Gig review: The Damned + The Hard-Ons at the Enmore Theatre, Sydney

Live review: The Damned and The Hard-ons at Enmore Theatre, Sydney. Thursday, March 21 2024

By BRIAN GIFFIN

SYDNEY had turned on a perfect Thursday afternoon and Enmore Road looked like mid-nineties Kings Cross, without the sleaze. Crowds surged in and out of doorways, waves of punters were flooding the Duke for pre-gig drinks, police cars under lights and sirens screamed the wrong way up the road through heavy traffic, and The Damned were playing at the Enmore Theatre.

Warming up the crowd for the main event were The Hard-ons, looking as excited as I’ve ever seen them. “How lucky are we?” asked Blackie with a smile so big it could be seen from space, while Tim Rogers promised us the Damned would give us “the best night we’ve had in our lives”. Then Blackie’s guitar ripped the molecules of the air apart as they plowed into a loud and entertaining set. With Rogers doing a happy scarecrow dance centrestage, the Hard-ons were evidently super thrilled to be opening for one of their main influences. After three songs their shirts came off and the blitz continued, the set drawing heavily from poppier moments of their most recent albums and peppered with wisecracks and rejoinders as they stirred up the crowd. A couple of earlier tracks allowed Blackie to unleash guitar mayhem and after a tidy 40 minutes they closed with “Just Being With You” and another promise that we were about to see something truly amazing.

It wasn’t long before that something amazing appeared in the form of The Damned, Monty Oxymoron waving as he crossed the stage, the reformed 1980 line-up behind him. After a brief hello from Rat Scabies, the band took their positions and kicked off with “Ignite” while the darkly suave Dave Vanian strolled to the mic, leading the band into an expansive evening of rock and roll.

From that first moment they looked and sounded amazing, five gentlemen delivering a masterclass in live music entertainment. Dynamic and perpetual, there was hardly a pause and no moment wasted. With the Captain’s goofy yin to Vanian’s theatrical vampiric yang and Paul Gray looking ultra-cool nailing down the bottom end, there was also plenty of time to marvel at the sheer power and size of Scabies’ drumming on such a compact kit. He was the spark that gave charge to a glorious performance. The set was vast, The Damned shifting through all their musical guises from thrashing punk moments to melodic Gothic rock with nary a waver. Their evergreen cover of “Eloise” marked the mid-point of the set and a new release of energy as the second half of the set had them bashing out their punkiest rockers. Even then, with the tireless energy of groups half their age, they returned for “Curtain Call”, a rousing “New Rose” that almost brought the house down and, because that still wasn’t enough, a final blast through MC5’s “Looking at You” before saying farewell at last. This may be the final time we see The Damned like this in Australia, but there’s still plenty of fire in their bellies. Anyone who needs a lesson in how to deliver two hours of pure rock entertainment could not look past The Damned.

IMAGE: Andrew Pittman