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The
Damned - The NOTE Era Line-Up
I've explained about myself
here,
and I feel it bears no repetition. Most of the history of The Damned
is freely available on the net, so the same goes for that. What I will do is a very
superficial description of my co-conspirators during my time with punk rock's
most resilient old lags, starting with:
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Dave stems back to the original days of The Damned,
1976 and all that. He hasn't aged at all in nearly thirty years, possibly because of his
former fixation with vampires. These days he's more of a Harley Davidson riding,
rocker
type, with a Pepe Le Pew style quiff. Dave used to piss about with a band called
The Phantom Chords after he and everyone but Rat quit The Damned
in about 1987/88ish. I've heard the unreleased album, and The Phantom Chords weren't as bad as Ratty used to tell
everyone they were.
I got on well with Dirty, even
though he let us down on
more than one occasion. He's a very straightforward and funny bloke and we had a
lot of shared interests. Unfortunately he's probably not the best guy to rely on
in a crisis so I hear, but you wouldn't want to get into a fight with him. His
years spent as a grave digger make him a truly hard bastard. I've got a video of
him smacking an over-zealous stage invader and it's some punch. Dirty still croons a tune for a few bob with Captain,
Patricia and some other blokes who I don't know.
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Stalwart of the band, and the bloke who brought them
back from the grave more times than I'd care to remember, Chris Millar is a
crafty geezer with an eye for a fast buck and a scam or three up his sleeve.
He's very astute and always has things on the go. Ratty ran the Global Audio Foundation,
a file-sharing service for
musicians to record together online. He's also playing for a band
called The Germans, doing film work, and has a virtual band called Slipper who
are unique in that the band have a record out but have never been in the
same room as each other. Ah, the wonders of the net.
Rat was once a toilet cleaner at the Fairford Halls in
Croydon, before becoming a full time burglar. In the time I've known him, Rat
has bought and sold the back catalogue of old Damned tunes over and over, been
the restaurant critic for Loaded, adapted Alan Moore's Watchmen for radio
(recorded but never broadcast unfortunately), done some soundtrack work for
Disney and Miramax with the late Joe Strummer, owned his own studio where he produced
The La's among others,
sorted out a few punk super-groups, done session work and generally kept a finger
in many pies whilst supporting a wife and three kids. Sharp, funny and
occasionally a bit vicious (verbally), Rat is a top bloke and a working class
legend.
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