The Damned - Album By Album

 

The Damned were there at the beginning of punk and they're still going now. While the Sex Pistols burned bright before exploding fast and the Clash were effectively finished after five albums (we shall speak not of Cut The Crap here), the Damned have, via a few splits and reunions, been almost a constant presence on the live circuit for 40 plus years now. When they started out, they were very much the archetypal '77 punk band with chief songwriter Brian James being hugely influenced by the Stooges and their debut album Damned Damned Damned being a brutally fierce collection of frenetic two minute blasts. However, James' departure following the failure of their second album saw the group reorganise with Captain Sensible, Dave Vanian and Rat Scabies (and subsequently new bassist Paul Gray who joined for 1980's The Black Album) all starting to come into their own as songwriters and steering the band off in a variety of directions often all at once. The amazing thing is that not only did they get away with it, they also came up with some absolutely amazing albums in the process with the group hitting a run of form in the first half of the '80s that few of their peers could match.

The departures of Gray to join UFO and Sensible to pursue a solo career would see another shift in the sound with Vanian and Scabies steering the band off into gothier waters on the Phantasmagoria album and gaining the group a Top 3 hit with their cover of Barry Ryan's Eloise to boot. However, the subsequent album Anything was a critical and commercial failure and the group would break up soon afterwards. Although Scabies would attempt to keep the band going in the '90s and managed to coax Vanian back, the pair soon fell out and Vanian would rejoin up with Sensible to put a new line-up of the group together (and creating a rift with their estranged drummer that continues to this day) backed by drummer Pinch (ex-English Dogs) and keyboardist Monty Oxymoron. 2018 would see the group, now with Gray also back on board, release either their tenth, eleventh or twelfth album (there's a couple on the list below where their inclusion is a bit debatable but I decided to make this as comprehensive as possible) Evil Spirits with the promise of a new EP due out soon.

Still a great live band and capable of putting out some damn good tunes when the stars align, the Damned are very much a national institution. Here's a guide to the albums of punk's last great survivors from worst to best...  

12. Not Of This Earth (1995)

Following the break-up of the Damned Mk 4 line-up in 1988, Rat Scabies and Brian James had begun work on some demos. Although James quickly bailed on the project, Scabies put a band together featuring new recruits Alan Lee Shaw (ex-Rings/Maniacs/Physicals) and Kris Dollimore (ex-Godfathers) on guitars and bassist Moose Harris (ex-New Model Army) with the aim of polishing the songs up and releasing them. He eventually persuaded Dave Vanian to join him for the project and thus Not Of This Earth (bizarrely rechristened I'm Alright Jack And The Beanstalk for the UK market) came out under the Damned name in 1995. Unfortunately, it's a weak effort that really probably should never have come out under the Damned moniker - a lot of the songs are just forgettable with the possible exceptions of Testify, Tailspin and Prokofiev. It probably says a lot that this particular Damned line-up would have disintegrated within a few months with Vanian bizarrely heading off to join the Captain Sensible Band (who also had Paul Gray in their line-up at the time) and this group assuming the Damned name instead. All of which started an argument that has now been raging for twenty plus years between the various factions...

11. Anything (1987)

Anything does at least have two genuinely good tracks on it - the soaring surf-punk of Psychomania is an excellent album closer and the group's cover of Alone Again Or gives it an '80s goth makeover to good effect. But the rest is pretty forgettable to be honest with the likes of In Dulce Decorum and Tightrope Walk just being downright dull. And let's be honest, the overblown title track's refrain of "Anything is better than this" was really just asking for trouble...

10. Evil Spirits (2018)

The group's first album for a decade and their first with bassist Paul Gray since Strawberries some 36 years earlier, unfortunately it pains me to say that Evil Spirits wasn't really worth the wait, essentially sounding the same as So Who's Paranoid? but with less of the sparkle. Standing On The Edge Of Tomorrow, We're So Nice and Look Left were the best offerings of an otherwise pretty unremarkable bunch but even they would have struggled to hold their own on any of the band's prime era stuff.

9. Give Daddy The Knife, Cindy (1984)

I was in two minds as to whether to include this on the list or not as it was released by the Phantasmagoria era line-up under the pseudonym of Naz Nomad & The Nightmares after their old label Bronze collapsed but before they signed to MCA. A covers album of ‘60s garage rock standards such as I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night and The Wind Blows Your Hair, the band at least sound like they’re having fun here and they handle the material well but let’s face it, it’s hardly essential listening unless you’re a Damned completist.

8. Music For Pleasure (1977)

If Damned Damned Damned was the sulphate-fuelled rush of punk distilled to its purest form then Music For Pleasure was the comedown afterwards with Brian James suffering from writers' block and the rest of the band struggling to come up with sufficient quality material to make up an album, not helped by line-up instability with Rat Scabies fired midway through the recordings to be replaced by Jon Moss on drums and Lu Edmunds being added as a second guitarist. It's not the disaster it's sometimes painted as (Idiot Box and Stretcher Case Baby are at least decent) but it just suffers from not being half as good as their debut was. The group would split soon afterwards but would be back, minus James, a year or so later. 

7. So Who's Paranoid? (2008)

So Who's Paranoid? (the only Damned album to feature Stu West on bass) shows the group at their most psychedelic and it's this variety, combined with Captain Sensible's sly lyrical humour on tracks such as A Danger To Yourself and Maid For Pleasure that keep it on the right side of entertaining. Elsewhere, A Nation Fit For Heroes sees the band revisiting their love of garage rock, Dr Woofenstein and Nature's Dark Passion allow Vanian to cut loose with the requisite goth melodrama and Dark Asteroid is a fourteen minute almost prog-rock epic to close the album off. Not perfect but it's a better effort than it really had any right to be.

6. Grave Disorder (2001)

Released on the Offspring’s Nitro label, the Damned’s official “comeback” album (their first with Captain Sensible back on board for almost two decades and with keyboardist Monty Oxymoron, drummer Pinch and ex-Sisters of Mercy bassist Patricia Morrison completing the line-up) remains the best thing they’ve done since the millennium. Playing to the poppier end of their repertoire, it’s also probably their most political album with the likes of Democracy?, Song.com, W, Amen, Neverland and Would You Be So Hot (If You Weren’t Dead)? seeing the band casting a caustic eye over the post-millennial world while Beauty of the Beast and Absinthe allow Dave Vanian to let his melodramatic goth side loose to good effect. It does get a little bit corny in places but generally Grave Disorder is a sound effort.

5. Damned Damned Damned (1977)

Some might see putting Damned Damned Damned all the way down at number 5 on this list as tantamount to sacrilege as it was one of the key albums of 1977, 30 minutes of bile-spitting sulphate-fuelled Stooges indebted old school punk. And I should point out, I only consider it a whisker below the Top 4 albums on here with New Rose, Neat Neat Neat, Fan Club and the rabid Stab Your Back being great songs and a good mark of Brian James’ ability as a songwriter. The only thing that ever so slightly counts against it in my book is that I’d argue that all four original members of the Damned produced their best work once they were allowed to grow away from their primitive beginnings and spread their wings musically (Vanian, Sensible and Scabies with the group's Machine Gun Etiquette onwards material and James with the Lords Of The New Church). But still, even though they did subsequently better it, as a document of the time, Damned Damned Damned is nearly faultless.

4. Phantasmagoria (1985)

Following the departures of Captain Sensible and Paul Gray in the wake of the Strawberries album, the Damned would go through a bit of an image change with keyboardist Roman Jugg moving to guitar and bassist Bryn Merrick joining. Signing to MCA, the new look line-up would see Dave Vanian pushed very much front and centre as the band took their sound off to gothier territory. Even more surprising is they carried it off pretty well - Phantasmagoria definitely sounds like a logical move on from Strawberries but songs such as Street of Dreams, Shadow Of Love, the ominous There'll Come A Day and the magnificently overblown Sanctum Sanctorum see them heading into much darker waters lyrically. Elsewhere, Grimly Fiendish and Is It A Dream? saw the band keeping the pop tunes of previous releases intact and Eighth Day marries a lyric about waking up on the day of the apocalypse to a bright bouncy chorus and carries it off well. The change may have thrown a few people for a loop at the time (especially image-wise) but the truth is that Phantasmagoria has held up very well and is well worth a listen.

3. Strawberries (1982)

Derided by critics at the time as the Damned's pop album, the truth is that Strawberries (which saw the group expanding to a five-piece with the addition of keyboardist Roman Jugg) has held up very well over the years and comes across as a supremely varied effort which mixes all the best elements of the Damned's sound. Ignite, Bad Time For Bonzo and Dozen Girls provide the driving punk sound of old, The Dog is the token goth epic and Generals, Gun Fury and Under The Floor Again show off the group's love of classic garage rock. Elsewhere the band dip their toes into everything from northern soul stomp (Stranger On The Town) to pure melodic pop (The Pleasure And The Pain) while the yearning Life Goes On would have its main riff slyly half-inched by Killing Joke for Eighties a couple of years later and then from there by Nirvana for Come As You Are. A very under-rated album, Strawberries is definitely up there with the Damned's best.

2. Machine Gun Etiquette (1979)

Trust me, this was very unlucky not to get the number one slot (to be honest, any of the top three on this list could have taken it depending on what day it was!). After the messy disintegration of the original Damned line-up in late 1977, the group would reconvene as 1978 turned into 1979 with Dave Vanian, Captain Sensible and Rat Scabies now joined by ex-Saints bassist Algy Ward (who would in turn soon make way for ex-Eddie & The Hot Rods man Paul Gray). Machine Gun Etiquette is really the album that the group should have followed Damned Damned Damned with, taking the best elements of that album and refining them slightly. So while Love Song, the title track, Melody Lee, Anti-Pope and Noise Noise Noise retained the feral punk thrash of old, there were signs of a new more thought-out style of songcraft creeping in - I Just Can't Be Happy Today and These Hands could arguably be seen as the beginnings of what would a few years hence develop into the Damned's trademark goth sound while the epic Plan 9 Channel 7 was something that you could honestly never have seen the '77-era Damned pulling off. Best of all though was Smash It Up which grows from a gentle almost psychedelic guitar intro into a full-on pop-punk singalong and remains the band's traditional set closer to this day.

1. The Black Album (1980)

Building on the progress they'd made with Machine Gun Etiquette, The Black Album would see the Damned really spreading their wings. Although by this point the rabid breakneck punk of their debut was limited to a couple of tracks here and there (Sick Of This And That and Lively Arts mainly), their new sound would see the beginning of their long fascination with '60s style garage rock (see Wait For The Blackout, Drinkin' About My Baby and History Of The World) as well as their gothier sound gaining more traction to good effect on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 13th Floor Vendetta and Twisted Nerve. They'd even make a couple of forays into psychedelia on the whimsical Silly Kids' Games and Curtain Call, a 17-minute epic which took up the whole of side 3 of this double album. Mixing all of the best things about the band, it was a close-run thing but on this particular day The Black Album just to say inches it as my favourite Damned album (although this may well change tomorrow...)