KEXP Suggests: The Damned: Don't You Wish We Were Dead at NWFF

The Damned: Don't You Wish We Were DeadNorthwest Film Forum Screenings: 

Friday, August 14 at 8 PM

Saturday, August 15 at 4 PM

Saturday, August 15 at 8 PM

Sunday, Aug 16 at 4 PM

Sunday, Aug 16 at 8 PM

This weekend, the Northwest Film Forum is showing The Damned: Don't You Wish We Were Dead. You won't want to miss this documentary of scene-starting UK punk band The Damned, whose 1977 debut, Damned Damned Damned, the website All Music Guide critic Ned Ragget described as “rock at its messy, wonderful best.” Crisply directed by Wes Orshoski (known for his exquisite full-length profile of Lemmy from Motorhead), the film is a vivid recounting of the band’s career, and debuted to acclaim at SXSW earlier this year.

Dave Vanian, Captain Sensible, Brian James, Rat Scabies. I would stare at those names on the 45 of the first punk 45 I ever bought, “Love Song,” the kick off track from their third album (and definitive masterpiece) Machine Gun Etiquette. I would imagine what these boys were like as I pummeled the walls of my bedroom listening to its brief sides. Such darkly exotic monikers! These weird foreign brats on the sleeve must truly be as thuggish and mysterious as they appeared, each one looking like a bad seed gone to stage like geeks in a circus, the vinyl soaked with back alley boasts and bitter-fuzz playing of criminally age-arrested simple tunes. (Rat Scabies himself is reported to have earned his name at his try-out for the band from being visibly afflicted with the itchy skin rash as he scratched at his chin, and then the others witnessed a vermin crawl across the rehearsal space just as they were about to discover his drumming finesse. Not sure how true that story is.)As the story unfolds, through the eyes and words of many were-there veterans (Charlie from UK Subs) and inspired fans (Jack Grisham of TSOL), we experience how The Damned started as an everyman’s punk band, the first in many things: First new-era punk single “New Rose,” first punk album, first punk U.S. tour. Yet somehow they were mostly forgotten by those outside the milieu. Why? As pioneers who bridged the gap between the music of the Stooges and the fresh wave of post-New York inspired British bands in the officially tagged “Punk Rock” period, The Damned had the same internal squabbles and drama based on tempers and royalties as other groups of the era. But their hard-working class grit, ability to make do for themselves regardless of lack of label backing, and unconcern of what others thought (they got away with “Curtain Call” on their fourth release The Black Album, a song which is almost eighteen minutes long and defies every stereotype you might think about the genre they helped ignite), landed them precisely in perpetual survival mode. The title of the movie suggests that some terrible tragedy (the death of a member perhaps, after recording a classic record) might have helped increase their fame. It's this gallows wondering that fuels the desperation in the film.

Staying together and preserving arguably had a bigger influence on the future of punk than the legends of their oft-compared competitors the Sex Pistols and The Clash, though. Because even if they were actually brought together for rehearsals by Pistols promotional provocateur Malcolm McLaren and had a management dalliance with Clash PR-brute Bernie Rhodes, they resisted the heavy-handedness of for doing what they did best just for themselves. Musically, their interpretation of punk combined a 70s anti-stadium rock pomp, intimately audience-engaged spectacle with a love for all the bad guy music teenagers are timelessly drawn to: Jerry Lee Lewis is cited as a primary influence, and his relentless snarl and bark and beat is their M.O., mixed with an Iggy Pop-like moxie of doomed caterwauling and caustic seduction. It wasn’t the world-attacking rage-surf armageddon or military-marching dystopian-pop of their two most highly profiled contemporaries. It was less contrived, more like what was happening in the states with magazines like BOMP and compilations like Nuggets discovering the sweet hidden trash of 60s garage mavericks. But with that everything-is-over pessimism of the economy in the late 70s UK added to it.It’s that morbidly depressed era that seems to have cast a long crawling shadow on the viewpoints of the band members, for though they didn’t die, and Dave was able to escape the life of an actual gravedigger and the Captain was able to translate his clownish yob appeal into solo pop chart schmaltz, the band seemed cursed. (Two successive bass players got cancer, which would be Spinal Tap funny if cancer was ever funny, though the men are still alive and laughing and wondering if it was the spit-gobs hurled relentlessly at them that caused it.) In a brief explanation, Scabies had been beaten in front of his bandmates one night and they didn’t intervene, and then seemed to take it out on the rest of The Damned by finagling their residual monies into his own pocket. (His nasty declaration towards the group’s legacy and the documentary itself towards the end of the film is as much a story of punk as the rest of The Damned’s hellhound-on-my-trail resilience.)

So if they never made that much money, and stayed together and played together longer than almost any other original UK punk band, what exactly did they achieve? Well, remember the fact that they bravely toured the U.S. very early on, and you can hear their music most prominently in both the West Coast Goth movement (Vanian rocked that look before any other 70s kids), and the beloved early Orange County hardcore of TSOL, 45 Grave, and other bands that you can hear traces of at almost every punk rock show. (Remember when Bad Religion cut an expansive and much loathed prog-rock album? What do you think gave them the bollocks to do that? And The Damned got away with such things.) You know how they say that no one quite sounded like the Sex Pistols? Well, most punk bands that you know owe a huge debt to The Damned, in everything from their garage rock worship to their DIY stoicism, and the weird and loving and passionate Damned fans who are briefly interviewed (“What other punk bands?”) confirm this legacy.