The Damned
London Palladium
Britain’s first punks pull out all the stops, dive into the dressing-up box, slap on the slap and deliver a truly spectacular show. Oh, and they play some great and classic songs too.
There’s a horse-drawn funeral cortege slowly processing along Argyll Street towards the London Palladium. It’s being followed by a veritable horde of vampires. Hundreds of them. There are top hats as far as the eye can see, a significant acreage of capes, phalanxes of fangs and more tourniquet-tight corsetry than even Soho is accustomed to. Baffled tourists gape at the unexpected prevalence of freshly drained Victorian virgins and make-up-caked walking dead. “Is London always like this?” “And who’s in the casket?” There’s a floral tribute; white wreaths fashioned into nine letters that provide a solution: THE DAMNED.
“Well,” observes Dave Vanian, driving force behind the audaciously ambitious Night Of A Thousand Vampires, of which this mock ceremony is only the initial instalment, “they’ve been trying to bury us for years.”
While The Damned have had more than their fair share of detractors since their formation in the white-hot crucible of 1976’s UK punk rock explosion (forever fending off accusations of being a mere pantomime approximation of the genre from those with neither sense of humour nor perspective), the veteran combo’s star is very much in the ascendent. Again.
You probably don’t need a recapitulation of how we all got here, but life’s a bitch, so here goes.
The Damned were the first punks to vinyl, with the timeless seven-inch New Rose. Their debut album followed in short order, and they played their first farewell gig in April ‘78. They returned the following year without main songwriting guitarist Brian James. Captain Sensible switched from four strings to six, Smash It Up followed Love Song, and the rest is history (including a Sensiblefree mid-80s when they enjoyed their second batch of Gothdefining hits, most prominently Eloise). Anyway, while the world at large dropped an E, put on an anorak and looked the other way, 30 more years passed until, even with the good Captain firmly re-established under the red beret of destiny, The Damned looked to be ‘Sensible’s-A-Wanker’-ing their way towards the end-of-thepier legacy punk circuit.
“We were spiralling down,” Vanian admits, “and I wanted to make one last really good Damned album.” And, having crowdfunded through PledgeMusic, that’s exactly what they did.
2018’s Evil Spirits, recorded with Bowie/Bolan producer Tony Visconti in New York City, gave the band their first UK Top 10 album. It took them to the Royal Albert Hall, Madison Square Garden and, oh yes, the London Palladium. But it’s not the first time that Vanian and Sensible have been to this venerable venue of variety. They’ve both attended shows here as punters. In the 60s, Dave was treated by his parents to a performance of The Black And White Minstrel Show. And Captain? “In 1974 I went to see The-Glam-Rock-Star-WhoseName-We-Dare-Not-Mention.” Moving swiftly on…
Organising The Night Of A Thousand Vampires (so named after it was decided to attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the most confirmed vampires – or at least people dressed as vampires – extant in a single location) turned out to be a mammoth task, and much of the responsibility fell on Vanian: “Obviously, Halloween is my favourite holiday, so I wanted to do more than just a normal gig; a more theatrical show. Originally the idea was much more expansive, it was going to contain elements of theatre.”
The Night Of A Thousand Vampires doesn’t give any impression of being a compromise. Vanian “wearing quite a lot of different hats” has worked closely with both The Circus Of Horrors and Hammer House Of Horror to deliver the most immersive experience possible.
The CoH provide an apposite warm-up slot with a supporting extravaganza which is, just as Vanian describes: “An old-fashioned, un-PC dangerous circus”. Swords are swallowed, ‘freaks’ caper, burlesque and circus skills collide in a flaming orgy of murderous camp and pierced everything. Later the CoH’s performers interact with The Damned in a succession of set-pieces during the band’s extensive two-part performance.
Hammer allowed Vanian unlimited access to beautiful film stills from Christopher Lee’s Dracula and beyond, which (when backprojected behind the band) add a touch of old-school cinematic class to proceedings. There’s also a string section, additional musicians, actors, an unfamiliar set-list, ornate stage set, costumes, hair, make-up and miscellaneous special effects to contend with. It’s no surprise, then, that the hectic sound-check (which marks the string section’s first full rehearsal with the band) goes on for so long that Vanian ultimately misses his own funeral.
As the doors open and the ghouls begin to mass around the Palladium’s bars, the band – completed by Black Album veteran Paul Gray (bass), Monty Oxymoron (keyboards) and drummer Andrew ‘Pinch’ Pinching – disappear into dressing rooms, to be transformed into cosmetically created creatures of the night. This is far from just another night on the road. Especially for Pinch, who announced it was to be his last performance with the band, after two full decades in the stool, just a couple of days ago.
“Twenty years he’s had to put up with us,” considers Captain, still reeling from Pinching’s shock announcement. “He’s a little bit younger, so he’s probably not ready to be part of me and Dave’s gentleman’s club of the road. I mean, we used to complain if the booze wasn’t right, now we complain if the tea bags aren’t the right brand.”
And they’re not just losing a drummer. “He does so much,” says Sensible. “Not just stick-twiddling. He’s in charge of lots of aspects of the live show.” During the chaotic sound-check, Pinch (perched high above the Palladium stage atop a makeshift tomb which one imagines was probably mapped out on a napkin à la Tap) doubles as ever-so-slightly tetchy musical director, pointing out that classically trained string sections need actual written cues rather than a distracted “after the next bit”. And that somebody (mentioning no names) is playing climactic show closer Black Is The Night in a completely alien key. Oh yes, he’ll be missed.
After seats are taken and expensively secured views of the stage blocked by ornate hats and hairdos, the Circus Of Horrors take to the stage for half an hour. Thirty eye-boggling minutes during which one discovers there can be a lot more to hoop-spinning than Grace Jones would have you believe, and that limbo-dancing is apparently still a thing.
As topper-ed Monty ramps up the atmosphere with solo piano piece Beauty Of The Beast, The
Damned take to the stage to a rapturous reception. Paul Gray looks like a reanimated smuggler, a tricorne hat sets off his trusty Rickenbacker a treat, while Sensible’s all frock-coat and plastic specs (the guitarist appears uncharacteristically subdued throughout the entire set. “I was concentrating,” he admits. “I’d been cramming, but some of the material we’d never played before other than in the studio. Some stuff I’d played keyboards on and had to invent guitar parts.”) Pinch? Pinch is very high up… Not ideal for a man who’s used to giving visual cues to his prone-to-a-prognoodle bandmates.
And Vanian? Vanian looks magnificent: an immaculately caped Bela Lugosi-style vampire, utterly in his element. As he applies his commanding baritone to Wait For The Blackout, he gazes out into the gilt ornature and blood-red velvet plush of the capital’s most prestigious theatre, to find an entire legion of the undead staring back at him.
“Our audience are amazing,” says Vanian afterwards, “They got behind the idea and it was wonderful to see.”
The Damned’s constituency are uncommonly faithful, and why not? The Damned, on all evidence presented here tonight, are one of the finest live spectacles available to modern man. Forty-three years into their career, and not only are they still peaking, they’re also finding new ways to freshen up their entire modus operandi. As the performance unfolds, Vanian nods to Dead Of Night by producing a ventriloquist’s dummy for Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde, the audience nearly soil themselves with excitement as a barnstorming Eloise (during the course of which an on-stage murder takes place) confirms that the string section were more than worth all the effort, before long-established setpiece Curtain Call closes the first act on a stunning high.
During the interval, as the audience check each other out over Bloody Marys, Vanian proves his commitment to his art by having his head shaved.
He’s elected to play the second half of the show as Nosferatu. And those bald caps? Well, they just don’t work: “They can come apart and it shows,” says Vanian, “so I had all of my hair shaved off. It took six and a half minutes while people were gluing pieces to me and spray-painting me with make-up.” Pieces? Pointed rubber ears, to be precise.
Anyway, as one might expect, things get rather hectic during Dave’s transformation and all doesn’t go exactly to plan. Originally, as the second act kicks off, with Tightrope Walk (twin aerialists giving it plenty on the flying trapeze), Vanian is supposed to sing from the side of the stage before secreting himself in a coffin from which he’ll emerge, triumphantly bald, after The Dog (a hitherto overlooked gem from Strawberries, based on the character of Claudia from Anne Rice’s
Interview With The Vampire, which features a turn from young actress Indica Watson wearing a party dress which Dave spent last weekend painstakingly removing hundreds of sequins from). But Dave gets into his coffin too early and has to sing both songs from inside. Finally emerging from his box during Neat Neat Neat – in order to slaughter the doppelgänger who’s sung the first part of the song dressed as he had in the first act (oh, do keep up) – he launches into an epic cover of Bauhaus’s Bela Lugosi’s Dead. It’s only then that he realises his in-ear monitor pack has fallen off in the coffin and he can’t hear anything. Cue much pacing. “Unfortunately, I’d worked out this spectacular thing with dry ice, and the coffin was so full of it I couldn’t find the pack.”
But with the entire audience so beside themselves with delight at the sight and sound of a bald Vanian delivering the unofficial Goth national anthem, no one notices, and the show storms on from strength to strength. New Rose, Love Song, an apposite romp through The Doors’ People Are Strange, Smash It Up (Pt 1 & 2) and finally, in its correct key, future classic Black Is The Night.
As the inevitable ovation erupts, Vanian returns to his casket as Sensible, his usual beret back on his head and his unusually taciturn tongue loosened at last, apologises for being “under-rehearsed”, but there’s so much love in the room no one even calls him a wanker.
“I look forward to doing something much, much bigger next year,” Vanian says later. “Maybe The Bride Of Frankenstein… A reanimation, live from the power station.”
Having successfully brought The Damned back from the dead on so many occasions, only a fool would bet against him succeeding.