‘There isn’t one songwriter, and so the flavour of the band is always going to change,” says Dave Vanian, reflecting on 50 years of the group of which he has been the sole constant member, the Damned. “Captain Sensible is a great fan of syrupy pop music and prog and glam rock. So his writing is very poppy, melodic and quite wonderful. My writing is more melodramatic, more theatrical. And Rat Scabies was a mod who really loved bands like the Who. That melting pot would either not work at all, or be an absolute firecracker.” As the history of the Damned attests, it has, on occasion, been both.
There have been three break-ups: in the late 70s, late 80s and early 90s; Sensible and Scabies have had repeated spells out of the band; Scabies only started working with them again in 2022, after 27 years away. “The rift was really between him and Captain,” says Vanian, though at one time or another, it seems as though each of the three principals has been in a relationship-ending rage with one or both of the others.
In 1977, Scabies was so sick of the others he left the band while on tour in France, later to be replaced by the future Culture Club drummer Jon Moss. Then the founding guitarist and songwriter Brian James split the band in 1978, only for the other three to reunite. In the 80s, the others were unhappy at Captain Sensible’s chart-topping parallel solo career, which led to him in turn leaving the band and having a breakdown. Vanian himself considered his friendship with Scabies over after the drummer licensed the release of the Not of This Earth album in 1995 against Vanian’s wishes. But the trio are now reunited, releasing a new album and gearing up to mark their half-century with a gig at Wembley Arena.
The Damned’s history, in fact, is so convoluted it’s actually done them harm. Where everyone understands who and what their contemporaries the Sex Pistols and the Clash were, it’s much harder with the Damned. They released the UK’s first punk single, New Rose, before diverting to psychedelic pop, but to many listeners they’re one of the definitive goth bands. Their 13 studio albums are spread between nine labels, so there’s never been the career-spanning reissue programme a band of their status might expect. That hasn’t stopped anyone and everyone from trying to take their piece of the Damned: there are also 23 live albums of varying degrees of quality, and a preposterous 30 compilations. “It’s all out of our control,” Scabies says. “We signed those pieces of paper, and we never really thought about the consequences.”
Then there’s the matter of the 33 people who have played with the Damned. But these days, regardless of the long service of the other band members, the idea of the Damned is once again fixed as Vanian, Sensible, Scabies. And, at last, they all seem to be getting on.
“They’re genuinely funny blokes,” says Captain Sensible. “They’re very amusing to travel with. No one knows what Dave Vanian is really like, but he does very good impersonations from Carry On and On the Buses. And Rat has his ongoing hunt for the holy grail.” He really does, as documented in the book Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail: “Worth a read,” Sensible says. If you search, YouTube even has a trailer for a film about his hunt, called Rat Scabies: Grailhunter. “You should hear about the exploits he gets up to in the south of France with a shovel in the dead of night,” Sensible says. “Well, I won’t go into it.”
As for the old enmities? A proposed sit-down with the three of them became individual video calls with Scabies and Sensible, before a weeks-long wait for a separate chat with Vanian. But relations are solid. “I didn’t want us standing around a grave saying, ‘We should have done that while we had the chance,’” Scabies says of their reunion. “Life’s too short. And it was quite a relief to be able to say, ‘You know what? It’s all water under the bridge. They say, ‘Forgive and forget,’ and we’ve benefited from that, for sure.”
* * *
When the Damned began, punk didn’t even exist as a word. Brian Robertson, Chris Millar, Ray Burns and David Lett were part of the original tiny coterie of punks, coming together through the same array of half-formed bands as the other early punk groups did. Robertson became Brian James, to avoid confusion with Thin Lizzy’s guitarist, Lett became Dave Vanian (as in Transyl-), Millar became Rat Scabies, because he looked like a dead rat and had suffered scabies, and Burns became Captain Sensible, because he wasn’t.
“Everyone in the band thought they were the best one in it,” Scabies says. “Any one of us could have fronted their own band.”
“Each member was almost a frontman in themselves,” Vanian agrees. “Now there’s a lot more give-and-take and letting others shine.”
Their forthcoming album – the first featuring the three of them since 1995 – is dedicated to James, who died in March 2025, and consists entirely of covers of the kind of songs the four of them all had in common when they first came together. “The one thing we all agree on musically is 60s garage bands,” Sensible says. “They were all doing their utmost to sound great, but with more passion and less skill they created this lovely sound.” And so Not Like Everybody Else serves as a whistle-stop tour of the Damned’s formative tastes: the Kinks, the Stones, the Creation, the Lollipop Shoppe, the Stooges, Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd.
The Damned, the three of them all admit, will always be known as “punk band the Damned”, despite their not being a punk band since 1978. Even on their first post-James album, Machine Gun Etiquette, they were stretching far beyond ramalama on Smash It Up Pt 1, I Just Can’t Be Happy Today and Plan 9 Channel 7. From 1980, The Black Album featured the 17-minute prog-psych epic Curtain Call, still a feature of their live sets (“I could probably take a minute and half out of that,” Sensible says, “but no more.” Vanian says they feared “it could be the kiss of death”). By the mid-80s, they were major label gothic psychedelic hitmakers with Grimly Fiendish, The Shadow of Night, Is It a Dream, and their cover of Barry Ryan’s Eloise.
Vanian has regrets from those times, namely that they couldn’t translate those British hits into US success. He begins talking about his contemporaries – Billy Idol, John Lydon – who went to the US and remade their careers with the backing of their labels. And their relative financial circumstances have clearly occurred to him.
“I get so many people from other bands telling me, ‘If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t have started my band.’ And that’s very nice and flattering, but it hasn’t helped me, and I’d like to have a little bit of luxury before I pop off.”
In fairness, though, the Damned often didn’t help themselves: their instrument-smashing, pie-throwing mania wasn’t confined to the stage, and one reason they tore through so many labels is that they could be tiring signings. “There were several incidents when we were invited to go to see record companies and chat to the people there,” says Sensible. “And of course the first thing we’d do is head to the booze cabinet. Once we were left for about an hour in this bloke’s swanky office, because he’d said he had to go off to a meeting. By the time he got back, we’d demolished the place. Needless to say, we didn’t get signed.”
Where Sensible and Scabies were always the outright maniacs of the band, Vanian, the Bela Lugosi of Hemel Hempstead, was more enigmatic. His image launched a million copyists: any singer who has ever worn black clothes and white face paint owes him a debt. He invented the goth image, without ever being a goth. Music fans might have a clear picture of him, but they perhaps have less of an idea of him, unlike Lydon and Joe Strummer, whose personalities were part of their image.
“I don’t know if he knows himself,” Sensible says. “He would have made a very good actor.”
“Dave’s the frontman, he’s been there the longest,” Scabies says. “If Dave doesn’t think something’s a good idea, there’s no point trying to do it.”
“I was a reluctant frontman,” Vanian says. “Frontmen want to be the star of the show, but I didn’t even want to be in a band. I was chosen because of what I was before I was in a band. Brian had said to Rat, ‘Who’s that guy? He looks like a singer.’ I didn’t need an excuse to be like this; I would have been who I am, no matter what.”
In the 2015 documentary The Damned: Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead, Vanian is a fleeting presence – in the background, and spoken about by the others, but never interviewed himself. That, he says, is because he saw the story the makers wanted, and didn’t want to be part of its telling. The story it ended up with was one of Vanian as at times both the Jagger and Richards of the band: he appeared to be the one keeping it running and very much the boss (at one point Sensible decides not to say something, for fear of upsetting Vanian), while also prone to following his own whims, down to not turning up to shows on occasion, leaving the others to carry on without him.
“I’d love to do something with a proper film-maker – with actors – about the band’s inception,” Vanian says, reflecting on the film. “But I’m a private person – when the band started I thought about wearing a mask and being an unknown singer. But we got pictures taken too soon, and that was the end of that.”
* * *
The Damned provided a chance for its members to live as the people they wanted to be, making the music they wanted to make. All three of them might wish they’d had the full backing of a major label but that would have brought pressures of its own, and their brief stint with MCA – the hits period – ended with them too exhausted to come up with new material. Doing it their way might have been chaotic, but it ensured they remained the Damned rather than another rock band reliving past glories.
“We went on a musical adventure,” Sensible says. “For me, the purpose of punk was to be creative and do something for yourself. I was a toilet cleaner, then five minutes later I’m trashing a guitar on stage and girls find me attractive. So punk was my saviour.”
“There were no rules,” Scabies says. “It was a bunch of kids having a laugh. And a lot of our audience probably related to the fact that we were quite disjointed – all of the band came from kind of broken backgrounds in one way or another. I think a lot of dysfunctional youth related to the fact that we weren’t being packaged. We didn’t all wear the same clothes. We didn’t have a corporate logo or sign to a major.”
In what might have been their dotage, the Damned are now bigger than ever. April brings that Wembley Arena gig; their recent albums have been the highest charting of their career. Things seem to be, for the first time ever, peachy.
“We’re all knocking on,” Scabies says. “I don’t want to go out being miserable. I want to go out having a good time on a full belly.”
“We wouldn’t still be playing if we’d got stinking rich,” Sensible says. “I’m glad we did it this way because I bloody enjoy the shows and travel. None of us got lazy and lost our drive.”
As long as he can still swoop across the stage like a vampire, and deliver those songs in that stern baritone, Vanian will continue, too. “You’ll know it’s time for me to quit when I start leaning on the mic to sing Sinatra songs, and reading letters from the fans.”
• Not Like Everybody Else is released 23 January on earMusic. The Damned play their 50th anniversary show at Wembley Arena on 11 April
