‘We wouldn’t keep playing if we got filthy rich’: The Damned celebrate 50 years of hunting down punk, goth and the Holy Grail | punk

‘T“There’s no one songwriter, so the flavor of the band is always going to change,” says Dave Vanian, reflecting on 50 years of the group of which he was the only permanent member, The Damned. “Captain Sensible is a big fan of edgy pop, prog rock and glam. So his writing is very poppy and melodic and very groovy. My writing is more melodramatic and more theatrical. And Rat Scabies was a model that really liked bands like The Who. This melting pot will either not work at all, or will be an absolute firecracker. As the history of the damned attests, it was sometimes both.

There were three breakups: in the late 1970s, late 1980s, and early 1990s; Both Sensible and Scabies have had frequent outbursts outside the band. It wasn’t until 2022, 27 years later, that Scabies started working with them again. “There was a real falling out between him and the captain,” says Vanian, although at one time or another, it seems as if each of the three managers was in an angry relationship that ended with one or both of them.

In 1977, Scabies became so fed up with the Others that he left the band while on tour in France, later to be replaced by future Culture Club drummer John Moss. Founding guitarist and songwriter Brian James then split the band in 1978, and the other three only reunited once again. In the 1980s, others were dissatisfied with Captain Sensible’s parallel chart-topping solo career, which in turn led to the band leaving the band and breaking up. Vanian himself considered his friendship with Scabies over after the drummer licensed the release of the Not of This Earth album in 1995 against Vanian’s wishes. But the trio have now reunited, released a new album and are preparing to celebrate their half-century with a concert at Wembley Arena.

In fact, the history of the damned is so complex that it has hurt them. When everyone understands who and what their contemporaries the Sex Pistols and the Clash were, it’s much more difficult with the Damned. They released their first UK punk single, “New Rose”, before turning to psychedelic pop, but for many listeners, they are one of the defining goth bands. Their 13 studio albums are spread across nine labels, so there has never been the extended reissue program of their career that a band of their stature might expect. That hasn’t stopped anyone and everyone from trying to take their piece of the damned: there are also 23 live albums of varying degrees of quality, and 30 preposterous compilations. “It’s all out of our control,” says Al-Jarb. “We signed those papers, never thinking about the consequences.”

Then there is the matter of the 33 people who played for the Damned. But these days, regardless of the long service of other band members, the idea of ​​the damned has once again been cemented as mortal, sensible, and scabby. Finally, they all seem to be progressing.

“They’re really funny guys,” Captain Sensible says. “It’s a lot of fun traveling with them. No one knows what Dave Vanian really looks like, but he does a pretty good impersonation of Carry On and On the Buses. And the Mouse continues his hunt for the Holy Grail.” It actually does, as documented in the book Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail: “Worth a read,” says Sensible. If you search, on YouTube you will find a trailer for a movie about his hunt, called Rat Scabies: Grailhunter. “You should hear about the exploits he performed in the south of France with a shovel in the dead of night,” Sensible says. “Okay, I won’t get into that.”

As for old feuds? A proposed sit-down with the three turned into one-on-one video calls with Scabies and Sensible, before waiting weeks for a separate conversation with Vanian. But the relationships are solid. “I didn’t want us to stand around a grave and say, ‘We should have done it while we had the chance,'” Scabies says of their reunion. “Life is too short. And it was such a relief to be able to say, ‘You know what? It’s all water under the bridge. They say, ‘Forgive and forget,’ and we’ve certainly benefited from that.”

WWhen The Damned started, punk didn’t even exist as a word. Brian Robertson, Chris Millar, Ray Burns and David Litt were part of the original small punk clique, coming together through the same group of semi-formed bands as other early punk groups did. Robertson became Brian James, to avoid confusion with Thin Lizzy’s guitarist, Lett became Dave Vanian (as in Transyl-), Millar became Rat Scabies, because he looked like a dead rat and suffered from mange, and Burns became Captain Sensible, because he wasn’t.

“Everyone in the band thought they were the best at it,” Scabies says. “Any one of us could have fronted our own band.”

“Almost every member was a pioneer in their own right,” agrees Vanian. “Now it’s a lot of give and take and letting others shine.”

Their upcoming album – the first to feature the three since 1995 – is dedicated to James, who died in March 2025, and consists entirely of covers of the kind of songs all four shared when they first got together. “The one thing we all agree on musically is 1960s garage bands,” Sensible says. “They were all trying their best to make a great sound, but with more passion and less skill they created this beautiful sound.” And so “Not Like Everyone Else” is a whirlwind tour of the formative tastes of the Damned: The Kinks, The Stones, The Creation, Lollipop Shoppe, The Stooges, and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd.

The Damned, as all three admit, will always be known as “the punk band The Damned”, even though they haven’t been a punk band since 1978. Even on their first post-James album, Machine Gun Etiquette, they were stretching far beyond the ramallama of Smash It Up Pt 1, I Just Can’t Be Happy Today and Plan 9 Channel 7. Since 1980, The Black Album has showcased the prog-psych saga Curtain The 17-minute Call, which remains a feature of their live sets (“I could probably do a minute and a half of that, but no more than that,” says Sensible), says Vanian, who says they fear “it will be the kiss of death.” By the mid-1980s, they were major makers of goth music with Grimly Fiendish, The Shadow of Night, Is It a Dream, and their cover of Barry Ryan’s Eloise.

Vanian has regretted it ever since, precisely because they were unable to translate those British hits into American success. He begins by talking about his contemporaries – Billy Idol, John Lydon – who went to the United States and reshaped their careers with the support of their labels. Their relative financial circumstances clearly crossed his mind.

“I hear a lot of people from other bands say to me, ‘If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t have started my band.’ Which is very nice and fun, but it hasn’t helped me, and I’d like to have a little luxury before I leave.

But in fairness, the Damned often didn’t help themselves: their obsession wasn’t limited to smashing instruments and throwing pies on stage, and one of the reasons they tore down so many posters was because they might be tired signings. “There were several incidents when we were invited to go see record labels and chat with people there,” Sensible says. “And of course the first thing we do is head to the liquor cabinet. One time we were left for about an hour in this guy’s fancy office, because he said he had to go to a meeting. By the time he got back, we had torn the place down. Needless to say we didn’t sign.”

While Sensible and Scabies were always the outright lunatics of the band, Vanian, Hemel Hempstead’s Bela Lugosi, was more enigmatic. His image launched a million copies: any singer who dressed in black and painted his face white owed him a debt. He invented the Gothic image, without being a Gothic at all. Music fans may have a clear image of him, but perhaps they have less idea of ​​him, unlike Lydon and Joe Strummer, whose personalities were part of their image.

“I don’t know if he knows himself or not,” Sensible says. “He would have been a very good actor.”

“Dave is the front man, he’s been there the longest,” Scabies says. “If Dave doesn’t think something is a good idea, there’s no point in trying to do it.”

“I was a reluctant pioneer,” Vanian says. “Band members want to be the star of the show, but I didn’t even want to be in a band. I was chosen because of who I was before I was in a band. Who’s this guy?’” Brian told Ratt. He sounds like a singer.’ I didn’t need an excuse to be like this; I’ll be who I am, no matter what.”

In the 2015 documentary The Damned: Don’t You Wish We Were Dead, Vanian was a fleeting presence – in the background, talked about by others, but never interviewed himself. He says it was because he saw the story the creators wanted, and he didn’t want to be a part of telling it. The story he ended up with was Vanian’s, as both Jagger and Richards sometimes were in the band: he seemed to be the one keeping it running and very much the boss (at one point, Sensible decided not to say something, for fear of upsetting Vanian), while he was also prone to following his whims, down to skipping shows on occasion, and letting others carry on without him.

“I would like to do something with a proper filmmaker — with actors — about the beginning of the band,” says Vanian, thinking about the film. “But I’m a normal person – when I started the band I thought I would wear a mask and be an unknown singer. But we took pictures very early, and that was the end of it.”

TCursed provided an opportunity for its members to live as the people they wanted to be, and make the music they wanted to make. All three might have wanted the full backing of a major label but that would have created their own stresses, and their brief stint with MCA – their period of hits – was over and they were too exhausted to come up with new material. Doing it their way may have been messy, but it ensured that they remained the cursed rock band rather than another rock band reliving past glories.

“We went on a musical adventure,” Sensible says. “For me, the purpose of punk was to be creative and do something for yourself. I was working as a toilet cleaner, and five minutes later I was smashing guitar on stage and girls found me attractive. So punk was my savior.”

“There were no rules,” says Scab. “It was a bunch of kids laughing. And a lot of our audience was probably related to the fact that we were quite dysfunctional – all the band members came from broken backgrounds in one way or another. I think a lot of the dysfunctional young people were related to the fact that we weren’t packaged. We didn’t all wear the same clothes. We didn’t have a company logo or a sign of a specialty.”

In what may be their dementia, the Damned are now greater than ever. April brings the Wembley Arena gig; Their last albums were the highest-grossing of their career. Things seem, for the first time ever, peachy.

“We’re all knocking on the door,” says Scab. “I don’t want to go out and be miserable. I want to go out and have a good time with a full belly.”

“We wouldn’t have continued playing if we had become filthy rich,” Sensible says. “I’m glad we did it this way because I thoroughly enjoy the shows and the travel. None of us slacked off and lost our drive.”

As long as he can still pounce on stage like a vampire, delivering those songs with his stern baritone, so will Vanian. “You’ll know it’s time for me to quit when I start relying on the microphone to sing Sinatra songs and read fan letters.”