(Part 1, all about Madness and Geese and Fishbones and such, is here.)
THE DAMNED/LENNY KAYE’S NUGGETS/THE DICTATORS, Hammerstein Ballroom, Friday May 31.
I have finally decided what I want to be when I grow up.
Seriously, is there a better role model than Captain Sensible? For a start, the man his mother believed to be named Raymond Burns is a Taurus, born just three days ahead of me – and ten years earlier. That means the Captain just turned 70, yet not only does he look ridiculously young for a septuagenarian, he remains a shit-hot and massively under-rated guitar player, a brilliant front man though that is not actually his job, a wonderfully creative songwriter, and a fantastic harmony and occasional lead singer. (In other words, he is from the Peter Townshend School of Rock.)
Known for his love of rabbits, he has also been a staunch campaigner for animal rights and vegetarianism, an equally fierce opponent of tobacco companies and right-wing politicians alike, and even formed a political party, the Blah! Party, in 2006, yet while also writing and singing songs about all kinds of injustices in the world, he has avoided being labeled a “political” artist.
The Captain’s ability to straddle all sides of the music world is evidenced by the solo single he released on the anarcho-pacifist label Crass Records in 1981 not long before he infamously had a UK number one hit covering the South Pacific song ‘Happy Talk’ of all things; he’s additionally enjoyed many a side-project, from the Sensible Gray Cells to Dead Men Walking, to keep himself and audiences alike entertained and hopefully out of jail. To top it all, he’s from my neck of the woods in South London, provided me with the funniest interview of my life and several more great anecdotes besides, and is a die-hard Crystal Palace fan.
Then there is the small matter of his band The Damned, currently touring with their peak line-up, the one that recorded the classic 1979 comeback album Machine Gun Etiquette (mostly) and the following year’s near-equal The Black Album among ten other studio albums to the group’s name over a 50-year career. Of course, The Damned would be a much lesser power without the perennially deep-throated, dramatic singer Dave Vanian (67), the group’s only omnipresent member and to many fans, their equal-parts demonic and debonair public face; they are also currently all the more attractive for the recent re-admission of Moon-like original drummer Rat Scabies (68) after many years of mutual public name-calling, as brutally and rather sadly captured in the 2015 documentary Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead? (Joe Bonomo has an excellent review of his own of The Damned and The Dictators in Chicago that dives deeper into the group’s troubled history: it is here.)
As such, it is strange to consider that long-term bassist Paul Gray, who first joined in 1980, is the youngest member of the current quartet, allowing that he was also the first in the band to experience chart success, back in 1976 as a teenage member of the pub-rock pre-punks Eddie & The Hot Rods. (The 65-year-old stopped playing live in 1994 for many years due to a particularly brutal onset of tinnitus, and shortly after recording with the Captain on the excellent Sensible Gray Cells’ indie release A Postcard from Britain was diagnosed with throat cancer; the words “survivor” and “warrior” should probably prefix his name). Relative baby Monty Oxymoron, 62, has been a consistently perfect addition to the group since joining on keys in 1996.
I mention their ages because frankly, as senior citizens in their home country, The Damned have no right, to be this, um – what’s the appropriate adjective here? – damned exciting on stage, so ineffably damned good. And yet they are. (Check ‘Stranger On The Town’ above.) The show at Hammerstein Ballroom, a venue I hadn’t attended in at least two decades until I’d stepped foot back inside for Madness only the night before, ranks up there with my favourite high intensity shows of the 21st Century. If not quite as inspirational as Idles, witnessed at an all-ages club inside a bowling alley inside a vast suburban mall outside of Albany – a show that I wrote about here – I can genuinely say that I jumped around much more at the Hammerstein than I dared on that particular night. If this was in part because I didn’t feel aged out of doing so at Hammerstein, it was also because, unlike in Albany in 2019 and certainly unlike the previous night at the Hammerstein with the Nutty Boys, I had plenty of room to do so: either the $70 general admission ticket price served as a significant deterrent or The Damned’s popularity is not what they imagined.
For my part, I paid that $70 ticket price, not because I am laden with disposable income (I spend far too much of my time opting for creativity over wages to fall into that category), but because I had a sense that I’d get my money’s worth. A decade back, I took a punt on seeing the group at The Chance in Poughkeepsie, figuring that the combo of Vanian and Sensible – the heart of the group’s best songwriting and performances over the years – would itself be worth the one-hour drive, and I was proven more than right when they pinned me to the wall with a blistering opening twenty-minute blast of their catalogue’s biggest hits. I likewise figured that any possible advancement of rheumatism or arthritis or the like over the last decade would surely be canceled out in 2024 be the reappearance of Rat Scabies. And I was right about that as well.
An additional reason to pony up the cost is that The Damned, like Madness, are a viable ongoing recording entity, and at the Hammerstein, they duly played the singles from last year’s impressive Darkadelic: namely, ‘The Invisible Man’ and ‘Beware of the Clown,’ for which they adorned those red noses in the clip and first photo above, and bad-mouthed British and American politicians alike.
Otherwise, the set was drawn predominantly from that aforementioned peak period when, after the inevitable bust-ups, blow-outs and break-up that came from being the first British punk band out of the gates, they reunited – significantly, minus the man considered the creative driving force behind their first two albums (Brian James) – with the Captain switching from bass to guitar.
Newly invigorated and evidently not lost for song-writing ability, the classics followed fast and furious over the next couple of years, and though few of them troubled the upper reaches of the British singles charts, the quality of the albums stayed supremely steady, and the group’s reputation grew with it, especially as they veered away from the self-ridiculing anarchic nature of the incomparable ‘Smash It Up’ and ‘Noise Noise Noise’ and into more gothic territory with the likes of ‘Thanks for the Night’ and ‘Shadow Of Love.’
Somewhere in the middle, on 1980’s The Black Album (The Damned were years ahead of Spinal Tap on this front), stands what I consider their finest pop song, ‘Wait for the Blackout.’ Given that they opened the set proper with it, I may not be alone in that opinion. That seminal double album concluded with their most ambitious song to date, the 17-minute ‘The Curtain Call,’ which likewise they must continue to hold in reverence given that they opened their encores with it, pretty much in full as far as I could tell.
As this all suggests, The Damned were always so much more than cartoon punks – though elements of mischief, piss-taking, self-deprecation and joyful chaos still emanate from all aspects of their profile, including the stage. No, they were and remain top-notch musicians and music fans, men who appreciate(d) everything that was gloriously irrelevant about rock ‘n’ roll at its most primal and entertaining. To wit, if ‘Noise Noise Noise’ represents a certain punk ethos at its most pithy – “we say noise is for heroes, leave the music for zeroes!” – it was also, and remains to this day, an incredible pop song. Same for ‘Smash It Up,’ ‘Neat Neat Neat,’ ‘New Rose’ and so many more that peppered the two-hour set at Hammerstein. To that end, The Damned were the British Ramones, hiding their talents not so much under a bushel as under a sea of volume and gloriously dumbed-down lyrics.
And now it’s 2024. The Ramones are all dead, The Jam and The Clash long gone, The Sex Pistols a strange recurring fever dream, and with rare exceptions like Siouxsie & The Banshees, the rest of the British school of first-generation so-called sea-changers are fighting it out for attention on the punk cabaret circuit.
The Damned, meanwhile, play the concert halls they deserve, the Captain still treating the stage as his playground, Vanian as territory to be prowled like a lion on heat; Rat plays drums with a venom and tenacity worthy of his rep, Paul Gray bops around like he’s still in the Hot Rods, and good old Monty – a psychiatric nurse in his other life – hams up the mad scientist role while clearly possessing the kind of keyboard chops I might once have come close to had I practiced hard and single-mindedly enough.
I come to all this with conscious bias. While The Damned had broken up before I started going to gigs, I was very much on board with the 1979 reformation, and attended a memorable Christmas show at The Electric Ballroom in December 1979, which I recall that the Captain played in his birthday suit, though that could be a false memory given how common it was in those days. (He was leap years ahead of the Chili Peppers as well.) Tickets that night, by the way, were just £3 which, according to my Bank of England inflation calculator, comes out to £14.27 in 2024 money, or barely $20 even factoring in differing exchange rates over the years.
In other words, if you think concert tickets are expensive these days, you’re right, though given the rising costs of touring alongside the precipitous decline of record royalties, one can empathize with the artists. Still, if The Damned were disappointed by the turn-out, they didn’t show it, and nor should they have done, given the rapture with which they were received by the couple of thousand in attendance.
And as for the Captain as role model, why, do you have a better candidate?
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Support was a double-header worth of its own bill any other night. The redoubtable Lenny Kaye, possibly the oldest man on the stage all week at a spritely 77, has been touring the 50th Anniversary of his influential compilation Nuggets, with a group of fellow renowned musicians, including bassist Tony Shanahan. There is a valid argument to be made that the quintet of silver-haired rockers working their way through songs like ‘I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night),’ ‘Pushin’ Too Hard,’ and ‘Road Runner’ were too damned good to authentically replicate the disheveled psychedelic garage band sound of the 1960s. But Kaye’s poetic monologue during a breakdown of the set-closing ‘Gloria’ successfully got at the essence of rock’n’roll as lived out by someone who witnessed that 1960s explosion from the vantage point of a fan, wrote about the music in the 1970s (and beyond) as a journalist and album producer, and came to contribute to it as Patti Smith’s long-term guitarist and right-hand man. It was a pleasure.
It was left to a band that coined the essence of punk long before such bands were called punks to open proceedings. And if bassist/songwriter Andy Shernoff, and guitarist Ross ‘The Boss’ Friedman, the sole original members of The Dictators to take to the stage at 8pm, alongside current front man Keith Roth and drummer Albert Bouchard, may have been secretly questioning how, 50+ years after establishing a blueprint for The Ramones and all that followed with the 1975 album The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!, they are stuck with a 25-minute bottom-of-the-bill opening slot, they’re easily mature enough to understand it’s in no small part because The Dictators has almost never provided full-time employment in the first place.
Andy, I should note, is a good buddy of mine who lives in the Catskills, so I know first-hand his musical integrity, and the fun he is having with this current itineration, despite the hardships of life in a minivan touring Europe. Then again, the fermented-grapes enthusiast gets to visit wine country along the way – if only through the window of that van – and would be first to admit there are worse ways of earning a living than by writing songs about ‘New York New York’ and its ‘Avenue A,’ asking the question ‘Who Will Save Rock And Roll?’ and issuing the proclamation recognized by all rockers of a certain age, from his Dictators to The Damned to Madness: ‘Let’s Get The Band Back Together’. (See below, on loop if you can.)
ANDRA DAY/ALEX VAUGHN/EBONY RILEY, Central Park Summerstage, Manhattan, NY, Saturday June 1
My ears were still ringing on Saturday morning, despite wearing my custom-molded earplugs for The Damned. This helps explain why my determination to stay in NYC an extra night and take in more live music along the way, did not result in another indoor show, even if I was tempted to see the first ever NY gig by legendary Belfast punks The Outcasts, whose Good Vibrations singles from 1978 and ’79 represent a certain blueprint for honest-to-goodness power-pop-punk-rock.
My heart was at the opening of the Punk Rock Mini-Golf two-weekend summer series hosted by my friends at Maker Park Radio, where a Captain Sensible golf hole would have made for a wonderful writing segue and I’d surely have enjoyed the evening’s outdoor bands, but there was sadly no-one on this particular night’s bill that could justify the intensely difficult public transport journey down there – and back.
After watching the Champions League final in midtown, I opted instead for a New York City staple, one of the annual calendar events that makes the city so damned special – the free-admission opening night of Central Park’s Summerstage series.
And truly, Central Park in summer – it was a gorgeous Saturday all around as you can see from the pic at the Park, above – is a magnificent place. I never lived close to midtown, but my Brooklyn years found me sufficiently close to its sister Prospect Park and its own Celebrate Brooklyn series. In both cases, Vaux and Olmstead’s purposefully meandering meadows by day can only be matched by the joy of taking in quality live music at night - preferably alongside fellow New Yorkers of all stripes.
The Summerstage opener this year was a triple R&B bill, and if the names Andra Day, Alex Vaughn and Ebony Riley didn’t roll familiarly off my own lips, a quick look at the series’ pre-made Spotify playlist quickly confirmed my relevant ignorance: Day, in particular, is a highly successful chart-topper and actor, with a Golden Globe to her name for her titular role in 2021’s The United States vs. Billie Holiday.
By the time I made it to what I correctly anticipated to be a packed-out park, Riley had come and gone, the sun was also preparing to take its leave, and Alex Vaughn had taken to the stage to accompany that illusion caused by the world spinning round. I thoroughly enjoyed the Maryland native’s set, performed with full band, albeit that I viewed from a physical and slightly emotional distance, the latter descriptor being a caveat for the fact that I am well outside of her various demographics. But all I ever ask for from my creatives is authenticity, and Vaughn delivers that in buckets. She is, in every sense, the real deal, and I was glad to make her acquaintance, even if I did spend as much of my time grooving on the audience, equal parts Black and white, from uptown and downtown alike, though lacking the truly international diversity experienced with the midtown bar audience for the Champions League final just prior. There I had found myself chatting to a man fresh in from Kathmandu to celebrate his son’s graduation from City College as valedictorian, especially reassuring proof that some kind of American dream still exists in real life. (He in turn was delighted to know if visited his home city, which is in Nepal, for any of you who were wondering.)
Andra Day’s latest album CASSANDRA (cherith) marks a conscious move by the West Coast native into the jazz that she was brought up on as a trained musician; it was only in part that I found her rendition of it a little tame that had me leave shortly after she came on, though I was immediately taken by her (Nord) piano player. No, I’d proven my point, catching four shows in four nights across at least three generations and venues. I was also tired, unaccompanied, and looking forward to an early breakfast and a later coffee with a couple of my long-term former Brooklyn neighbors and long-term friends before heading home to the Hudson Valley.
If I’m not sure when or even if I’ll experience a relatively diverse streak like this again, I’m so glad that I did. The chances are that if you have read this far you already know that music makes the world go round, it makes humans special, and we all are born with some innate love and talent for it, even if some people let it go at an early age. Almost the entire library of recorded music is available to us on demand these days, but that library is barely a hundred years old whereas we humans have been making rhythms out of old bones and other instruments for hundreds of thousands of years. If you’re not fortunate enough to be involved in the communal experience of playing music, I hope you continue to find time to enjoy the equally ecstatic experience of watching others do so, be it in your local dive bar, the big city’s concert halls and ballrooms, or the neighborhood park. It is what we do.
The first part of this double-header is here:
Glad to see that the FLESHTONES are joining the Damned UK tour this winter. Another great crossed channel double bill...
Luuuv The Damned! Life Goes On from the teeerif album Strawberries is, well. Amazing! Cheers from the US!