The Damned | Damned & Deliver

The punk pantomime goes to Portsmouth with the Reverend Death Vanian, the giant Rat, the wicked pop star Captain Sensible and some Naughty Nuns. PAUL MORLEY buttons up THE DAMNED.

Article published in NME, 16th October 1982

The Damned | Damned & Deliver | 11.45pm: At the back of The Coach That Has Seen A Thousand Tours, sat in the shadows and surrounded by a perfumed smoke tufting out from a juicy looking joy-stick, Dave Vanian, a pre-Murphy go-thick-rina, says to me: “There’s nothing that The Damned can’t do.”

Oh yes?

“Oh, yes. It’s gathering strength . . . people are beginning to understand that The Damned are so much different to how they used to be. They’re capable of anything and everything. No one will ever know how much until it happens.”

On a cassette that supplies a secure soundtrack for our nightime journey, Jim Morrison offers up a mocking vocal background to Vanian’s unusually direct speech. I move down to the front of The Coach That Has Seen A Thousand Halls to where Rat Scabies is slumped, simultaneously stoned and chirpy.

What does he think of Vanian?

“He’s alright,” he nods. “We’ve had our moments where I’ve hated him, and he’s hated me, but we always put up with each other for the sake of this monster that we’ve created, this monster The Damned. And it is a monster. A monster we can’t control.”

Dave talks of a growing strength. Scabies agrees.

“I’ve got a really strong feeling that we’re about to become the next Adam Ant. I’ll probably be proved wrong and it’ll be another dismal failure, but we’ll always be there fighting. It’s reached a point where we’ve been through too much just to let it go. The Damned will always be around. Always.”

Far away from the other side, Jim Morrison offers up a shadowy, stoned and of course ghostly moan.

1.00pm: The Coach That Ate A Butterscotch Yoghurt waits outside Victoria station to pick up various members of The Damned along with three teenage singing nuns. The New Musical Express enters The Coach That Saw A Video Of ET with slight trepidation, wearing clean underpants and a bullet proof vest.

Roman and Paul arrive first, the Face look of Ian McLagen and Ronnie Wood. Dave Vanian is picked up near Harley Street, pale, assured, wearing a dog collar, vicar not Rover, and his hair thick and ungreased. Rat Scabies is met outside Shepherd’s Bush Townhouse Studios, the look of a retired Marty Feldman, or a Denis Law ravished by Nobby Stiles.

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The New Musical Express put up a guard.

“Two years ago, “Scabies reasons, to the relieved Express, “an NME journalist on the road, I’d have ignored him or just been blatantly rude. The fact that NME journalists can be human beings never occurred to me.”

A crooked grin cracks open amidst ginger bristles. We’re on our way to Portsmouth. The sun smiles down on The Coach That Graced A Million Motorways, and Rat — the traveller’s friend — can appreciate such a sun. Vanian, of course, hides away from the sun’s coarse beams.

Halfway between London and Portsmouth, amidst the comfortable Hampshire hills, Scabies is lulled by the luxury of The Coach That Came To West Runton and the sun that bounces off the meadows. He sees God in the form of dolphins.

“I mean, infinity is incomprehensible to the human mind and yet we have a word for it . . . huh, just one of my little observations . . . I cannot comprehend infinity! I cannot comprehend that out there and all around me . . .”

He trails off and pulls hard on his Number 6.

“I can just about get to grips with the 12 times table . . .” He scratches at his leg: a round rat is sketched in biro on his thigh.” . . . let alone the outer nebula. People talk about beings from outer space, but there’s going to be no life form out there that we understand. They’re probably already here. How the fuck do we know that dolphins or trees didn’t manage to fucking escape down here at some time many zillions of years ago? I mean, dolphins, what are they? Phenomenal beings.”

Rat’s eyes pop out, his throat burns, his hair scratches out to every point on the compass. I bet he wouldn’t have talked about trees and dolphins during punk.

“Oh, no. A tree was something you pissed up and dolphins jumped through hoops and kept you amused.”

10.20pm: The Damned play tonight at the momentous Portsmouth Guildhall — the third night on the tour, close enough to London not to stay in a hotel. Captain Sensible is feeling “under the weather” and arrives by car just before the show. As he lopes on stage, he’s booed, spat at, gratefully disliked. He grins with well practised craziness; a cliched pop eccentric.

“You love me really,” he taunts, earning further jeers. The crowd that come to see the show range from those whose act of rebellion is to smoulder behind a pair of plastic sunglasses to those whose mohicuts are almost a surrealist wonder of the world: a few sailors, a few white neutrals, some cutie girls, some skins, some skins evolving into werewolves, some punk-zombies evolving into official aliens.

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The filthy leather jackets cry out The Damned and Sub-Humans and Charge, and we’d see these jackets at a Danse Society show. It’s all desperately formal; the severe ones and the soft ones mingle lethargically in the bar, livening up slightly as a BBC voice stiffly announces, “The Damned will be on stage in two minutes . . . two minutes.”

Scruffiness and big boots are no threat to The Stable Ones. Anti-Thatcher aggression? Tonight the Portsmouth Guildhall is merely a lost property hall. The Coach That Owns A Cream Tour Jacket can easily afford to go to sleep outside.

The Damned earn their money. Vanian preaches feverishly, as he sees it slicing through between classic values and modern chaos. The three singing nuns, three weeks ago selling badges at Futurama, throw ponderous shapes and reveal bits of thigh.

“Three nuns in suspenders dancing to The Damned sounds alright to me,” leers Rat, not really that positive. When the backdrops are all in place The Damned event will be set inside a church.

“The Real Lords Of The New Church Tour,” crows Rat, rattily. “There’s going to be a war so we might as well start bitching first.”

The stability of six-inch multicolour mohicuts is profoundly threatened by mesmerising skull-banging. Captain Sensible sincerely injects as much effort into the show as he would cleaning a toilet. At the end of the show, following plenty of slapphappy competitiveness between Rat and Cap, Scabies grabs Sensible by the neck and rants at the crowd.

“Look at this poncy pop star, mixing with Adam and all that Top Of The Pops rubbish! We’ve had to take him back to reality. For being such a prissy pop star I want you all to spit at him!”

Spit hurtles towards the sensibly stupid Sensible. When the show finally finishes he sneaks in half a bar of ‘Happy Talk‘. A few last faded jeers.

“It’s remarkable,” points out Scabies, “how much the audience take it out on Sensible and how much he lets them get away with it. It’s probably the only case of a star who’s actually had a number one hit, being put in his place by an audience. They love to do it. And why not?”

Afterwards autograph hunters home in on the smiling Sensible.

“Scum,” he calls them, and flicks orange juice at some of them.

“But we give you all that money,” one ‘fan’ pipes up. Sensible’s grin somehow widens; he adores the attention.

“Yes, money with a capital M. It’s your fault, you buy the poxy records. And now I can fill my home with jam and Siouxsie And The Banshee records.”

The hunters head home, signatures on arms, legs, upper lips. The Damned climb back onto The Coach That Has Keith Moon’s Autograph, and Sensible waves bye-bye.

“Fuck off you wanker,” shouts Scabies as Sensible bangs on the side of The Coach That Went To School With Phil Collins, which is slowly pulling away from the Guildhall. Scabies and Sensible scream meaningless insults at each other. Sensible rocks wildly in the glare of The Coach That Knew Marty Wilde’s Daughter, shrieking his daft happy talk, a demented, damned Clive Dunn. The Guildhall watches over the silly antics with melancholy stoicism. Tomorrow night it will host the Strasbourg Symphony Orchestra. So what changes?

3.15pm: “Funny! I was, oh, shocked.” Scabies recalls the peculiar ‘Happy Talk’ episode. “I heard the record and I said, Oh you’re mad, and I knew it was either going to be a huge hit or a complete embarrassment.

“It was a bit funny; it’s like a thing psychiatrists have a special name for, when you watch your best mate come a cropper and you’re sort of inwardly pleased ‘cos it hurts him and to a degree it makes you feel superior. It was the same only in reverse. I didn’t like it that he went independent, outside of The Damned. In a way he doesn’t need us anymore. And yet he does in his own mind, because he loves The Damned too much.”

11.30pm: Vanian thinks about Sensible. He calls him a jester and doesn’t feel that the hobbling Captain nonsense interferes with his own broad, paranoic performance.

“There’s a comical side to The Damned but also some kind of truth. It interlocks like a weird jigsaw, The Damned, there’s some weird chemistry that keeps us going. The Captain is actually a brilliant, underestimated guitarist. He’s very committed to what he does. He gets ill when he’s away from music. I knew it would be a number one as soon as I heard it.”

11.05pm: What do you really think of Sensible, Rat?

“The Captain? I love him dearly. I really do! When you see me put my arm around him onstage and we hug each other, that’s no front for the audience. I’ve known this guy for about nine years, we’ve been mates for a long, long time. I love the man. He’s an amazing character. It takes more than a couple of hours to get to know him, to realise what he is and what he’s about. He’s one of today’s geniuses.”

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Rat peers at me, very serious. I do not smirk.

“I dread to hear what he’d say about me. That’s why it’s a bit upsetting now that he’s a solo star. Up ’til now we’ve been a team, the two of us were on equal pegging. And now he’s like stepped away from me.”

Are you jealous?

“Of course. I don’t begrudge him it because of the shit we’ve been through but it would have been nice if it had been all of us. In this Damned world there can be some touching moments.

3.30pm: Sad Scabies’ retort to soft head Sensible’s ‘Happy Talk’ is “naughty gnome music . . . it’s for eight-year-olds”.

Why did you do this, Rat?

“It’s tricky to say why exactly. It’s called ‘The Naughty Gnome Song’ and it’s a little bit spiteful, but not so spiteful that I’ve got gnome voices singing about dicks and licking fannies and shitting on the floor. That would be too easy, and it would be too easy to get all cute and cuddly. It’s actually the hardest record I’ve ever made.

“I’m not making it to be a hit — although that would be nice — or to get it reviewed; I’m making it for me. It’s my baby. I want to show the world — fat chance! — that the days of me being a mindless yob are coming to an end.”

Scabies’ battered face beams at me.

“Y’know, I used to be very, very selfish. It was, I’m here, I want that, fuck you!”

And what do you want now?

“What I want is peace of mind. God, what a hippy thing to say! But it’s true. Just not to have any regrets. Not to wake up feeling like a lump of shit for what I did the night before.”

Rat Scabies was a punk rocker.

11.35pm: Dave Vanian likes to appear important: interpret that as silly conceit or fine pride. His conversation attempts to stretch a cover of enigma over his lightly intriguing personality. Perhaps he tries to project a sober charm, create a spell of indistinct menace, or maybe he’s just genuinely slightly remote.

At school, he says, he was a bit of a dreamer: the outcast. A true contemporary of Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer, he now finds himself as handsome and suggestive a pop presence as the boys George and Murphy; his sensual, spinning performance fills in spaces between Toyah and Danse Society, and it will be his glow that gives The Damned their pop success more than the mock-ups of Scabies and Sensible.

Vanian lifts The Damned out from Facey-fumbly or creaky-delic dilly dallying into that shapeless area that refers to the reasons inside and around ‘religion’ and the facts of life for the mohicuts and the blank teenybopper. There’s this broken grasping for both vivacity and a spiritual coherence, an identification with the ‘dark’ because the ‘light’ shines on only a deep futility.

“There’s nothing in the church these days for kids,” says Vanian, blandly. “So if you’re looking for faith, where can you go?”

What fascinates him about life in the night?

“I’ve always felt threatened by science. I’ve always felt that I was born in the wrong time. I like the balance between the old and the new. There’s a certain dignity about the past that seems to get lost.”

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How far does his interest in the ‘dark’ extend?

“I don’t do it just for appearance or as a pose. I like Gothic fiction, I love horror films, my house is almost totally Victorian. The perfect house for me would be an old chapel on the Yorkshire Moors. I just love dark windswept nights with the wind howling across the moors. The sort of thing people might find depressing. For me a bright sunlit day is depressing. I go for beauty in a different way to most people.”

Rat asks me if I get much out of Vanian. This and that. Rat tuts and rolls his eyes. In The Damned you get Sensible spitting at the audience, Roman flinging a sweaty towel around his shoulders and holding his pint aloft, Vanian flashing a crucifix into the spotlight and Scabies bouncing drumsticks into the audience. It’s all go in this circle — round and round in circus.

The Coach That Saw Genesis And Caravan play at a pub in West London ten years ago smooths the way towards London.

3.00pm: “Y’see,” sighs Scabies, “you’re not really alone very often when you’re doing this. Even if it’s just the old lady at home, she’s always there. And solitude is something you rarely, rarely reach. Sometimes, though, you can feel lonely when there’s loads of people around you. Like onstage you can play to 2,000 people and not know any of them, they’ll all be strangers. I’m not really a loner, ‘cos I’m too loud for that, but there are times when I just feel that I’ve got to get away from everything and everyone. Sometimes I just sit in the spare room and just think. Just determining things and breaking down reasons and trying to look at what the effects of my actions will be . . . I’ve learnt the power of thought!

“Y’know, I went through the reality of drinking a bottle of scotch a day and spending more money on the coke habit than I was earning. The one thing I’ve never really fallen for is heroin. I’ve taken it, but it’s like I’ve got two rules in life: one is never take heroin, and two, never commit suicide. Then no matter how down I get or how bad it is I go for a third rule that I’ve discovered, which is like work through it, slow down a bit, look hard at what you’re doing . . .”

Where would you be if not for The Damned?

“I’d probably be either a heroin addict or dead, or I’d be in prison. That’s what would have been happening if I’d stayed in my natural background. That’s what happened to a lot of the mates I was brought up with. I was lucky to get out.”

Is ‘survival’ one of the great things about The Damned?

“It’s there. We are survivors. Just the history of the band shows that. If ever there was a group that shouldn’t be around, it’s The Damned. The four members of the group were on a total self-destruct thing for the first two years. You’ve heard stories about Iggy Pop and Johnny Thunders, but I’ve seen things that’d put Keith Moon’s tales to sleep.”

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Did you enjoy it all?

“At the time it was great. What people forget is that we were just normal geezers. In my case, I was some yobbo who happened to be a drummer. I loved the drums as a kid, I liked the sound they made and I got a demented pleasure from all the blisters . . . and then I realised drums were a part of something, an integral part of music which previously I didn’t care much for.

“Then I started going to festivals and all that. I was only about 12. Off to the Isle Of Wight with me little tent. All the peace and love merchants used to look after me. We’ll look after you.

“Now you’re allowed to talk about things like that, whereas back in ’76 you weren’t allowed to have even heard of Led Zeppelin!”

What led to the deranged Damned drummer?

“Probably all of that. All the acid. I went through all that at quite an early age. I’m an old acid casualty I guess. There was that, and then there was the other side of like being a skinhead. You adapted to the situation. At school there were all the tough kids who were the skinheads and all the kids who got picked on and beaten up were the hippies. I cut me hair short, but I was into Hendrix not reggae. It was that survival thing. If you were surrounded by skinheads you didn’t go round saying peace and love.”

How were you drawn into punk?

“That was unique. That was the first thing where I wasn’t influenced by anything direct. I’d heard of MC5 and Iggy Pop, thought The New York Dolls were a load of wankers.

“Then I bumped into Bernie Rhodes and Brian James and Mick Jones, and the Pistols were playing at The Nashville once a week supporting Roger Ruskin Spear and things like that. And I was really poor but looking for something flashy and outrageous. I had holes in my jeans because I was always skint and I cut me hair off and couldn’t be bothered combing it.

“It all grew from there . . . but the attitude that was essential to punk was already there inside me. I got thrown out of groups ‘cos I only wanted to play fast songs, and I didn’t want to play things like ‘Brown Sugar‘.”

Were you just pissing about or did you feel it was some great force?

“I felt it was a great force. And it was essential. But what you did get was a load of pretentious statements from a load of jumped up little wankers making big claims about how they were going to change the world continuously, myself included.

“We were just geezers who had been dragged out, and all of a sudden inside six months you were fucking pop stars and everyone wanted to know you. I’d never even been to a nightclub until I was 19 and then that’s all I was doing. Made it! You heard all those legend in their own lunchtime stories about how Keith Moon could drink anything, take anything, and I suppose it was a case of if he can do it I can. I was taking pills without knowing what they were, drinking as much as possible. Always a beeline for the bar. It was like living up to that whole image thing I guess.”

Are you surprised you’ve emerged fairly sane?

“I think it’s only because the band split up for a year, and we split up because of the insanity. That year apart was actually good. When I left the band I was at the height of my worseness I suppose. I really needed help.”

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You were nasty?

“No, no, no. My ego was absolutely outrageous. I was beginning to believe that I was important, some kind of genius. In fact, people only smiled at me ‘cos they were intimidated by what I was doing. We took this year off, I formed a band called White Cats and the first gig had my name in big letters. Only 15 people turned up. I was used to 2,000. That put me in my place. I was just a drummer in a group and was only known in the context of The Damned and without that I’m a nothing.”

So The Damned just had to keep going?

“It was that very much. Captain had his group King which could have done quite well, but we were still always in touch. One day we both realised that things weren’t going too well with our groups, and Sensible said that he’d had it with King and how he was getting letters from Damned fans saying how great The Damned were. He said, There’s a few bob to be made here. So we went, Great, who are we going to get to sing?

“We got the obvious names like Gary Holton and things, and then I asked Sensible who’s the greatest frontman you’ve ever seen. He said, well, Vanian. I agreed. Vanian said alright and we got back together again.”

Damned forever, it seems.

Dave Vanian tells me that he has “complete faith in those two”.

11.55 pm: I tell Scabies how disappointed I was with the flatness of the show; the ritual of the rock gig leads to pure predictability, the audience don’t need to shout for any encore because they know they’re going to get it, the 50-odd kids queue passively for their autographs afterwards . . . The Coach knows all about the sameness . . .

“What can we do about it? I agree with you but I don’t know any other way that it can be done. It’s a reason we never made any political claims ‘cos we could never offer an alternative. The Clash never offered an alternative, they just stated the problems that were there . . . What’s the fucking good of that? It’s like saying there are some red curtains, it’s the same mundane thing, it’s stating the obvious and there’s no point.”

Rat Scabies builds himself up for a hefty rant.

“Unless you’ve got a solution to the problem and you yourself are part of the solution, then there’s no point. I want to see something constructive done.

“Look at fucking Paul McCartney, that man earns seven quid a second. Even while I’m saying this sentence he’s earned enough to pay my wages for a week. Why the fuck doesn’t he do something with the money intead of buying up Buddy Holly catalogues? Or why doesn’t he do something for like — I know it sounds corny — but why doesn’t he do something like build a youth club? Why doesn’t he buy electric guitars and instruments for kids? Why doesn’t he contribute something to hard-up schools? That man in the space of an hour could realistically help four schools out of trouble with what he’d earn.

“What does he do? He hires a video crew to go and film Black Uhuru at some dodgy gig ‘cos he can’t be bothered to go. It’s wrong, it’s injustice. I tell you if I was making loads of money and about to become a huge star, if I forget about people, OK I forget, but if someone reminded me I’d be the first to turn and say so you’re right. I’m not being anybody’s hero but I’d want to do something more than all these people . . .”

The Coach That’s Heard A Thousand Interviews murmurs to itself.

MIDNIGHT: The Coach That Never Sleeps reaches the outskirts of London. Rat is immersed in private thoughts, staring morosely out of the front window at the in-coming landmarks. He turns to me: “You see what I mean about how you can still be lonely even though there’s lots of people around you?” He pauses. “I’m still crawling out of all that mess. Just up there banging the drums, my job’s banging the drums.”

He returns to his rare solitude, perhaps to a richer world than the flat world of pop. The tape of The Doors pushes out into the night. “This is the end . . .”

Damn.