Posted on June 10, 2010 - by Post Punk

The Damned

The Damned © Kim Ford

The Damned
Shepherds Bush Academy
London, UK
Friday 4th June 2010

Shepherd’s Bush Academy’s website might call The Damned “punk heroes”, but there is little question over how omissible that is. For a band that started a tail-gating competition with The Sex Pistols over who could release the first official punk single back in the heyday of ‘76, The Damned are one of the most distilled, core-line 1977 punk bands about. But more importantly, they’re a progressive one. It goes without saying that they’ve been genre splashed and coated throughout their existence and a ten-fold album span.

Immediately noticeable from their opening songs, ‘Disco Man’ and ‘I Can’t Be Happy Today’, there’s a steep, gothic and new-wave overture that branches back to their earliest tracks, exuberated by Dave Vanian’s masterful crooner-style gothic operetta. Moreover, The Damned, who have been on tour every other year since their reform in 1993, have continued to display Lazarus-raising abilities in their live show

The Damned © Kim Ford

performances, to a point where all songs are true off-the-record sensations.

They play from a mixture of albums; “Machine Gun Etiquette” and their debut, “Damned, Damned, Damned”, alongside their latest release, “So, Who’s Paranoid?” The round-about twenty song set list is a tumbling fruit machine. ‘Thrill Kill’ is an overlooked track from their later “Grave Disorder” album, which shadow surfs the heavy trod of metal bass with low to high pitched guitar streaks. A song that Captain Sensible dedicates to Lemmy of Motorhead, who The Damned toured with at the end of last year and a previous member of the band for a brief period.

Classics included ‘Love Song’, generic Pistol riff based ‘New Rose’ and ‘Born to Kill’, which was interrupted by a reverberating ‘Neat Neat Neat’ interlude, allowing the audience to catch their breath before ‘Born to Kill’ came to a bludgeoning end. The encore contained ‘Problem Child’ and ‘Fan Club’, as well a Sky Saxon tribute in the form of a Seeds cover – the 1968 psychedelic classic ‘Satisfy You’. They finished the night on a return to

The Damned © Kim Ford

“Machine Gun Etiquette”; ‘Smash It Up’.

It’s a wonder why the ‘music press’ don’t cut The Damned some slack over the content of their latest albums, which unfathomably received appalling reviews. Their expansion from one-line chorus and fast-pumped tracks has certainly not compromised anything off their earlier work. The experimentation of albums such as “Strawberries”, resulting in songs like ‘Bad Time for Bonzo’ and gothic western, ‘Shadow of Love’, both on the set list, have done no harm. In the words of an old-time punk veteran, “Wasn’t punk supposed to be about something new?”