English punk rock band The Damned set a template for many bands to follow. Their ability to entertain and deliver raw, energetic music that crossed genres soon set them on a path to success. Following a recent tour here, and subsequent dates at large venues throughout the world, their return tour of New Zealand and the East Coast of Australia is coined ‘Final Damnation 50’. Fan can expect to hear two set lists, cramming in as many songs from their vast discography as stage time allows.
The lineup now features three original members: vocalist Dave Vanian, drummer Rat Scabies, and legendary guitarist Captain Sensible. They are joined by long serving members Paul Gray on bass and Monty Oxymoron on keyboards. The five piece has put together a set list that will enthuse punk, goth and alternative music fans alike which is unlikely to be choreographed in any way. We caught up with the one and only Captain Sensible to discuss the tour and his legacy with The Damned.
Most recent release: Not Like Everybody Else [label: earMusic]
Tour Link: https://thephoenix.au/the-damned-2026/
You’re coming back to Australia. It’ll be warm when you get here.
Yeah, the old bones can’t take the cold these days.
It’s a nice touch with the venue in Sydney being the Opera House.
Yeah, it’s clearly anarchic, isn’t it, and punk rock, because we haven’t toned down the act. We’re still the same people. But all those years ago, we were miles apart from any prestigious venue. The Royal Albert Hall sent us a letter: a very snotty one saying, ‘you’re not the sort of band we want at our beautiful venue.’ I think it’s kind of funny, really.
Yeah, a lot of people would be surprised that The Damned is playing at the Opera House.
Yeah, so they’ve got plenty of booze in the dressing room.
You’ve put out a lot of albums, and been in and out of the band. So, is arranging a set list this time going to be a struggle to satisfy yourself and the hardcore fans?
Yeah, it’s an absolute nightmare. To crown 50 years into a couple of hours is near impossible, isn’t it? I mean, you want everyone to kind of hear their favourite tune. But, it’s just very difficult because there’s three bands in the band. There’s a garage punk band, there’s a psychedelic band, and, there’s a goth band. So, you could write three incredibly different setlists. I remember sometimes that we’d look at the audience outside the venue trying to gauge what sort of crowd it was, and whether it was a mosh pit crowd or the dark kind of goth brigade. So, sometimes we hand out pages of A4 to the people queuing outside and ask them to write their own setlists, and we pull the ideas together and push you that way. Yeah, it’s tough.
Yeah, there’s always someone that’s going to say, “Oh, you didn’t play this or you truncated a song.”
Yeah, I just read a biography of the Kinks. I love the Kinks and these kind of raunchy bands from the late ’60s and early ’70s. The Kinks would deliberately not play their latest hit on stage, you know, or the most popular song. They would do it deliberately as a ‘fuck you’ to the audience. I mean, that’s pretty anarchic, isn’t it, really? It’d be rude. They were quite a wild band, actually, and they used to have punch-ups on the stage, the same as we did.
Yeah, and then they got covered by band Van Halen [‘You Really Got Me’] of all things.
Yeah, it’s true. We got covered [‘New Rose’] by that dreadful, stodgy heavy rock band, Guns ‘N Roses.
One song your band is very well known for is ‘Eloise’, and that was a cover as well. You weren’t part of the band when it happened.
Yeah, I mean, the music you listen to when you’re young, it stays with you for the rest of your life, really. I think for all of us, sadly, the current generation is going to be listening to Taylor Swift when they’re 70 years old. I mean, there’s not much joy in that, is there? But no, we love these old tunes and we give them a new lease of life or just to please ourselves, really.
Yeah, that makes sense. You’ve also got some interesting guitars that you kick around with. Obviously, you’ve got your SG and PRS. Are there any kind of rarities that you’ve collected over the years that are oddball guitars? Ones that might look bad but sound great?
Ha, well, funny you should say that, I don’t collect guitars. I’ve got about 12, and that’s it.
I know other bleeding musos who’ve got hundreds, which is a bit excessive. All of the guitars I’ve got, I play at some point: at home or, on stage, or whatever. I mean, one of my favourites is the ultimate travel guitar. It’s a Hohner G3T, and it is one of these horrible looking headless things. I kind of Steinberger copy, but it’s actually better than a Steinberger, and you can actually fit it in a suitcase. I’ve got one [Stratocaster style] that a bloke in Japan made for me. I don’t know what that says on the headstock, and he makes guitars for session guys. It is a really quite posh guitar. Anyway, that’s nice, thank you, Mr. Tamari.
It’s a very nice, flashy red finish as well, which probably goes really well on stage.
Well, funnily enough, I don’t like posh looking guitars, for stage. I think the ones I use are the kind of budget end of the Gibson range. They’re called an SG standard 60’s tribute and it does not have that high gloss lacquer finish. So, it’s just a red stain and it takes any battle scars it gets on stage or on the road. You see them in the, in the bodywork and I like that, you know, I like my guitars to look a bit rough and ready. Yeah, so it’s been gigged.
Have you adopted the digital age of late, for amplification?
My guitar tech, Shauno said, ‘well, instead of taking all this heavy gear,’ well, yeah he would say this, wouldn’t he? Anyway, ‘instead of taking all this heavy gear, you know, when we’re doing a gig in Madrid or somewhere, why don’t you get one those funky Kemper profilers, and you can put your own guitar sound in there, take it wherever you want, and it won’t break your back.’ So, I bought one, and we put the sound of the Marshall and the Mesa Boogie amplifiers into it. I did one gig with it, and I got rid of it the next day. It was bloody awful. Because I use in-ear monitors, I can really hear the tone of the guitar, and I could hear this kind of high-end digital noise. I just couldn’t dial it out my mix, and it wasn’t the warm kind of oomph that you get from a proper valve amp. I’m old and I would say that, and you didn’t see people who know a lot about sounds doing a blindfold test not being able to tell the difference. But it didn’t feel right for me, so I got rid of it. The amplifiers I’m using are 25 years old. We wrap them in a huge duvet and put that in a metal suitcase, then defy the baggage handlers to destroy it. You know, because they’ll give it a good go, that’s for sure.
The backing vocals are a feature for all band members. Is that something that you think is essential to making sure that a song really carries to an audience?
Yeah, Dave is a phenomenal singer. He’s chosen to be the singer of The Damned on his looks but, boy, can he sing, we’re very lucky to have him. The rest of us, our vocals are kind of a bit random. So, when you say, backing vocals, they’re not what you call harmonies. We’re not Crosby, Stills and Nash. It’s a punk rock approximation of what backing vocals are. It sounds good though. I think your live music should be, well, live, and dangerous, and occasionally, it should mess up. It should go wrong, because you don’t want that to polish. You know, well, I don’t anyway, I don’t want to see a band playing the same thing every night, and saying the same old nonsense between the songs. We never say the same stuff from one night to the next. It’s always kind of organic and a choice comment or quip from a member of the audience can run through the whole show, you know, we’ll pick them out and ask, ‘was that okay for you? Was that an improvement?’ I like the banter between the audience and the stage. We’re not playing huge venues, but hopefully you can still hear what people shout at us. Even if it’s, you know, ‘I want my money back, or, they’re saying, ‘Fuck off!’
What are your recollections of the 80s given that you went into a post-punk solo career?
Yeah, that was an incredible time. I was writing songs for The Damned and sometimes when you sit down with a guitar, you start off trying to put a wild riff together and you end up with something quite completely inappropriate that sounds like The Carpenters or Abba. So, I ended up with a bunch of cassettes of demos that were obviously rejected by the band. I didn’t know what to do with them and I met this bloke [Tony Mansfield] who was in another band called New Musik, and they just had a hit with a song called “Living by Numbers.” He said, ‘Now, Captain, I’ll play these to my manager and see what he can do.’ The manager went off and got a record deal within a couple of days and the next thing you know, I’m on bloody Top of the Pops doing my solo stuff. It was just so quick, and I was driving around in limousines for three years, being invited to swanky parties with models. Ha-ha, and yeah, it was quite fun.
London had a lot of interacting with different styled bands such as The Sex Pistols, XTC, Motörhead and Siouxsie and the Banshees. All that music was a melding of ideas and people were evidently open to new music.I can only speak for us but we went on a musical adventure. Well, we made the first album Damned Damned Damned, which is kind of gnarled and raw: it’s just us playing our set list with a minimum of overdubs, you know, all bashed out in a small room, in a demo studio, in fact. It’s not polished or well recorded but it is a great punk album. After that, we just went off on this musical adventure which went through goth and psychedelia, and it was an unwritten rule that we didn’t like to repeat ourselves. Some bands do, and they keep their sound and it’s consistent. I think that would be boring, really. So, we don’t do boring stuff. There’s punk rock in there, but it’s mixed with goth, psychedelia, and garage rock. We even did a Motown track called ‘Sonar Deceit’ [Evil Spirits]. I mean, that’s really fun. I love the Motown beat, you know.
Did you cross paths with bands like The Stranglers during 1982, when your Strawberries was around?
Oh, yeah. I mean, we rubbed shoulders with all those people, yeah. I can tell you some stories. I mean, there are some wacky people involved in those early punk rock bands from London. I mean, we were outcasts. We didn’t fit in with the society or the fashions of the time. I mean, if you walked down the road in London in 1976, wearing drainpipe jeans and with a a leather jacket on, and short hair, and a sneer on your face, the whole pub would turn out and chase you down the road with billiard cues. The newspapers were saying stuff like, well, ‘this punk rock menace,’ and, ‘it’s the end of civilisation as we know it,’ and all this sort of stuff. So, I mean, you really took your life in your hands if you were walking around dressed like that. So, you had to be a maniac or deranged to want to do that. So, all the people who started these bands in London, sort of The Strangler, The Clash, and so on, they were all outcasts, and they were quite wacky people. I loved meeting people like Mick Jones and Jean-Jacques Burnel. They’ve all got stories to tell, and generally, they’re fun people.
Strawberries was an album where you started to introduce a bit more instrumentation. You put in some cello, sitar, brass, mellotron – there’s all sorts of stuff, and even an unreleased track [‘Fun Factory’] with Robert Fripp.
Well, punk rock is still popular in the UK, in a kind of fringe way. But they do this festival called Rebellion every year in Blackpool, which is a huge affair these days. All the punk groups that came after us were influenced by punk rock. But we were not because there wasn’t any punk rock before us, unless you count the garage music of the late 60’s with The Seeds, Electric Prunes and people like that. So, we were listening to things like King Crimson and Soft Machine, and Kraut rock bands like Neu!, Faust, and I used to like Traffic and Brian Auger, and still do. These are the things that I was listening to, that influenced me. So, I think that the more interesting punk rock bands from London are the ones that were not necessarily influenced by punk rock. They brought loads of interesting influences to their sound. Look at what John Lydon is doing with PiL at the moment. We did a festival with them the other day and they were absolutely fantastic, with Lu Edmonds on bouzouki, or whatever he was playing. They’re really inventive and he’s a Neu! fan as well, so he knows a thing or two about Kraut rock.
So, I can only imagine at the time that if people got wind of The Damned working with Robert Fripp ,the punk purists and prog purists would be up in arms.
Yeah, when we were recording, the album called Strawberries, we didn’t have a title for it, and we thought, how is this going to be received by the punk rock press? I think Rat Scabies asked, ‘would it be like giving strawberries to a fucking pig?’ So, that’s where the title came from, uh, it was abbreviated, of course. So, the album cover was us feeding strawberries to a pig. The pig had a good time during that photo session. The thing with Robert Fripp : we were doing a TV programme with his band, I think. I don’t think it was King Crimson, it might have been League of Crafty Guitarists or whatever he was calling it. We were doing a TV show in Switzerland, I think it was, and we all got raucously drunk in the green room. We were having such fun with Fripp, because he’s quite a fun bloke. It continued on the plane home since we were on the same flight as him, drinking our way back to the UK, and we said, ‘Come and join with us at the Hammersmith Odeon,’ and he said, ‘Don’t worry, boys, I’ll be there,’ in his West Country accent. Sure enough, he did turn up with his guitar, you know, and, we had a jam, and it was fantastic. So, we said, ‘well, we’re doing a recording session in a couple of days. Why don’t you come for that?’ and he did. Can you believe it? He brought his guitar synth and he played this incredible synth sound on this track called ‘Fun Factory’, and it was just incredible what he did. It really embellished the song beautifully, which is quite good song as well. Yeah, it’s not so well known as some of our stuff but my advice is to go on YouTube. It’s probably on there. Yeah, so listen to what Fripp does on this song called ‘Fun Factory’.
That’s great. Are there any solo songs that you’re able to fit into this set list?
Well, we’re trying to fit 50 years of The Damned into the set list, I don’t think there is any room for my old shit. If I did my own gig, it’d be difficult to cram my stuff in, because when you get to a certain age, you’ve probably been involved with quite a lot of music. If somebody shouts out ‘Wot’ from the audience, Mr. Vanian will sometimes looks across the stage at me and go, ‘Go on then, by public demand, Captain.’ So, I give it a couple of verses of that tune, which is funny seeing in The Damned playing a rap song.
Is that when people start throwing sunglasses at you?
Yeah, I do get that, and it is very nice of them. I mean, we make the mistake of asking them to throw money once and instead of notes, they threw coins. So, we didn’t do that again.
Is there a particular album or song by The Damned that most resonates with you after all these years?
Well, yeah, we sequence our albums in these long brainstorming sessions and they’re painstaking painstakingly sequenced for people to listen to our music as a whole piece, from start to finish. I know the Spotify generation thinks differently, but we put a lot of working on that. So, our first album flows well as a kind of punk rock album and Jimmy Page liked so we must have been doing something right. He comes to see us play, by the way, which is nice. We were influenced by them as well; you can’t be that early Led Zeppelin. I think it’s gloriously gnarled, and that was Brian’s [James – late co-founding guitarist] album. Machine Gun Etiquette was a band collaboration when Brian departed the band and went off to do Lords of the New Church. That album was our kind of punk and psychedelic mix up, and I think it works really well. Dave then started to write really dark material, and that became The Black Album, and that flows really well. I like some of the later stuff that we cannot cram into the set, and I don’t know how many people have aware of lately. There’s a song called ‘Dark Asteroid’ on a recent album [So, Who’s Paranoid?], and the song lasts 14 minutes. It’s our tribute to Syd Barrett and that period of music, and we mix up with a bit of a Kraut rock; it’s incredible, wild, freak out jam session, that’s ‘Dark Asteroid’. That’s my, that’s my advice. Listen to that one.
What was it like being on The Young Ones TV show when it was breaking? Bands were added to it to get the variety programming budget at the BBC.
Yeah, we were, we were fans of The Young Ones; it was an anarchic TV. We went along to the recordings of the programme and they were doing it live. That the show was being filmed live. We stood there, we did our bit and then everybody got invited down to an Indian restaurant afterwards. We were filming in the afternoon, and the restaurant was booked for six or seven o’clock in the evening. By then, we were roaring drunk. As you can imagine, we’ve been sitting around all afternoon being plied with booze by the production crew. By the time we got to the Indian restaurant, I mean, wow, we were seeming and I was never one to kind of deny the opportunity for a bit of debauchery. Then one of The Young Ones who weren’t drunk, I mean, they, they’ve been doing that, they were actors, and comedians. But they weren’t drunk, anarchic punk rockers, so one of them said, ‘oh, Captain’s on good form. Why doesn’t he jump on the table and give us a song?’, which, of course, I did. I was kicking the curry all over the place. They all got covered with food, and we got thrown out of the restaurant. So, I learned something from that, you know. What you see on the screen isn’t always…they weren’t reckless maniacs. We were, and I ruined everyone’s dinner but you know, I’m rocking it. Ha-ha.
Thanks very much for having a chat. We will see you in September.
Cannot wait. It’s going to be awesome. Thank you. Cheers. Nice one.