Before punk won the hearts and minds of the jaded and socially exiled, it destroyed rock ‘n’ roll. It condensed lavish guitar solos into throbbing, four-note whines. It transformed drawn-out psych jams into bursts of rhythm and power chords. Mystical/neo-romantic poetry decayed into 90-second cultural reprimands. Punk empowered anyone with a voice, a pawn-shop drum kit, or enough sheer nerve to join a band. Suddenly, the individual mattered again; rock music ceased its tenure as a phenomenon and became a creation, deities fell and became androgynous vampires, the glue of rock crusted away, to be replaced by three chords, spit, and a safety pin. On both sides of the Atlantic, punk was a welcome and revered deviation from mainstream rock, if not a shocking one. The early progenitors of UK punk held a new banner for chaos, disorder, and social challenge, and their musical output remains startling, yet earnest even today. Their ranks included The Clash, The Buzzcocks, The Sex Pistols, and irrevocably, The Damned.
Occupying the sonic bridge from early 1970s glam rock, The Damned were perhaps the most flaunting members of early punk. Each player -- Brian (guitar), Rat (drums), Captain (bass), and Vanian (voice) -- had a penchant for the limelight, merging glam’s bratty strut with punk’s lewd power. The Damned were in as many ways pioneers, as they were the first punks in the UK to record a single and the first to share a stage with their US counterparts. Damned Damned Damned was also the first UK punk LP, beating the Sex Pistols’ more illustrious Never Mind the Bollocks by several months. Without foresight or agenda, it became a model for punk rock releases, signing to the then fledgling independent label Stiff Records and garnering an underrated producer in Nick Lowe. It was Lowe who kept the record’s production down, giving it a gritty, organic quality that contrasted with the Pistols’ sharp lucidity.
The songs themselves fit and pound and surge; they holler out anti-anthems like “Neat Neat Neat,” “Fish!,” “Stab Your Back,” and “Born to Kill.” There’s the haunting narrative of “Feel the Pain” that reads like a gothic rendition of The Velvets’ “Venus in Furs.” These songs don’t resound the way The Sex Pistols’ and The Clash’s first albums did; that is to say, Damned Damned Damned offers nothing that could be stitched to a leather jacket or spray-painted on the walls of Parliament. Instead, there’s a deeper, embedded aesthetic at work. Within the unrelenting backbeat, the howling guitars, the bounding, precise bass, and David Vanian’s undead-Elvis croon we find expressions of both torture and absurdity.
Take “New Rose,” the album’s first single: it begins almost as a romp on a 1950s sock-hop before it delves into lines like, “I don’t deserve somebody this great/ I’d better go or it’ll be too late.” “I Fall” follows a similar bent: “I'm a falling angel, falling down/ Be a falling angel, won’t you come round?/ Don’t be scared to follow, it’s no crime/ You’re a falling angel before your time.” And it’s here that The Damned reveal an emotional authenticity that exceeds the occasional social posturing of the other early, memorable punk albums. The 30-year anniversary edition of Damned Damned Damned, with its two (slightly redundant) bonus discs, serves to further capture this spirit. Disc 2 compiles John Peel sessions, B-sides (including a double-time take on The Beatles’ “Help”), early singles, live tracks, and demos. Despite the scattershot recording of Disc 3’s live gig at London’s 100 Club, it succeeds in bringing forth The Damned’s sheer power and disregard for rock ‘n’ roll.
That said, there’s no one device that makes Damned Damned Damned worthy of a massive year-30 anniversary reissue, which could perhaps explain its general regard in punk history as a near-classic that failed to inspire the masses the way that Never Mind the Bollocks or The Clash did. Rather, the sum of its parts and the blood on its hands made this a punk’s punk record, an unmolested expression of all things worth fighting for: love, power, brutality, and the contrary right to destroy all of it.