Our Phil gets the lowdown from these masters of anarchy, chaos and destruction on touring, creativity, The Damned's sound, tinnitus, “over playing”, and cats!
Ahead of The Damned’s final, final tour of Australia I managed to catch up with drummer Rat Scabies on 31st July to talk creativity, pushing yourself and never stopping learning…
Punktuation – Hello Rat, happy birthday for yesterday, hope you had a good one?
Rat – Thanks, I was rehearsing, I have another band on the go, The Sinclairs (a surf noir duo with multi-instrumentalist Billy Shinbone) We have a new single coming out today, and a couple of shows coming up, so I spent my birthday rehearsing!
P – Very nice! You’ve got a few side bands going on; One Thousand Motels (another duo with Chris Constantiou), and Professor and the Madman (along with fellow Damned member Paul Gray, and Alfie Agnew & Sean Elliot formally of U.S band D.I.) They’re all bringing out new albums, so you’re a busy man?
Rat – Yeah, I am, and I got lucky – I bumped into people and just really like their song writing and what they do. Professor and the Madman was slightly different, but with The Sinclairs, I’ve known Billy Shinbone for years, and we said we should put a project together. It ended up being a bit more psychedelic than we expected it to be, but it’s something I really like doing, because I like listening to it. Six o’clock comes, I put music on in the kitchen, start making dinner, and I don’t have anything new on there – it’s all projects I’m involved in. Same with One Thousand Motels, stuff comes up on the speaker and I’m like “I like this”. I’m proud to play it to anybody.
P – With The Damned, and also with the side projects, you’re not constrained by one sound, you just go for whatever you fancy?
Rat – Yeah, I think that’s part of being a musician really. It’s not about doing the same thing. I always want to learn; I always want to get something new, find a different way of doing something, and that creative thing is really why you do it. It’s not for any other reasons – well not for me anyway!
P – So, 21-year-old Rat, would he have thought at 71 he’d still be pushing himself, challenging himself?
Rat – I thought I’d be dead!! No, definitely not! I mean, who thought Punk would have any sort of a life span? It was always a disposable thing, it wasn’t meant to be something that was preserved, it was about the moment, it was like a snapshot in time. The thought of it still being around… I mean, without blowing my own trumpet, ‘Damned, Damned, Damned’ still sounds like a great record! (Editor: We fully agree!) It’s got something about it. This wasn’t deliberate, we didn’t know what we were doing – we just went in and did it, and that was the end result. And you know there’s the old-fashioned, Punk rock, anarchy side of me that says “Well, you should have been done with that years ago”, but also, when people talk to you about that record, I’m just glad they get it, appreciate it, and want to listen to it. I mean you don’t have to listen to anything anymore – it’s a choice. You can click a mouse and move on.
P – I have an 18-year-old daughter who’s going to see you play in Brisbane, and it’s possibly the most excited I’ve seen her before a gig! Because of the energy, and the feeling and, as you said, the rawness of it. If you listen to ‘Never Mind The Bollocks’, it sounds over-produced, whereas with ‘Damned, Damned, Damned’ it was; “Right, we’re just going to do this and we’re going to put it out”. And that’s the difference, for me, that’s the essence of Punk. Do it yourself, don’t overdo it, just put it out.
Rat – Yeah, it was very honest. When you think back, Fleetwood Mac spent two years making their album…
P – And Stone Roses took seven for their second album!
Rat – That difficult second album…. but for some reason, it still stands up, athough in some ways it’s a challenge. How do you compete with that? I think you have to resort back to that 1970’s way of working and get on with it and do it. See what you’ve got, see what you can turn it into. Ignorance is a great thing, perfection is overrated!
P – Wholly agree with that!
Rat – You just do whatever you can to make it sound like music, and if it sounds like music, then that’s what it is.
P – The wonderful thing about The Damned is that you started with that energy, that rawness, that anger – and then you took it all over the place! You’ve got ‘Phantasmagoria’, you’ve got ‘Anything’. You’ve got Goth, you’ve got garage Punk, garage rock, you’ve got it all. You just don’t give a shit; you just always do what you want to do.
Rat – Always, always. None of us had written a song before, or any music, professionally. We couldn’t stereotype ourselves; we just didn’t know how to be the same thing over and over. We could have tried, and redone the first album for the next 50 years, but that wouldn’t have been sincere, and I don’t think it would have lasted – we weren’t comfortable doing that. Part of the journey was also experimenting with sound, going into a studio and going “Wow, what does echo do, what does reverb do? What are you touching over there, what’s that for?” It was a great way to make records!
P – We pick up that experimental thing on records like the ‘The Black Album’, where everything that was in that recording studio and its environment was taken in and stuck on a record because you just want to push yourself, and that’s magnificent!
Rat – Absolutely, and it’s a gift to have been able to do that. I think we were very lucky, certainly with ‘The Black Album’; the record company were very understanding about the creative process and had a lot of faith in us to be able to make the record. So, we were quite lucky that we were in an environment where it was nice, and big, and everything sounded nice in there, it was a real kind of treat. But then you look at when we recorded ‘New Rose’, at Parkway Studios – looking at the room you’re in (a very small room!) it was about the same size – so you couldn’t get into the control room because it was only big enough for two people. Everyone had to shuffle in and out, squeeze up…
And there we ran out of time. Ten minutes in, and Rat’s morning of interviews had come to an end.
P – Thanks, for your time, take care!
Rat – Thanks a lot, cheers bye.
I’ll always regret not asking about him playing Bingo in the tv series Black Doves (Bingo the character – not bingo the popular pastime)!
I also caught up with bassist Paul Gray, a few days later on 3rd August, to talk about house moving, cats, tinnitus, sound, “over playing” and touring…
Paul Gray – Hey Phil!
Punktuation – Hi Paul, how’re you doing?
Paul – I’m very good, I’m being slave driven, I’ve got about eight twenty-minute meetings, I feel I’m being driven along!
P – You’re a busy man, you’ve got your Damned things, you’ve got Professor and the Madman with Damned bandmate, Rat Scabies, and Sean Elliott & Alfie Agnew – there’s a lot going on?
Paul – I am, I am, and we’re moving house at the moment, so I’m even busier.
P – That’s never fun…
Paul – No, no it’s not…
P – How is your cat going to cope?
Paul – Do you know what, I took him along last Monday. My partner Annette is already in there, and he had a mooch around the sunroom, then wanted to go out straight away! You know, you’re meant to keep them in for four or five weeks, that first evening he wandered around the whole house.
(at this point, my two dogs that heard my wife’s car return, and started barking in excitement)
Paul – Did they hear me mention cats? But three days and he’s completely settled in, he’s 17 years old, so he can’t be arsed to jump over fences and go chasing birds. He’s great, thanks – he’s well settled, as I will be soon.
P – So, you had the whole tinnitus / cancer thing, and probably still have the tinnitus I would assume?
Paul – Yeah, tinnitus has been with me for thirty years…
P – How do you cope with that, being a musician?
Paul – With difficulty, I’ve been to every sort of therapy, I’ve seen the best consultants in Britain. I’ve tried the maskers, the CBT, the apps, all the things they give you. Nothing worked for me. I know exactly how it was caused; not so much live performing but from writing on headphones. Thirty, forty years ago, on a four-track Portastudio late at night. You get excited, the volume goes up, the mid goes up, a few more beers, the top end gets killed. I didn’t know that at the time, until one day you take your headphones off and hear the screaming… you think it will go, but it doesn’t…
I ducked out of live playing for 15 years and worked for the Musicians Union, because I couldn’t cope with any noise at all, but I’ve slowly habitualised myself to it again. Plus, I’m profoundly deaf now, so I’ve got hearing aids for the day, earplugs for when I go out, so it’s a constant hassle. We’ve put screens round the drum kit; we don’t play too loud on stage – or at least I don’t. And I think, what would I be doing if I wasn’t doing this? I’d be sitting at home wishing I was. I just take as much care as I can, it’s not pleasant, but at least I got it from doing something I love, and not working down a coalmine or in the military as some poor buggers did…
P – The Australia tour, we should probably cover that. You’re doing Australia, New Zealand and Japan. So that’s three countries, six gigs, eleven days. How do you attune your body to that?
Paul – I’m trying to ignore it (laughs)! I’m almost trying not to look at the itinerary because it’s too scary. I mean, we didn’t think we’d come back to Australia – you know we lost Brian (James) at the beginning of the year, last year, bless him. It could be any one of us, we’re at that age; I was 68 two days ago. And you start creaking, you start aching a little bit, not from the playing so much, but from the travelling; the flying, being squashed in vans, uncomfortable beds, lack of sleep – it takes its toll.
But we love Australia, we love New Zealand, we’re getting on really well, and playing really well. It’s the band’s 50th year, and if we don’t go back now, we never will go back again. So, they put it in, and we asked if we could have a few days off in between, so we can enjoy it, but financially we can’t do it. It’s so expensive to tour and to fly, fuel’s gone up because of the obvious, and insurance. Our budget doesn’t really allow for days off; I think there’s one or two days where we’re driving or flying or whatever. We are starting in New Zealand, so we’ve got a couple of days in Auckland, one day to just get over the flight, the next just to rehearse, but you know we’ll crack on as we always do, and it will be fun!
P – It will be fun! I moved out here 25 years ago and thought I probably wouldn’t see The Damned again, but I’ve seen you play so many times over here! It’s good for the soul. It is as you say a monumental task to get over; you are very much appreciated by everyone over here.
Paul – We know that, that’s why we’re playing – if we weren’t, we wouldn’t bother (laughs)
P – I saw a video recently of you revising your live set-up for your bass, and you saying you’d finally got the sound that you really wanted?
Paul – I said that didn’t I? (laughs)
P – Do you ever stop learning about the bass and its sound?
Paul – You can never stop learning about music and playing. I know the sound that I like and I get it from the Rickenbacker, but because they’re handmade guitars, every one is different. They may all look the same, but they all have their different characters; some are really awful and some are really beautiful. I’ve got some beautiful ones! I have a very simple set-up, just an Orange amp. There are two pre-amps that go straight into the P.A; one gives all the bottom end, one gives a nice grungy, clunky top end from the Ric. Mix them together and bingo! Regarding the two guitars I’m using at the moment, they were both made in the early 1980’s, which seems to me the golden period for those basses. I’ve got older ones, I’ve got newer ones, but for me, these work best live. Brian, my bass tech, will try them out before the sound check, or if we don’t make it in time because of flights or whatever, he’ll tell me “Well I think this one is going to sound better tonight” and I trust him, so I say, “Let’s use that one.” I’ll swap between the two at the moment, but of course that might change again…
P – Your personal bass playing sound, I find, is very distinctive. You’re up and down the fretboard all the time, you don’t seem to want to leave a note unplayed?
Paul – (laughing) you mean I over play? (continues laughing) I do…
P – No, but you don’t. That’s the thing. With the other members of the band, you’re all big personalities, all brilliant musicians, do you find that that your playing intertwines with what they’re doing?
Paul – Yeah, Rat and I have this weird thing! Rat never listens to the bass – you watch him on stage he’ll never be looking at me, he’ll be looking at Captain, like he used to look at Brian. He plays to the guitar, so I have a job to try and figure out what Rat’s going play from one second to the next, because it’s not like everyone says, that the drums and bass player should be locked in – tell that to Keith Moon and John Entwistle! They collided beautifully at times, other times it went off quite chaotically, very much like Rat and I, but it works.
I started off being a very busy bass player, which isn’t, when you’re taught bass, what you are supposed to do! In my first band, Eddie and the Hot Rods, we had one rhythm guitarist so there was no melody in between the guitar and the vocals. And also, because we didn’t have a backing singer, no backing vocals. I would fill in the melodies on the bass with those I would if I was singing. I started playing a lot of stuff and it just stuck.
It works with The Damned because the notes I tend to gravitate towards work really well with Dave’s melody style, and with Captain. Captain’s such a great melodic guitarist, he plays really nice, chorded versions that a lot of guitarists don’t do. And with Rat, at any given moment, he’s doing something completely unexpected. It’s a real fun band for a bass player to play in because you don’t know what’s going to happen from one night to the next! But, yeah, it works – it shouldn’t do, but it does.
P – It certainly does! But also, if you look at where The Damned started, with the Brian James dominated albums, including the second album, which some people don’t like but I think is magnificent. Then you get the more Sensible influenced one, ‘Machine Gun Etiquette’, and then you get ‘The Black Album’ (first to feature Paul Gray on bass), where everyone is contributing massively. You’re all talented musicians and songwriters to work together like that. Well, there’s obviously ego and there’s disagreement, but you do pull it off.
Paul – (satirical voice) No, no, no, no, no… (much laughter from us both)
P – No ego?
Paul – That’s what makes it work. We all know when an idea is good, and we all know when an idea works, and when it doesn’t work, we just dump it. There’s never any plan, I mean someone will come in with a song that isn’t even half formed, it could just be a snatch of something, but somebody else could pick up on that and all of a sudden, it becomes developed. With some fully developed songs, you try them and they just aren’t going to work, so you dump them. You have to be quite brutal about it. The nice thing with us is that we’re all pretty creative, so nobody’s miffed or pissed off if their idea doesn’t get used, because there’ll be another one along in a minute which works.
P – Do you have any plans to write new material?
Paul – Well we talked about it…
P – I bet you all have ideas?
Paul – We’ve been so busy the last couple of years, as you know, we knocked out the covers album (‘Not Like Everybody Else’, a compilation of songs that influenced Brian James) in five days, literally five days at the end of the American tour last year! We were all exhausted. We’d just done five weeks in America, and we had another five weeks coming up afterwards in Japan and Australia. We thought “If we come out of this with a couple of backing tracks that would be good going, but we came out with a completely finished album, vocals and all, apart from a few guitar overdubs. Even though they weren’t any of our songs, and we’d never played them together before, we knew which songs were going to work as we knew all the songs in our heads. Again, we understand each of our individual styles, we know each other’s strengths, we know how everybody’s going to play and respond to a musical idea. After 50 years that becomes quite ingrained! I know we’d all like to make another album, when we get the time. We’re busy up to December, then we’ll be in America for the entire month of April. I know we’ve all got ideas and it’s been talked about…
P – Well, that fills my heart with warmth. When you say the last album was a covers album, I’ve listened to it a lot, and I feel it’s an encapsulation of you and the music.
Paul – It’s an interpretation of the songs we all liked, and Brian especially, that got him to pick up guitar back in the early 70’s. That’s the common thread that we’ve all got in this band; that we all loved music from the 60’s – The Kinks, The Seeds, Pink Floyd, The Who, especially the garage stuff, and all the Nuggets stuff. Brian’s widow Mina threw in some songs that Brian played a lot, so some of those are on there. It was a tribute to Brian, but also a tribute to our individual and collective influences that really made us what we are now. Well observed, a real fun album to make as well!
P – It’s a good listen, a very good listen. So, what’s on your horizon in the near future?
Paul – Well, I’m in the middle of moving house! I’ve got the builders in, and I’ve got the builders in at the other place. We’ve got four shows with the Hollywood Vampires starting in 10 days, so I should pick up a bass…
P – If you can find one!
Paul – I’ve been house clearing for the last couple of weeks… So, getting prepared for the tour, it’s a long one. I think I’m home for about ten days from now until the middle of December, which it’s quite brutal. I’ve been stocking up on the old vitamins you know!
P – I would, sleeping tablets as well probably?
Paul – A few of them as well!
P – It’s a bit different from going up and down on canal barges?
Paul – (laughs) I’ve got this one…
P – I was reading about the barge earlier today – it just sounds like manic chaos! You, Rat and Captain on a boat, going up and down a canal?
Paul – Well everything you could imagine happened, happened. I woke up the first morning and my boots were on fire outside the window. Everything got shot with an air rifle, the boat got sunk in the end because it was so trashed, blah, blah, blah…
P – So the anarchy, chaos and destruction thing does ring true then?
Paul – (guttural laugh)
P – Thank you Paul, looking forward to the gig in Brisbane, see you there!
Paul – Thanks a lot, see you, ta ta!
This is your last chance to see The Damned down under! Final tickets for the shows are available from HERE
Main Photo Credit: PER-ÅKE WÄRN
- Tuesday, 8 September 2026 – The Powerstation, Auckland, NZ
- Thursday, 10 September 2026 – Sydney Opera House, Sydney, NSW
- Friday, 11 September 2026 – The Tivoli, Brisbane, QLD
- Sunday, 13 September 2026 – Forum Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC
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