The Damned interview: 'Everybody has an opinion, but that doesn't mean it's a good one'

Goth punk frontman Dave Vanian talks about the band's new album ‘Evil Spirits’, optimism and longevity, and recording with Tony Visconti

Standing on the edge of tomorrow: The Damned, with singer Dave Vanian (right)

Goth punk legends The Damned have released their latest album Evil Spirits. The Independent caught up with frontman Dave Vanian to talk about the band’s apparent immortality, recording with Tony Visconti, and how they found they still have a lot to get off their chests.

As we noted in a recent live review, the band have become, if possible, even more eccentric and outrageous as they were when they first formed in the 1970s. At their sold-out show at Koko in London, they ran helter-skelter through tracks from their debut album Damned, Damned, Damned and included a few new ones from Evil Spirits.

Vanian, 61, appears to possess a few vampiric traits, and prowls the stage in a long coat, black leather gloves and his slicked-back hair, bellowing the lyrics while Captain Sensible provides a touch of light comedy in his Dennis the Menace getup and frequent cheeky quips to the audience.

Read our Q&A with Vanian below:

ROC: Hi, Dave.

Vanian: Hello there. How are you?

ROC: Good, thank you. How are you?

Vanian: Still swinging.

ROC: Oh, I saw, at the gig at Koko.

Vanian: It went really well, considering we did two London’s back to back – you never know with those ones.

ROC: It was good, it was a really good crowd. You were amazing on stage.

Vanian: It seems like a month or two ago now, though. Well, I mean, it was.

ROC: The new stuff you were playing sounded brilliant live.

Vanian: I would’ve liked to have done more. It’s been a weird time with people coming, and going, in the band.

ROC: I guess with such a huge back catalogue, you have to decide what you’re going to miss out from the old stuff.

Vanian: Yeah, but because we spent almost two years doing almost 40 years worth of a back-catalogue set, it’s nice to break away. It’s nice to break away and do a whole pile of new stuff, and then just throw in real good old ones. I like keeping people on their toes.

ROC: It’s funny – I’ve spoken to quite a few bands recently that have been saying that. That, even after just 10 years, there’s expectations to do anniversary tours, and they don’t want to do that.

Vanian: You love your back catalogue. But when you’re doing a lot of shows with them, you get “angsty”. I look forward to the freshness of new material – you don’t know if people are going to like it, or hate it. I like that electricity it brings. If you play the old ones then you know they’re going to cheer, but it’s nice to throw in songs that they don’t know.

ROC: The great thing on this record is that you still have a lot to say.

Vanian: It’s amazing, isn’t it? Well, for a bunch of old farts.

Whenever we’ve recorded its always felt that way. It’s a case of when we’ve made the music; it’s for the music’s sake. It’s not really been “you’ve got to make an album”. They’ve just grown organically. I never know how the album will end up sounding. Whenever we decide to make music again, I never know how half the album will turn out.

ROC: You’ve still got these optimistic-sounding songs about very dark subjects…

Vanian: I’ve never wanted to shout about how bad things are. If you do, then you draw attention to the problem. And if you’re offering no solution whatsoever, then it gets a bit boring. It becomes a whole pile of moaning, and you end up depressed. But then, a rich rock star getting on his bandwagon about something he knows nothing about can be a bit like an old guy singing some tune and dancing around like he’s twenty again.

It’s a bit embarrassing, you know? Then, of course, there’s people who do great work and alert people to the problems that we all face; but I always feel that there’s a lack of optimism, and sometimes optimism will get you through everything. It can be turned into a real positive force. You’re right, there is dark matter because we’re surrounded by it. But I don’t want to sing about “oh no, what are we going to do?”

ROC: If you come away feeling depressed after each track, then it can be a bit redundant.

Vanian: I suppose it really depends. I have listened to a lot of music that is considered depressing, and not found it depressing. I used to listen to a lot of Nico years ago, and to me it was romanticised and extremely gothic in the kind of imagery you get from listening to it. So, I don’t know. It’s your point of view, I guess. But anyway, we’re not giving them any chance. Optimism is a good thing.

ROC: The one stood out for me was “Look Left”, because it addressed that issue of the bubble a lot of people were in before Brexit and Trump when they felt quite smug and safe, and I haven’t heard many artists address that side of things.

Vanian: That’s important. By accident, or by design, we’ve managed to tick all of the boxes with this album. There was no criteria of what we were going to write about, but somehow we were all thinking on the same lines – really easy.

ROC: I also just thought, seeing that live show, it was really wonderful to have a punk band that’s still going so well.

Vanian: It’s difficult if you’re very very successful. We’ve never really been. We’ve had times when we’ve been comfortable, but never really overly successful – where we’ve had mansions and swimming pools, you know, “the Billy Idol’s”.

ROC: I imagine you’re more castle guys anyway.

Vanian: I mean, yeah, after. Nice gothic castle somewhere.

I don’t think we’ve ever had the chance to escape that bubble; you kind of live in a rarefied atmosphere, where things don’t touch you as much. You live in the real world. When you’re in massive bands, you get safe kind of people around, which make sure they don’t see the wrong side of things. You can get lost in that bubble. We almost got lost in the Eighties, but it was a different type of bubble then – more like, how weird can you be?

ROC: I was watching some of your old videos, and it doesn’t seem like you changed much since then.

Vanian: Nah. And the thing about our shows is that nothing is ever choreographed – apart from what I might wear for the evening. There’s no “are we going to talk about this?”, or “are we going to do this?”; because I never know what to expect, and the audience know that. We experiment with the songs, sometimes it’s a straight set, sometimes we’ll talk, and sometimes we’ll have a bit of banter. It’s not going to be “hello, how are you doing? Let’s crack on with the rock n roll’” every night, like some bands do. For us, we’re very much a real band, in terms of everything we feel. Everything we feel is public.

‘It’s nice to break away and do a whole pile of new stuff, and then just throw in real good old ones’

ROC: On one of the tracks you’re talking about anti-war marches, were you talking about Britain? Because Britain seems to have become quite passive when it comes to protesting injustice, making things happen – whereas in the US you just had that massive March For Our Lives.

Vanian: Yeah, I think, what’s been happening, in terms of support, has been amazing. If we do something like that then everybody needs to be involved. It was surprising that they came out in numbers. With the shooting in Florida, why the hell was that allowed to happen? How many more before they decide that automatic weapons aren’t a good thing? It’s not a hunting rifle; it’s not designed to keep burglars out; its for one thing only. A hand pistol is different – not that I think it’s a good idea – but it’s different. Trump is ridiculous saying that teachers should be armed. A teacher who is trying to care and educate children, how many teachers should be able to do that?

It’s ridiculous nonsense that nobody needs. They’re right in saying that “if you ban this, this will happen”, but eventually things will even out. It’s a difficult situation, but I think the only good thing about the political climate everywhere is that people seem to be more involved and aware again. For a while, especially younger kids and that, people didn’t vote because they felt like it was nothing to do with them, or that it wouldn’t happen anyway. If there’s a real power for people, then you can change things.

In England we’re having problems with the education system – teachers have no power, they’re overworked and suffer problems in dealing with special needs children. When the smaller unions close and people strike, it doesn’t get enough notice. When people realise that the people are in control – I know that it’s not this way around – then things can be done.

ROC: Do you listen to much hip hop?

Vanian: Not a lot, not a lot. I tend to go back further in time these days, and listen to Twenties and Thirties stuff. I don’t dislike hip hop, but I don’t have a big knowledge of it.

ROC: The reason that I ask is because with you talking about young people, the punk spirit of using music to protest about current issues has sort of translated over to hip hop.

Vanian: Over the years there’s always been a genre of music that does that. When you think about just before the Second World War, you had all the German cabaret alerting people – it’s a very similar thing. Art is always influenced about what’s around it, and you can’t help what’s there.

I’ve found that I wrote things on the album, which I wouldn’t normally do – not fantasy, but more involved with the film world or books I’ve read. “Plan 9” was basically written about the relationship between James Dean, from an interview about being a vampire, years ago.

ROC: Were you reading about anything in particular in the news that got you riled up?

Vanian: Just the general mood of things. You can’t have your head in the sand. There’s a lot of news that you don’t want to hear, but you hear it anyway. As I say, the album needed to be optimistic because everybody has fell into this depression, where you can’t trust anybody to do anything. The political world is a different world to be in.

You’ve got so much corruption around it, regardless of you even trying to do the job. I don’t want this album to add to that. The Damned have always had a track where you can dance around the room to it, but then when you listen to the lyrics it’s like “woah, that was kind of rubbish”.

ROC: I feel like I know what you’re going to say already, but with artists speaking out, Billy Bragg for example – he feels that he has this responsibility to say something...

Vanian: He can say something. Even classical musical did that in its day, it spoke about oppression and things that were happening at the time, even though we don’t look at it like that. There’s always going to be that, but if everybody was like that, it’d be pretty damn boring.

ROC: That’s what I think.

Vanian: He [Bragg] feels that way, and he thinks that everybody feels that way. But if, for instance, you look at the music in the Second World War, it was all dance music, all upbeat music – because it kept the morale up. It was like “yeah, we’re being bombed, but we’ll finished off” kind of thing.

I’m not putting him down, but I’m not a big Billy Bragg fan. I think that if you say you’re responsible in that way, then you get people talking about nothing they know about. I’m not going to get on a political platform; I don’t have the credentials to do that. Of course, everybody has an opinion, but it doesn’t mean it’s a good one.

ROC: When I went to your gig, I loved that there were such a mix of generations there, and they were all dressing the same. But you don’t see that as often at gigs anymore.

Vanian: No. I know, it’s lovely to see. I love when people get dressed up. It’s the one thing I miss. Over the past 10-15 years everyone dresses down.

ROC: Do you think its to do with genre? Because people don’t belong to a genre anymore, like they used to in the Seventies, Eighties, Nineties, etc?

Vanian: I think that everything is so fractured, and instantly available. If someone looks a certain way, you can just buy it off the shelf. You don’t get people creating their own styles as much, because people are influenced by certain things that just grown organically. People just decide they like something, and dress up that way – it’s a fad. It’s like the people that we called “post-punk”, who dressed up to go out and then got back in their normal clothes. I mean, I’m all for theatre and melodrama.

ROC: I don’t think anyone would be surprised to hear that.

Vanian: It cements the fact that we all wear clothes that are totally impractical.

ROC: And you went out to Brooklyn to record Evil Spirits, right, with Tony Visconti?

Vanian: I don’t like modern production, at all. But there are a lot of similar records, you know. We record the best when we record the old-fashion way. I just love the analogue sound, a mixture of new and old. I’ve noticed there’s a big swing-back, to try and get the best of both. There were some young producers that I wanted to use, but we couldn’t really talk about music because the references that we were using, they didn’t really have any knowledge of that stuff. We were on a strict timing as well.

We would have had longer with someone else; it becomes quite wearing saying “I don’t know what that is”. I think there was a period in the 60s, where people were striving to sound like they’re using different producers and different styles, and it wasn’t the music, it was the sound. I want to go back recording that way. With Tony, we had nine days to record. And, to be fair, he hadn’t heard it before then. It wasn’t until a month before we went in that studio that we had anything recorded.

We did all of this on the strength that we could make an album without any anybody hearing anything. I knew I had ideas, and Captain knew he did, but I think people were worried about what our ideas would be. I know what we’re capable of, and we’re quite good at working under pressure. It all came together. We came out with about 20 pieces of music in the end. We picked the best ones, and the ones that were closest to being finished. But we still have these unfinished pieces of music, which is brilliant, because usually you finish an album and everything goes into it.

ROC: That’s interesting, compared to a lot of bands who boast about having to cut it down from 70 tracks or more.

Vanian: That’s never happened to us. We’re usually like, “right, what are we gonna do for the next track?” When we did “13th Floor”, that was written in 24 hours. It was the last track to go on the album. It started because I really like a piano part, and Captain and I started work on it.

There was a drummer in it, and he went off thinking that we’d only half a track, that it was rubbish and it wouldn’t work. So, Captain and I worked all night. We finished at 6 o’clock the next morning. The sound of it was one of the best on the album. Captain and I love the experimental track – but we didn’t have the luxury on this album due to time, unfortunately.

Sometimes we find that we write something to complicated. On this track, there’s a lot of backing record, a lot of melodies – not impossible to do, but different on the record. “Standing on the edge of tomorrow” works differently live, but it still really works well.​

Evil Spirits, the new album from The Damned, is out now