CAPTAIN SENSIBLE

As the original Damned dust off the cobwebs (Covid permitting) – an audience with their master of mayhem. But what’s this? Method in his madness?

IN AN APARTMENT BLOCK HIGH UP ON ONE OF Brighton’s hills, Captain Sensible is giving MOJO a tour of his home. Its funky psychedelic décor, it transpires, is inspired by Austin Powers’ groovy shag-pad in the cryogenically suspended spy’s first film. “Like [Powers’ creator] Mike Myers, my love of the ’60s is tinged with regret that I wasn’t there,” he says, in cheery south London tones. “I was at school when the Summer of Love was going on and I used to read about it. Fucking hell – I want to go down the Middle Earth and UFO club! But I was 12. If I’m lucky enough to meet any of the ’60s people, I always ask them, What was it like?!”

That The Damned’s guitarist is infatuated by the psychedelic era to the extent he’s painted his flat with giant op-art spots and lurid candy stripes should come as no surprise to fans au fait with the pioneering punk group’s extraordinary late-’70s/early-’80s triptych of acid-dipped albums – Machine Gun Etiquette, The Black Album and Strawberries.

But the Captain’s gift for psychedelic fretboard activity and serpentine prog rock arrangements is not – it’s fair to say – what the world best knows him for. His public image is that of punk rock’s grinning loon, possessed of a penchant for mayhem and an on-stage fashion sensibility that has, beyond his trademark red beret and plastic shades, variously involved tutus, nurse’s uniforms or, even more alarmingly, nothing whatsoever covering his modesty. Contrary behaviour being his forte, it is only fitting, then, that in 1982 he shot to UK Number 1 as a solo artist with a throwaway pop cover of Happy Talk from the South Pacific soundtrack. Household fame ensued.

As a decades-in-the-waiting reunion of the original 1976 James/ Sensible/Scabies/Vanian Damned line-up hoves into view this summer, it seems timely for MOJO to peel away the complex layers that swaddle the man born Raymond Burns in Balham in July 1954. Sporting a Crystal Palace football top and heavy-framed specs, Sensible – so dubbed during an anarchic coach trip to the August 1976 Mont-de-Marsan punk festival – is nothing but upbeat, candid and entertaining for our two-hour encounter.

Alluding, for the first time, to the childhood traumas that helped shape him, he will poignantly admit, “I don’t think I’ve ever grown up, because I’m still trying to make sense of those days…” But mostly, he spends our conversation marvelling at the strange and unpredictable path his life has taken – while ruefully admitting to being, at times, “a complete arsehole”.

“The name Captain Sensible?” he chuckles. “It is ironic, you know…”

Your dad’s job was maintaining street lighting, but as a young man he’d occasionally worked as an extra alongside Bond star Roger Moore. Were there acting ambitions in the Burns family?

No (laughs). He’d tell me stories about Roger and a few others sitting around playing cards and drinking, then grumbling when they had to go on set. My dad was very much part of south London pub culture. Someone must have said to him, (Cockney geezer) “Hey Tom, there’s a right old