deep bond with American proto-punk, while English psychedelia finds space in the reinterpretation of “See Emily play”homage to Pink Floyd by the genius Syd Barrett.
The title track, “I’m not like everybody else” of the Kinks, becomes an identity declaration perfectly adhering to the spirit of the Damned, supported by the blues tension of “Heart full of soul” of the Yardbirds and the psychedelic garage rock of “You must be a witch” by Lollipop Shoppe. With “When I was young” by the Animals, the album takes on a more reflective and melancholic tone, before closing with “The last time” by the Rolling Stones in a live recording at the Hammersmith Apollo on 29 October 2022, with the participation of Brian James, full of a very strong symbolic value, which sounds like a farewell but also like a collective celebration.
50 years of Damned
At the time of the birth of the Damned, the term “punk” had not yet entered common use in the musical vocabulary. In the mid-Seventies, Brian James, Dave Vanian, Rat Scabies and Captain Sensible were part of that tiny constellation of musicians who found themselves moving from one embryonic band to another, before the movement even had a name and a recognizable form. Even the pseudonyms adopted by the members of the group tell of that instinctive and anti-identity attitude, with Brian Robertson becoming Brian James to avoid homonyms, David Lett transformed into Dave Vanian, inspired by the Transylvanian imagery, Chris Millar took the name Rat Scabies and Ray Burns chose Captain Sensible, ironically, because he wasn’t one at all. From the beginning, The Damned’s identity was never monolithic, but the result of a continuous creative tension which, as Vanian says in the interview with the Guardian, made change inevitable: “There isn’t just one author, so the flavor of the band is destined to change continuously”. He added: “Captain Sensible is a big fan of sugary pop and prog and glam rock. So his writing is very pop and melodic and really gorgeous. Mine is more melodramatic, more theatrical. And Rat Scabies was a mod who really loved bands like the Who. That melting pot either wouldn’t have worked at all, or it would have been a firecracker.”
This unstable balance has produced a unique trajectory, but also an internal story that is anything but linear. The Damned disbanded and reformed several times, going through fractures in the late 1970s, then again in the 1980s and early 1990s. Captain Sensible and Rat Scabies have left and rejoined the band at different times, with the latter returning to collaborate on a stable basis only in 2022, after twenty-seven years apart. As Vanian also admits to the Guardian, “the fracture was above all between him and Captain”, even if, in rotation, each of the protagonists experienced their own “end of relationship” with the others. Yet, despite the conflicts, today the historical nucleus is together again, ready to celebrate half a century of activity with a new album, “Not like everybody else” – precisely, and a big concert at Wembley Arena on April 11th.
Outside, this complexity has often worked against them. If the story of the Sex Pistols or the Clash has become a compact and easily decipherable myth, that of the Damned has remained more elusive. In October 1976 the latter released their first single, “New roses“. The song, still often remembered today as the first single ever released by an English punk band, was later included in the debut album “Damned Damned Damned” in February 1977, kicking off a trajectory that would take the group well beyond the confines of the genre they helped found. Although recognized as the first to release a single recognized as British punk, the Damned soon veered towards psychedelic pop, eventually becoming perceived by many as one of the definitive goth bands. The group’s discography has never had an orderly narrative or a coherent reissue program, as one would expect from a group of their importance. This too it is part of their destiny.
And yet, indeed this freedom allowed the Damned to push well beyond the boundaries of punk already at the end of the seventies. After “Machine gun etiquette” of 1979, which radically broadened their scope of action, came increasingly daring experiments, including “The black album” of 1980 like that seventeen-minute prog-psychedelic suite which still closes many concerts today, entitled “Curtain call”. While in the Eighties the band signed gothic-psychedelic hits like “Grimly fiendish” from “Phantasmagoria” of 1985 and the single “Eloise” of the following year.
Doing things their way was often chaotic, but it ensured that they remained the Damned, and not a nostalgic rock band intent on replicating themselves. “We went on a musical adventure“, Sensible told the Guardian, while Scabies added:There were no rules. It was a group of kids having fun. And probably a large part of our audience recognized themselves in the fact that we were quite disconnected: we all came, in one way or another, from somewhat disastrous backgrounds. I think a lot of dysfunctional young people identified with the fact that we weren’t made. We didn’t all dress the same. We didn’t have a company logo or a contract with a major label.”
Fifty years after the beginning, the Damned are not just celebrating a career, but an idea of the band as a space of absolute freedom: imperfect, contradictory, but still capable of sounding necessary. “Not Like Everybody Else” it is born precisely from this spirit, but looks back with clarity and respect.
