Sensible, be Damned:
A conversation with
the Captain
By BOB SHORTShare "We found Mike Mansfield very endearing. He was an absolute sweetie... as you can imagine. And very impersonatable. "
Captain Sensible then regales me with a better than passable impersonation of the host/producer/director of seventies pop programme Supersonic. "Camera ready. Stand by the Damned. Cue the Music. Neat Neat Neat. Take two."
The Captain is very excited. He's been placed on the kind of production line run of interviews the likes of which he tells me he hasn't known since a little single called "Happy Talk". He's not sure if I know the song he's talking about. I'm guessing he's just been through a series of interviews with people who wouldn't know what a seven inch single was if they tripped over one. I resist the temptation to say "what?".
Instead, I told him the first time I saw the Damned was on Supersonic. That show had managed to retain the brashness of British Glam whilst all around fell into the rut of serious music. It was an afternoon kid's show but, back in March of Seventy Seven, the kids got more than they bargained for. The Damned literally exploded onto the screen. Asked to mime, they went berserk. If they didn't have to worry about playing the right notes they could at least show off. Sensible jumped around until he tripped and fell flat on his face less than a minute into the song. The audience screamed with excitement. Finally, there was Damnedomania. So pleased with this crowd response, the Captain jumped around until the end of the next verse and fell over again. Coming home from school to see that on the television left my jaw on the floor for a week. The future had finally come true. Just cut my hair and call me punky.
"I'll tell you what," the Captain confides. "We were all out to grab more than our fair share of the limelight. But it came to my attention that I was just standing there on stage. Now there was a lot of attention on Dave Vanian but that was natural because he's the singer. But Rat Scabies (drums) and Brian James (guitar) were going for it to such a degree that they were getting photographed as much as Vanian was. I was getting fuck all. So to get my share of the limelight, I had to invent this character called Captain Sensible and it bloody well worked. If I can talk about him in the third person."
I have no problem with that. There are two kinds of performers you never want to be around. One comes from the Robin Williams school of "I can't turn myself off" and, trust me, you never want to get stuck in a lift with one of those bastards . The other kind comes from the "I don't believe in stage personas" school of thought and they will bore the living shit out of you six ways from Sunday. Thankfully, I've discovered that somewhere beneath the Captain Sensible suit is still good old Ray from Croydon.
"The Captain – you don't know what he'll do next. He's totally deranged. One minute he's quite coherent. He's a smart cookie. He knows a bit about politics and urban transport schemes and stuff. He knows about this and that. But then he can go off on a tangent. Fucking Phil Collins! That bloke! I was in a restaurant the other day and I just ordered and they put on a fucking Phil Collins best off. I went berserk. Bring me the manager. I'm not having it..."
"Sorry. That's the kind of thing I do when I'm writing. I imagine I've had five or six lagers and I just start cackling." The Captain has a website. He blogs. He Twitters. He Facebooks. If your Captain lust is not satiated by this interview, try: http://www.captainsensible.com/ for all your Captain needs.
I try to steer the interview back towards a more even keel. There are a lot of things I'd like to know about the Damned. After all, whilst they weren't the first punk band, they pretty much laid the template a thousand bands would copy. A sound born of grafting the Stooges' Raw Power to the New York Dolls and a layering of sixties pop references. In New York, the Dictators had pretty much done the same thing and in Sydney, I remember standing in local import store White Light Records as Rob Younger listened to "I feel alright" and favourably pointed out the similarities to Radio Birdman's version of the same song. But the Damned had gotten their act together incredibly quickly.
Claiming not to rehearse, the Sex Pistols had locked themselves away in a dingy room at the back of Tin Pan Alley and did the hard yards until they got it right. The Saints didn't just come out of nowhere. Those 1974 recordings of Brisbane's favourite sons sound more like Black Sabbath than anything you could call punk rock. The Ramones practiced and played for years before they "appeared out of nowhere". The Damned seemed to just form, start playing gigs and get a record contract in the space of four or five months seemingly on the strength of just wanting to do it.
"We rehearsed maybe once or twice a week in a little church hall in Paddington. We hired it off the vicar. We didn't tell him we were a punk group."
Well no-one knew what a punk group was then.
"That's true. But that's where the lyrics came from for a song called Noise Noise Noise. (It's 8 o'clock down the church hall, Enormous amplifiers 6 feet tall, gonna turn them up full blast, the vicar waves his arms and looks absurd, the noise drowns out his godly words and he can't get out too fast). When he came to lock up, the vicar would always look up to heaven because we were always a little tipsy by then. Vanian was always more interested in getting the church organ working rather than rehearsing. Even then, before we'd even played a gig, he had his eye on the Goth thing."
I sense there will be no revelations here. Perhaps there really is no revelation to be had. Could it really be that after a couple of misfires like the legendary non-band the London SS, the right four people just came together and thumped their way through Brian James' songbook to rapturous applause. Were these guys merely the luckiest bastards ever to do the right thing at the right time? Certainly, as 1976 stumbled to an end, there was a big three in punk. The Pistols. The Clash. The Damned. Everyone else was on the b-team. The Damned upped the ante with the first UK punk single and the first UK punk album with favourable reviews and responses all round.
How long could this charmed life continue? Well, even a cursory examination of UK music press practice reveals a need to fatten calves for slaughter and the Damned may not have helped their cause.
"We gave them a really hard time. They would send journalists out on the road with you and we'd set fire to them, we would urinate on them..."
Suddenly, the safety of a phone interview did not seem such a bad thing.
"We were a punk group. I personally would not have wanted to go out on tour with the Damned. The funny thing with all those young journalists is that they've now all made their names and are editors. So the thing compounds itself and these editors won't let their staff write about us. We're untouchable. But we're not the same people we were then. We were young and fairly aggressive. We drank a lot of alcohol and occasionally (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) some speed might have got taken. It's a fair cop but we were only behaving like punk rockers. You can't ask for your money back. The Damned were out of control. What did you expect? They're the fucking Damned."
There were, of course, other reasons for the backlash not least the release of the band's sophomore LP "Music For Pleasure". Looked at now, in the light of thirty five years of the Damned, it looks and sounds like a Damned album. In 1977, it went down... well poorly is about as kindly as I can say it. Much like Television's "Adventure", it's now hard to see what the problem actually was but there was a problem. Whereas no shop had been able to carry enough copies of the debut "Damned, Damned, Damned", "Music for Pleasure" sat in its box and gathered dust. Shops couldn't give copies away.
"The idea was to put together a more kind of psychedelic punk rock for the second album. We asked Syd Barrett, the ex-lead singer with Pink Floyd, if he'd do it and he said yes. Unfortunately, he wasn't quite well enough to attend the studio."
If the only two Pink Floyd songs you had ever heard were "See Emily Play" and "Arnold Layne", this would not have be as strange an idea as it would otherwise have seemed. Barrett's departure from Pink Floyd followed psychiatric problems caused or at least aggravated by drug use. Given his mental state, it is unlikely his presence would have proved any real advantage to the recordings.
"We were waiting for Syd to turn up when Nick Mason, the drummer with Pink Floyd, walks in. And you don't really want a member of Pink Floyd producing a punk album. They don't understand punk and why should they? Sure enough, he made a pig's ear of it. Maybe if you got it remixed by Nick Lowe (producer of the first LP), there's a good album in there. It's too clean for my tastes. I tell you what you should do with it. Put it on a record player with a speaker in the toilet. I don't mean in the actual fucking toilet. And mic up the speaker with all the reverb. That's the raw element the album really needs."
The follow up album, "Machine Gun Etiquette" was, however, a vindication.
"Yeah. That was what we were trying to do with 'Music for Pleasure'. That was the idea we had but we couldn't really go for it until Brian had dissolved the band and we got back together again without him. Brian's material is very pure. It's of a very rock and roll persuasion. He doesn't like psychedelic effects. He doesn't use flangers and phasers and backwards echoes and things like that. So we had to wait for 'Machine Gun Etiquette' to get what we want without any constraints. And we bloody went for it as well. It's a total departure. It's still got the punk spirit but it's also got elements of prog and psychedelia and all sorts of things. I think it's a marvellous mixture and it works really well."
"Machine Gun Etiquette" marks one or rock's major miracle resurrections. The original sound of the Damned had very much defined by Brian James. The band had largely been his vision playing his songs with his very distinctive guitar sound. With all that gone, the band had not merely survived (which is a difficult enough thing of itself). It had thrived and continues to thrive. There would be breakups and reformations. Sometimes Sensible was in the band and sometimes he wasn't. Rat Scabies was sometimes in the band and sometimes he wasn't. Dave Vanian remained vocalist but his style changed from punk shouter to gothic crooner. The band veered further towards psychedelia, adding straight pop and music hall to the mix. Whenever you thought the band was finished a new album would appear and it would always be better than merely acceptable. "The Black Album", "Strawberries", "Phantasmagoria" and all the way up to 2008's "So, who's Paranoid" this level of quality has continued. Despite the differences in personnel and styles, if you place any of these discs on a turntable, you'll point these discs out immediately as being by the Damned. So what is it that makes a Damned record?
"Crikey. I don't know. It's a spirit I suppose. We just come together and suddenly the most innocuous of songs suddenly takes on a darkness that wasn't there in the demo stage. It's true. There's a movie kind of dark vibe to even the most jaunty pop piece I might write. In the Damned's hands, they can take on a sarcastic or a black humour kind of a thing. I don't know what it is. Maybe one of the band has sold their soul to the devil or something. There have certainly been accusations..."
The Damned are coming to Australia in January as part of their 35th Anniversary World Tour. Given the appalling line-up of this year's Big Day Out, it seems odd that promoters failed to link the band in. Still, seeing the Damned in medium sized venues promises to be memorable. What are we likely to see?
"Probably a better performance than people are expecting. We pretty much are playing the best music of our careers – if you can call it a career."
That could well be the case if reviews of recent shows are anything to go by. What material will you be drawing upon?
"We'll probably go heavy on 'Damned Damned Damned' and 'The Black Album' because that's what we've been playing and really enjoy doing during the last few months. It's really refreshed the set list for us. To play that stuff on the first album is really challenging because it's so frenetic and fast. Sometimes I get into the middle of a song – and they're short songs – and I don't know what key the solo is in. You've got a few seconds to get your point over and throw in as many notes as possible and, if you fuck up, you've blown your chance.
'The Black Album' is challenging in a different way with all its harmonies. You find yourself doing two or three things at the same time. Well, I do. Plus keeping an eye on the girls in the front row. And making sure roadies aren't drinking my beers. Don't think I don't know that goes on."
But can we expect another great Damned LP?
"I think, if we ever make another album, it'll be another change in direction. I can see us going down a dark kind of film soundtracky area."
That'll be interesting. The last one ("So, who's Paranoid") was very poppy.
"Yes it was. I don't think we'll do that again. What we were trying to do was a garage punk thing like The Chocolate Watchband, The Seeds and the Strawberry Alarm Clock. That's where punk comes from for me. I just like slightly inept garage pop. There something wonderful about it. It doesn't have to be perfect.
This is why I don't listen to a lot of rock music. I prefer music to have flaws. It shouldn't be perfect. It shouldn't be clinical and state of the art and all cleaned up with the drums timed to be like drum machines. Music should be raw and exciting but still have a tune."I couldn't have said it better myself.
Australian Tour, 2012
THU 19 JAN – HI FI, BRISBANE.
FRI 20 JAN – BILLBOARD, MELBOURNE.
SAT 21 JAN – METRO THEATRE, SYDNEY
SUN 22 JAN – THE CAPITOL, PERTH.From http://www.selecttouring.com.au
