Ok, so for no reason whatsoever I’ve been catching up on a lot of ’77-era UK punk recently. Obviously there’s an absolute ton of more recent/relevant music that I’d promised myself I’d get around to writing up for the blog, but the hell with it, I’m grabbing bits of writing time as & when I can at the moment, and today I feel like talking about The Damned.

Traditionally of course, I’ve always been a solid American partisan when it comes to the tedious transatlantic punk debate. I’ve never thought the ‘Pistols and The Clash were worth a damn (their sole beneficial effect being to create an identifiable market/aesthetic that allowed thousands of much better bands to thrive), and beyond that what do I care what a bunch of spit-drenched oiks from, I dunno, Guildford or somewhere have to say on the matter when I’ve got the whole wonderful axis of Ramones/Velvets/Stooges/Dolls/PSG/Huskers/Flag/Threat/Minutemen/Replacements/Teenage Jesus/Zeros/Crime-etc-etc-etc to explore forever?

Obviously there ARE plenty of fun and/or interesting British bands from that era that I’ve always been into, but if I start running of those down here this will be a very long and dull post, and would The Damned stand for that? Hell NO! Point is, a lot of the big names in UK punk are still pretty much unknown to me, and, given my current preference for everything loud, fast and stupid, 2010 is proving a good opportunity to rectify that. Now let’s get on with it….

As a cultural presence, The Damned have always really bugged me.

For some reason they always seemed to be turning up on TV. Whenever it was time for the BBC to dig up the ol’ anglocentric history of punk thing for another go round, there they were clowning around on the Old Grey Whistle Test, making a mess, acting like louts and playing straight into the hands of all the musos who wanted to write off punk as a gimmicky bunch of crap. And then they’d always drag out Captain Sensible for a ‘quirky’ interview segment where he’d talk a bunch of arse about how they single-handedly destroyed the evil hegemony of two hour drum solos that we’re told ALL OTHER MUSIC consisted of in 1975 (I swear every time they do one of these documentaries, the drum solos get longer).

I remember hearing “Smash It Up” on the radio as a teenager, and even at age 16 thinking “what a stupid song – I bet these guys’ fans are a bunch of morons”. I guess I must have heard “New Rose” a bunch of times, but it never really grabbed me the way a big, rousing punk tune should – always sounded pretty weird and crappy and amelodic – b-team stuff by a buncha chancers who happened to be in the right place at the right time, or so I thought. None of the clear intent or fun or sense of purpose or blazing kick-assitude of The Ramones or Dead Kennedys or The MC5 here – just a tinny, raucous mess. Whatever.

As I’m finally starting to appreciate though, this is something like the best tinny, raucous mess ever; a tinny, raucous mess for the ages! The Damned’s songs do business like frantic series of exclamation points and punctuation outbursts, the musical equivalent of “!!!$&”£$>!#:@!!!!” in a cartoon speech bubble, the sound of a bunch of overgrown schoolboys hurtling forward trying to express something desperately important but without a clue in hell how to do it – a hilarious, confounding, stupid, hyperkinetic mess, beating it’s head against the wall and laughing.

Listening to “New Rose” with fresh ears, what a startling and mysterious thing it is. Perhaps the only record I’ve ever heard that manages to be unnervingly scary and brooding whilst also powering full steam ahead in cheerful 4/4 idiot rock mode. The way that that weird, top-heavy riff sorta keeps *almost* turning into a straight up Heartbreakers boogie, but keeps pulling back in the last few notes as the singing starts, perpetually frustrating itself and sabotaging the motorik-punk pleasure principle (that’s probably why I never liked it much back in the day). “I GOT A FEELING INSIDE OF ME / IT’S DARK AND STRANGE LIKE THE STORMY SEA!” Good grief, I know the singer’s a bit of a goth and everything, but what were these guys ON? It’s like The Damned tried to record a big, up-tempo love song that everyone would love as their first single… and when they listened back, it had all gone horribly wrong, turned into pimply hormonal carnage, haunted by the ghosts of Black Sabbath.

The whole existence of The Damned seems like a horrible, glorious mistake. I mean, they look like a bunch of random, poorly conceived characters that Hanna Barbara might have thrown together for a failed ‘punk’ update of Scooby Doo. They make ugly, ham-fisted, beserk music that tries to be enjoyable, high energy rock n’ roll and KINDA succeeds, but basically ends up sounding like an explosion in a confused 17 year old boy’s head. They’re quite famous, but nobody’s ever gonna write a poncey book about how they were influenced by situationism. The Damned never were and never will be cool. How can you not love ‘em?

“Damned Damned Damned” is an absolute riot from start to finish – Brian James’ guitar-playing seems to lunge around in a constant temper tantrum as he tries to throw in ‘chops’ to assert his musician-who-can-play status at every opportunity, wrestling all the while with an amp set up like a giant, farting trash compactor, stumbling into moments of beautiful brutality than inadvertently invent Greg Ginn three or four years early. Rat Scabies’ drumming sounds like a constant, rolling headache that almost buries the rest of the band, and I still don’t know WHERE Dave Vanian is coming from most of the time.

He’s a very strange frontman. I’m not sure where he got the idea from that he’d like to be the singer in a band, but he doesn’t seem to like being the centre of attention much. He mumbles through “Born To Kill” sounding like he’d rather just have a bit of a snooze whilst the rest of the group go off like human fireworks behind him, and somehow he gets away with it. He could be singing about buying shoes on half these songs, or going to the cinema, or stalking virgins through the streets at midnight – I have no idea, but whatever he’s on about it all fades into irrelevance by the time the rest of the band burst in for a yelped, incoherent chorus. The whole album is wild anyhow, and I’m ashamed that I’d not bothered listening to it until now.

The other song on there I really like is “See Her Tonight” – you know the one; “SHE’S SO COOL!!! I’M GONNA SEE HER TONIGHT!!!” – a song so breathlessly enthusiastic it almost loses it’s grip on musical syntax altogether and just explodes into a monkey-like shriek of excitement. Listening to it, I imagine the male protagonist as some supremely dorky teenage amalgam of all the members of The Damned, bouncing off the walls of his bedroom in anticipation. ‘HER’ I imagine being a slightly older, more sophisticated girl, like an arts graduate or a photographer or something, who maybe led him on a bit cos he seemed like a goofy kid who’d be fun to have around, but now deeply regrets it as she sits there trying to have a smoke and listen to Public Image as he literally hops around in front of her wearing a dirty raincoat, army boots, crazy new wave sunglasses and, like, Bermuda shorts or something, blathering on relentlessly, overjoyed by the fact that he’s ACTUALLY HAVING A (one-sided) CONVERSATION with this SMART, COOL LADY!

What a great song – it makes me laugh out loud whilst walking down the street. What a great band – it sounds like they had no idea what they were doing but they just fucking DID IT, and it doesn’t get much more punk rock than that.

Labels: punk rock, The Damned