Monocled Alchemist

Lynn Hanna takes tea with The Damned’s Black Rabbit, Captain Sensible. Peter Anderson bowls him over.

Article published in NME, 6th February, 1982

The Damned | The Mad Batter’s Party | IT’S ONLY minutes after midday but already The Captain is completely out to lunch. Here he comes now, as large as life and twice as loud, lurching into the bar beneath his ubiquitous beret.

WHOOPS! He staggers into a fake-oak settle and nearly sends it sprawling. OOPS! He pulls out his handkerchief but spits straight onto the carpet.

UUURGH! He’s caused bassist Paul Gray to convulse with laughter so that he’s choked on his beer and sprayed it over a plate of chips. The Captain carries on eating them anyway . . .

Fuelled by a haphazard consumption of assorted stimulants and fired by a successful night in the studio, Captain Sensible is curled up on the settle, weakly weeping with laughter.

“Discharge. The Exploited. I started it all, mate. And what thanks do I get for it? They pay me to produce their records. I couldn’t produce a rabbit out of a hat!”

Tears well out of those blue, reddened eyes and roll down the grey, sleep-robbed cheeks. Peroxide hair the consistency of straw peeks out under the battered beret. A thick leather jacket and heavy chains adorn that formidable frame. Is there anybody in there alive?

The Damned | The Mad Batter’s Party

EVERY SO often The Damned pop up like the demon king in a punk pantomime, a record hovering at the top of the alternative charts or skirting the fringes of the orthodox Top Fifty.

While the rest of the class of ’76 have grown up or got out, they follow a messy, impoverished fate with a Boys’ Own enthusiasm, and a rough hewn joie de vivre.

Although the times have changed around them, The Damned have stuck fast almost exactly where they started.

Dave Vanian: “I don’t believe that any of the bands who started when we did didn’t think about making money. The Clash had that big political thing, now they’re the new Rolling Stones. They were praised for preaching against the very thing that they’ve become. Because we were honest and said that we wanted money, we were slagged off. Maybe we should have been pretentious.

“Every single band that’s got the tag ‘punk’ now seems to be a political band of some sort. That doesn’t mean we have to sing about it all the time. In this band we have political beliefs and do various things, but we keep it away from the band. It would be terrible if I thought we had three minutes left and every band was singing about it.”

IT TAKES some time for the full cast of this farce to slowly assemble in a London pub. The Damned are due to play in Manchester tonight, to make a bit of money to buy beer or pay the rent, to pursue their own simple, squalid pleasures.

There’s the part-time keyboards player Roman, and the road manager Nigel. There’s Dave Vanian, immaculate in an outfit that gives him the ghostly air of a deceased flying ace: jet black hair scrupulously brilliantined, bloodless skin as pale as porcelain and wearing dark glasses discreetly sprinkled with diamante, he looks like a creature that suffers at the slightest suggestion of sunlight.

The Damned | The Mad Batter’s Party

Rat Scabies arrives sober, a little sullen and growing ominously disgruntled at The Captain’s injudicious insults about the size of his nose . . . The first act takes place in the van as we prepare to leave London. Voices are raised between Rat and The Captain.

Tempers flare, faces flush and sinews stretch to the point of physical confrontation. Suddenly Rat leaps over The Captain and scrambles out of the door, helped on his way by a hefty slap on the backside that only adds to his wrath.

Threading furiously through the traffic, he hurtles down the subway steps. The last I see of Rat for the day, he’s scuttling at full speed, going underground. Whether driven by a desire for revenge or reconciliation, The Captain springs out after him. But Rat has disappeared, and it’s a drummerless Damned who make their way back to the pub to drunkenly consider their predicament.

“I ain’t goin’ wivvout Rat!”

The road manager exhorts Sensible to remember his obligations, to remember the money! But the Captain is not only immoveable, he is offensive, and the road manager is the next to exit in high dudgeon, taking the hired van with him.

With the afternoon creeping on and no drummer or form of transport, the chances of reaching Manchester seem increasingly slim.

“Will you get sued?” I ask anxiously.

“Well, I suppose we might,” replies Vanian, calm and unperturbed behind his sunglasses. “But we might still get there yet.”

AT FOUR o’clock we’re driving round Southwark, searching for the studio where The UK Subs‘ drummer Steve Roberts is rehearsing with The Exploited, with Sensible’s frantic bulk hanging half out of a window, dementedly demanding directions from any unfortunate passer-by.

At half past five we still haven’t left London. The Damned stop for asprin, to renew guitar strings, to buy brandy. At some point it is discovered that the amiable Steve, press ganged into this outing on the pretext that Rat is ill, has now gone missing.

The Damned | The Mad Batter’s Party

“‘E’s done a runner,” cries The Captain, setting off in search of him.

“Nobody leaves this van!” screams the road manager ineffectually.

The next time we stop, we’ve started before anyone realises that Paul Gray has disappeared. He’s escorted back to the van, clutching a pork pie and muttering furious imprecations.

To Peter Anderson and me it’s a minor miracle that we ever reach Manchester. But as the night wears on, The Captain mercifully collapses into semi-consciousness, while Dave Vanian sits inscrutable in the front, glancing at the map or silently staring out into the darkness.

The club turns out to be the sort of place designed for abject suffering rather than the pursuance of pleasure. A filthy, freezing dressing room soon starts to fill with a trickle of the sort of new punk hangers-on who make straight for the band’s beer and then start to criticise the last LP.

On the far side of the room, Captain Sensible is sadly explaining that Scabies is suffering from a terminal illness.

“Where’s Rat?” comes the question, a little closer. “He’s broken his leg.” Just for a second a smile of the purest pleasure flickers across Dave Vanian’s pale features.

Watching The Damned in the best of circumstances is rather like recapturing the mucky pleasure children get from playing mudpies.

Tonight, with no soundcheck it starts with an excrutiating buzz which slowly separates into something approximating its proper components.

By The Damned’s standards it’s a restrained occasion with the Captain more subdued than in the days when he used to wear a tutu or a nurse’s uniform, descend into the crowd like a raging pink bear in a fluffy costume or refuse to continue until he’d ordered anyone with a beard out of the audience.

The Damned | The Mad Batter’s Party

Two things redeem The Damned, one of which is a string of pop songs of inspired daftness like ‘New Rose’, ‘Noise Noise Noise’, ‘Love Song’, ‘I Just Can’t Be Happy Today’.

The other is the fact that on stage, their characters take on a two dimensional cartoon allure, with Vanian stalking the stage like an unearthly manifestation of a deathly MC, Paul Gray as archetypal principal punk boy and Sensible’s dangerous dementia usually aided by Rat’s own rampant ego.

Together they create a spectacle which the more responsible observer can only contemplate with a sort of horrified fascination.

IT’S ABOUT a week later that Peter and I find ourselves at The Captain’s parents’ house in Croydon. Sensible’s room is painted red but still papered with a faded design of nursery animals.

Damned paraphernalia, personal effects, and discarded underwear litter every available surface, together with a motley collection of toy rabbits, the most favoured of whom — a scruffy creature of indeterminate age and colour—stares out blankly from between the sheets.

The Captain’s mum comes in with a cup of tea. The Captain himself is stretched out on the floor gently wafting a large cabbage leaf in an attempt to coax a real recalcitrant black rabbit from where it’s taken sanctuary under the bed.

Sensible has just finished working on a single with Dolly Mixture, and if that thought is enough to freeze the blood, you may be surprised, as I was, to hear that he and Paul Gray have produced a very pretty piece of summery pop.

His own single ‘This Is Your Captain Speaking,’ an indictment of war and religion, is selling well in the independent charts. On the Crass label, it seems a more serious facet of the Sensible character.

The Damned | The Mad Batter’s Party

“The first thing about The Damned was that we were four geezers who, without getting into the stupidity of it all, had no future. I was on the dole, blah, blah, done a lot of jobs.

There’s no pathetic pose. No star trips . . . well, not many anyway. I go to see other groups playing and I can’t understand what they’re doing, standing there all po-faced and serious.

“This word anarchy is bandied about right, left and centre, but if there ever was a band who embodied the whole thing, we’ve done that and we still do. The name of the band ought to have been Chaos right from the start.

“I’ve got no pretensions or want to do anything else. I love touring, it’s the best thing in the world. Total stupidity.”

Is there a retarded element in what you do?

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

Of not growing up?

“Yeah,” The Captain shouts delightedly. “You hit the nail on the head. Totally, absolutely, totally. I’m 27 and my dad still treats me as if I’m 15. We’re overgrown schoolkids, people who never want to grow up.”

AND SO, at last, we come to Rat, coincidentally recording in a studio around the corner from The Captain, putting the finishing touches to a track he’s contributing to an anti-war album and bravely acting unabashed by his embarrassing display of a few days earlier.

“The divorce lasted a day. It was one of those childish, pathetic squabbles. I’m not trying to defend myself. Well, I am, or I wouldn’t bother saying it. But we’ve been together five or six years and to be honest, it hasn’t been exactly rosy to date.

Rat’s acting career

The last time that happened, I did actually leave the group and fly back to England. But as we was already in Hammersmith, it didn’t seem to count that much.”

Our meeting has also fallen on a day when Rat’s embryonic acting career has been temporarily halted. The revue in which he was playing the German Air Defence Minister has just folded after playing to only 17 people the previous night.

But The Damned have been asked to play the group in a proposed production of Hype, an expose of the music business based on a book of the same name.

“We’re probably one of the few groups, the only band, that still stands for a lot of the same ideals that also apply to the new New Wave,” says Rat.

“The rest of them now are just as narrowly minded. Because I’ve actually become competent as a drummer, it doesn’t mean I’m going to slag off the geezer in Anti-Establishment because he can’t play as well as I can. It’s his spirit, that’s what I started with.”

“I think the difference between the old and new punk is that the world situation is getting desperate. Christ knows if the world’s going to last more than a couple of months,” says Sensible.

“Punk is the voice of youth, and youth ain’t happy at the moment. When you say things like that, obviously it’s going to be a bit depressing.”

New Punk

MY CONTENTION is that the original punk nihilism posed a challenge, created a parallel, and that its immediacy, in which The Damned past played their part, made for an exhilarating entertainment that was some sort of personal catalyst.

The new punk takes depression to the point where it blurs into powerlessness, in a time of crippling recession, it is helping to discourage the possibility of an individual making any effect on their environment.

Pursuing a subsistence lifestyle with a gloss of tawdry glamour, trudging round the same treadmill summing up rock’s Peter Pan complex with resolute irresponsibility, The Damned embody many of the things I detest.

That being the case, I really don’t know why I like them. Perhaps it’s because, trapped in a vacuum that their contemporaries vacated, they’re supplying a tantalising taste of the high, free spirits when punk first started to a differently deprived audience.

Perhaps it’s because of their proud, comic disdain of pomp, or because of the unwitting way they epitomise anarchy. Maybe it’s because The Damned never say die.