Under a railway arch in Shepherd’s Bush, the final manoeuvre in original British punk rock is being plotted, at extreme volume. Forty-six years on from the infamous summer of 1976, the founding members of The Damned – Dave Vanian, Rat Scabies, Captain Sensible and Brian James – are preparing to make an implausible comeback, with a run of five UK gigs beginning tomorrow at Hammersmith Apollo. Implausible, because they’d always intimated that certain members hated each other.

Back when that foul-mouthed musical genre was forged by dissatisfied teenagers amid spiralling temperatures and political chaos, there were three main perpetrators: the Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned.

Over the years, there have been various reunions, most notably by the Sex Pistols, but a recent bust-up between Johnny “Rotten” Lydon and the others over Danny Boyle’s Disney miniseries, Pistol, surely means that only the four gentlemen of pensionable age blasting away across the room from me are left to carry the torch.

“Cor, what a load of ’orrible noise!” says their mischievous bassist, Captain Sensible, emerging from the rehearsal space after the reunited quartet have blasted through New Rose. “You don’t get that off The Stranglers now, do you?

The Damned were often cast as punk’s jokers, less explicitly political, but every bit as influential on subsequent generations. Yet there’s a strong sense that they never got their dues. 

At the time, it was they who initially defined the emerging sound, releasing both UK punk’s first single, New Rose, in October ’76, and its exciting first LP, Damned Damned Damned, the following year. They also were the first to tour widely, and, in February ‘78, the first to fall apart in disillusion, after their hastily released second album.

Unlike the others, The Damned has existed in various line-ups ever since, but that first configuration – often cited as a band with four frontmen – has only once regrouped, in 1991, with apparently fatal consequences: an American jaunt ended prematurely with Sensible and guitarist Brian James grappling down the back stairs of a venue, and everyone blaming drummer/co-manager Rat Scabies for financial irregularities.

As Sensible told me in ’02, “I’d lay a crisp £50 note on the table against anyone ever getting those four members of The Damned together in one room again.” “Well, you might get them all in,” added Vanian, “but you definitely wouldn’t get all four out alive.”

So, when these latest shows were announced two years ago, punk fans the world over scrambled for tickets. Subsequent postponements due to the pandemic were a matter for concern: would they hold together long enough for this one last hurrah?

Today, however, I’m pleased to report that the mood in Shepherd’s Bush is amicable. As I arrive, members drift in and out for a breather or a cigarette, but rarely all at once. “We all deserve a bloody good payday,” reasons Sensible, 68, sporting a gaudy Hawaiian shirt. “I mean, we actually deserve medals for surviving the punk years, but I’ll settle for the cash.”

If Sensible (real name: Ray Burns) is the Damned’s most identifiable member, their original driving force was James, who initially corralled the misfit teens into his band. 

James, now 67, says he’d started a pre-punk group called Bastard, but around Christmas ’75, saw an ad in Melody Maker looking for a guitarist and drummer. “I went along, and it was Mick Jones [later, The Clash’s lead guitarist] and Tony James [Generation X], getting something together,” he says. “One day, Rat came down, and me and him really connected, but the other two weren’t that keen on his look, so me and Rat shot off and did The Damned, with no uniform necessary.”

Incredibly, Scabies (real name Chris Millar) had been doing panto – drumming in the orchestra pit for a production of Puss in Boots in Grays, Essex. Scabies knew Sensible from Croydon’s Fairfield Halls, where the pair were janitors, cleaning the venue’s toilets, and they soon unearthed Dave Vanian (né Lett), a gravedigger from Hemel Hempstead, who’d shuttle in from the suburbs in his own vintage hearse. 

“Brian chose four people with big personalities, which was why it was so volatile,” says Sensible. “We were always trying to upstage each other. I wanted more than my share of the limelight – I was only the bass player, but I wasn’t going to let that stand in the way!”

Where their friends in the Sex Pistols and The Clash were kept in London by their managers – “you’ve got to remember,” says James, “for them, it was all about flogging clothes on the King’s Road” – The Damned ventured out far and wide, to pubs and colleges, spreading the word about punk.

By November 1976, The Damned were billed second on the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy”  tour, but that “historic” jaunt turned into a farce after the Pistols appeared on ITV’s Bill Grundy Show, drunk and abusive, causing tabloid hysteria. As the scandal escalated and gigs were banned around the country, The Damned wanted no part of it – they wanted to play – and were soon bumped off the bill.

“It was all these old jealousies,” says Scabies, “because Malcolm and Bernie had wanted me and Brian to do stuff with them, and they held a grudge because we took another route.” Scabies, the firebrand of yore, now 67, sighs gently. “You know how it is: the pioneers get the arrows, the settlers get the gold.”

By autumn ’77, they were exhausted. “When you’ve got four forceful personalities,” says James, “you can end up with four chiefs and no Indians. We were hammering it, drinking a lot, doing a few drugs. Something had to blow: Rat left and then I split the band up, because it wasn’t the same without him. What can you do? No regrets, that’s for sure – never!”

James’ story from here on, however, wasn’t entirely happy. Initially, he landed his dream job as guitarist in Iggy Pop’s touring band, but by the early ’90s, at a loose end after the Lords split up, he was grateful for the royalties when Gun N’ Roses covered New Rose.

Vanian, the quiet peacemaker, now 66, confesses that he’s been trying to reconvene this Damned line-up for 10 years, chiefly for James’s benefit, but it apparently took a few years for Sensible to acquiesce. 

So, Captain, what changed? “We got old, I suppose,” he shrugs. “Any animosity that was there in the past, it becomes irrelevant really. Life is too short to harbour grudges where you can’t even remember what they were about.” 

Since the reunion announcement, James and Scabies have been rehearsing together separately, so as not to jeopardise the four-way détente too early, but according to Scabies, James recently had an operation on his lungs. While in hospital, he caught Covid, and it’s almost palpable in the atmosphere at Shepherd’s Bush that this brush with mortality has redoubled all four Damned members’ resolve to leave all hatchets buried.

As I leave their rehearsal space, James, straggly grey hair flowing from beneath his trilby, leads the charge into See Her Tonight at an almost indecent velocity for men of their vintage. If the truce holds, a “died and gone to heaven”  experience beckons, for punk fans of all ages.

“The Damned are the last ones to survive – who’d have thought it?” concludes Sensible, before adding with affection, “Without Brian, I don’t know what I’d be doing with my life now – maybe still cleaning toilets…”

---

The Damned play tomorrow and Saturday at Eventim Apollo, November 3 in Manchester, Nov 4 in Glasgow and Nov 5 in Birmingham. Last remaining tickets available through