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The Damned Message Board Interview These
pages are a lightly edited transcript of an interview conducted through the www.officialdamned.com message board. All the questions were
put online by
registered users, a geezer from Ireland called Gary hosted it and then I spent
an age waffling on about stuff. In case you wonder, NOTE is Not Of This Earth,
the one and only bit of Damned product I played on. We start with a lovely
question: I'd
like to know why NOTE sucked so hard.
Ha ha ha. I did stick an answer to
this on the message board. There are a lot of reasons for this overall ‘suckiness’.
Some guy e-mailed me a while back asking what I thought of it and I pulled it to
bits track by track. There’s stuff on it I don’t even remember recording,
and stuff I didn’t record. Glen. The real problem was lack of good songs and
Alan’s ‘Theme Guitar’. Alan had a beef with Brian James and wrote three
chord songs about him obsessively. Weird really but there you go. There were a
few good moments in a few tunes but I believe in the old adage that you can’t
polish a turd. It was a bit demoralising for Dolli and myself trying to come up
with interesting things to play over what was essentially A, D and E in several
different orders. Ratty did some fine drum stuff. Testify is one I remember as
very drummer friendly.
Then we get into the production
(or lack of) side of it. If you want to mix a track, leave the big bag of weed
outside the studio, cos you ain’t hearing what I’m hearing. Too many guitars
were added, which washed out a lot of the real punchy original stuff. It got
fucked around endlessly after the initial recording was done, Glen popped in and
replaced a bit of bass when I was ‘unavailable’, then I recorded over what
he did ‘cos Dave didn’t like it. The Theme Guitar was all dumped then
re-recorded by someone else. Sometimes in the studio I would just be arseing
around playing any old bollocks whilst waiting to do the track properly only to
be told that we would be using that take, as the tape was running. I could go on
but there’s tons of problems I could see with it. Oh, and Shut It was a pile
of shit from the word go. Who the
hell told Dave it was OK to sing the expression "Cream Of The Crop"?
Shouldn't that be reserved for Brian Adams or something?
Or
indeed Desiree. Lyrics by Alien Tea Pot. Say no more. Striptease yourself
against a wall? I think not somehow, but what the fcuk? No other bugger could be
arsed to write any lyrics so you get what you’re given I guess. That was Ceebees mostly although a few other places did that one too. “You fat bastard” always got a good airing but rather the punters slinging abuse that beer bottles I always say. My all time favourite has to be Glasgow Barrowlands though…"Sumo…Sumo…"
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