I’d heard approximately half of the songs on this album before, on some kind of compilation of Damned material, and it was great to hear them again after a long time – probably around the early Nineties I would guess was the last time I heard most of the familiar tracks apart from Love Song. And I’m happy to report that the rest of the tracks are as good as the ones I'd heard.
Nominally punk, The Damned have a variety of styles on this album. Love Song and Noise Noise Noise are fast and thrashy, heading into hardcore territory. I Just Can’t Be Happy Today and Plan 9 Channel 7 are more melodic and soaring, more like the kind of direction that The Damned will take with tracks like Eloise. And both directions are good, showcasing Dave Vanian’s vocal abilities.
There’s a cover of an MC5 song which shows what a great guitarist Captain Sensible really is, with some Hendrix-esque soloing that is just gorgeously scratchy. Melody Lee lures the listener into a false sense of calm with a nice bit of piano (the Captain again, I think). And let’s not forget the wonderful anarchy of Smash It Up, almost prog meets punk in its brief complexity.
The punk ethos is supposedly that anyone can play, talent is not required, and I’m sure there are a lot of dreadful bands doing brief spells in pubs and clubs that history has forgotten. Survivor bias means that the ones we still listen to are the ones who were, actually, really skillful with their instruments and really good songwriters. Just because a piece of music is fast and raucous doesn’t mean that any old idiot can get away with it. That’s one of the things I love about The Damned. They’re happy to just mess around (there are Monty Python-esque interludes of sound effects and speech between the tracks, some tracks (Love Song for example) seem to get cut off before the track properly finishes. But when they want to, they can throw out a sublime track like Plan 9 Channel 7.
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