THE DAMNED: Not a Curtain Call (2024)

By BRIAN GIFFIN

“I WOULDN’T say I feel blessed!” remarks recently reinstalled The Damned drummer Rat Scabies with some amusement. “But when I was a kid picking up drumsticks, I never thought in my wildest dreams that I could make a career out of it, a life out of it. For me, everything’s a bonus.”

One such bonus is still being around to return to Australia this month for a tour with a reunited early eighties line-up of his famed band. It’s a run that has nothing to do with The Damned’s most recent album, last year’s Darkadelic. Instead, it’s a celebration of part of their heritage that has been billed as their “final” Australian tour, although the drummer chuckles at that suggestion.

“When I saw the posters saying ‘the last tour ever’, I was … really, no one’s planning what we’re doing outside of what we’ve arranged, but I put it down to a marketing thing, really! Unless they tell you that we’re all about to drop dead – which isn’t far off the truth, anyway. Last chance to see! Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but even if it’s not this line-up, I wouldn’t like to say that The Damned won’t keep going.”

It certainly doesn’t seem like Rat Scabies is ready to hang up the sticks just yet, having just come back to the band that made him famous late 2023 after 27 years away from the fold, and he seems philosophical about the fact that any tour could be the last. 

“None of us are getting any younger. That’s just the way of the world. You’re born, you live and then you die. I’m just trying to fill the time between the first and last of those events with as much fun as you can have, really.”

There’s no doubt that the man whose parents called him Christopher Millar in 1958 has squeezed a lot of fun into his life. After being caught at ground zero of the British punk explosion in the mid-seventies when The Damned opened for Sex Pistols, Rat Scabies was behind the kit with them for most of the next 20 years, made solo records and performed with a multitude of other artists along the way. 

Credited with releasing the “first” punk album, 1977’s Damned Damned Damned, The Damned were soon done with thrashing and smashing. As the eighties loomed, they began exploring other avenues of sound, opening the decade with The Black Album that saw them working with Hans Zimmer, and introduced the extremely versatile Paul Gray to the band. It was their fourth album with as many line-ups, but the addition of Gray and his sense of melodicism helped them achieve the directional shift they were seeking.

“This line up was a major turning point for the band,” Scabies says. “The first album was loud, aggressive, loads of energy, great songs – it was great punk rock […] we’d been through that whole punk rock explosion, and we found that we wanted to expand a bit more than three chords and just racket. But we weren’t really sure whether our audience would go with that, and not everyone liked it. But we decided that the only thing we should ever do was make records like we liked, and through ’76 to ’78, that kind of thing was good – the aggression and the attitude and the anger that you had when you were young.”

“When it came to Strawberries and The Black Album,” he continues, “we realised that wasn’t enough for us anymore to be like that. We still wanted to have that element to the band, but we discovered melody lines and actually if we thought it was cool, that was all that mattered. It didn’t really bother us that it might finish everything, doing a piece like ‘Curtain Call’, which is 17 minutes… Very different thing and far removed from the three minute shots of noise we had been doing.”

The band’s older fans weren’t all encouraging – Strawberries was originally titled Strawberries for Pigs after a comment by David Vanian about fan disinterest – but by then The Damned had re-established themselves in a Gothic rock direction and a new swathe of fans were now calling.

“The Damned were always a band to move forward. You don’t sign up to this deal to just play the same records for 30 years. The sad thing about being a musician is that people want to hear the old stuff. They’re not really interested in what you’re doing now. Not until they’ve heard it! When it’s been out for a while, it establishes and becomes part of you. Without having any real idea about what direction we should be going in, it was quite an easy call to say we didn’t want to keep doing [just punk]. We wanted to be more musical. And the upshot is that you hope that other people share the ideas that you have.”

Becoming more musical was a gamble that may not have paid off, but more than 40 years on, Rat Scabies and The Damned are still going strong, and they’re about to present that era of their career to Australian crowds for what may (or may not be) the final time.

“When we did ‘Curtain Call’ we really thought ‘Well, it’s make or break’. We’re really going to die because all of our hardcore fans are just going to go, no’. Or they’ve grown with us, and were also ready for the same changes we were. I like to think that’s what happened.”

THE DAMNED AUSTRALIAN TOUR

20/3: Tivoli, Brisbane

21/3: Enmore Theatre, Sydney

22/3: Northcote Theatre, Melbourne

24/3: Hindley St Music Hall, Adelaide

26/3: Astor Theatre, Perth