Damned If They Do ...

Punk legends The Damned are still drawing new blood -- on both both sides of the stage.

By Sean Flinn | October 1, 2001 Eternally Damned: clockwise, from top: Monty Oxy Moron, Pinch, Patricia Morrison, Dave Vanian, Captain Sensible Buy The Damned's music Visit The Damned's Web site Visit The Damned's Nitro Records Now, it should be said that The Damned are not the same group they were in the mid-'70s. They're 20-odd years older, and time spans like that often have the unfortunate side effect of granting people a bit of wisdom - anathema to any good punk rokka. After a decade or so, the nasty sneer begins to cramp your face, dig? And maybe you learn a bit how the world works - like, f'r instance, that kids now consider any guy with short died hair and lip ring to be "punk." Which is a damned shame - fashion has always played its part as one of the genre's identifiers, but the music and the lifestyle are supposed to carry far more weight, and have far less commercial appeal. Thankfully, the old guard is still around to gob in the face of folks who are only in it for the fashion - the weekend warriors, the yuppie spawn, and so on. Enter -- or rather, re-enter -- the Damned. The Damned emerged from Britain in the mid-'70s, springing out of the same scene that spawned the Pistols (minus the Svengali-like influence of someone like Malcolm McClaren). And while the vast majority of their peers have moved on to more "respectable" lines of work (Johnny Rotten now does political commentary for various Internet, television and radio shows, while the Clash's Joe Strummer has become an in-demand composer of film scores) the Damned have yet to relent. They've weathered numerous lineup changes, a few creative miscalculations and a river of bad blood between certain current and ex members to stretch their history out over two-and-a-half decades - all without resorting to playing the casino / county fair nostalgia circuit with other groups from the same era. They're in it, clearly, for the long haul. The group has undergone a bit of a facelift since its legendarily raucous early years. Bassists came and went before the group settled on Patricia Morrison, formerly of Gun Club and Sisters of Mercy (and now the wife of Damned vocalist Dave Vanian). Founding guitarist (and frequent nudist) Captain Sensible left in the early '80s to pursue a briefly successful solo career, only to return in the late '90s at a Damned reunion show. And founding drummer Rat Scabies has, after two decades with the group, departed, leaving the stool behind the skins open for the group's current drummer, Pinch (a fixture of the British hardcore punk scene thanks to his years with English Dogs and Janus Stark) to slide in and give the band some much-needed new rhythmical blood. And it was Pinch who spoke with Choler recently, giving us the inside scoop on the first Damned studio album in almost 15 years - the recently released Grave Disorder - which they recorded for Offspring singer Bryan (aka Dexter) Holland's Nitro Records (also home now to TSOL and AFI). Speaking by phone from San Diego, Pinch told us how he managed the challenge of being a new fish in an old pond, how the band keeps itself fresh after 20 odd years, and why the guitarist from The Prodigy is a complete wanker. Sean Flinn: What brings you to San Diego? I know you've been down here for a couple of weeks … Pinch: Yeah, I've been down here for three weeks. I've got my girlfriend here. And a glorious place it is, too. That's how I ended up in San Diego actually. We both laugh at this. That's wicked. Where are you from originally? I'm originally from about 90 miles Northeast of here - but we actually met back east in Washington D.C. where we had an internship together. She'd gone to school down here, so we kind of wound our way down here, eventually. We met [when The Damned] played a gig at Horton Plaza [a huge shopping mall in the heart of San Diego's historic Gaslamp District]. We met there. It was quite a bizarre experience - she was a naughty nurse and I was a … God knows what I was. But I had shit all over my face, I was sort of made up in a Joker style, so she really didn't know what I looked like - which I suppose is kind of a good thing. More laughter. Kind of a literal blind date, I suppose. Well, that leads me into my first line of questions, which are about you specifically. Tell me a bit about yourself - because you're not from the original lineup of The Damned. You came in during, what, 1999? Yeah, pretty much just before the last big tour they did over here. So what's your musical pedigree, and how did it lead you to get hooked up with The Damned? I started my first band when I was 15, and it was a band called English Dogs that was a very hardcore punk thing in England. I was a boxer for ten years -- an amateur boxer, so I had a pretty good career. And then, because I'm a few years younger than [the other members of The Damned], I sort of missed the first wave of punk, and just came in at the back end of it, with bands like Stiff Little Fingers, things like that. And all of a sudden I started losing all my fights. And I was thinking, "Hmm, this is wrong." Because I was fighting kids that I'd beaten before, and I was beating them easily, and the decisions were going against me. I thought boxing was supposed to be a fair thing. We know now that it isn't, because there're all sorts of shenanigans going on because of money. But amateur boxing, I thought, maybe that was a pure sport. But it obviously wasn't. And my trainer was going absolutely crazy, saying, "Look, you've got to get rid of that hairdo. You've got to get rid of it." And I said, "Well, no. This is a lifestyle that I feel really akin to." So anyway, to cut a long story short, I thought, "Well, if this is the way it is, even with amateur boxing, I'm just getting out of it." So, to go from boxing to drumming was a very short step, really. I just got to know a few friends from school, one of them played the bass. I got the oldest punk in town to be the singer - you know, the biggest guy I could find. Pinch: "How about singing in a punk band, mate?" Biggest punk in town: "Yeah, awwright!" That just left the drums. So I got into the drums. We cut a couple of demo tapes, ended up supporting this English punk band called GBH loads of times, which led to us getting our first record deal on the label that they were on (which is Clay Records). In the end, we did five albums, three singles, toured about 15 countries - around the world with that band. | Next