REAL GONE
Neat Neat Neat
Punk prime mover and Damned guitarist Brian James left us on March 6.
Damn good: Brian James was Brit-punk’s under-theradar architect.
Erica Echenberg/Getty
IF THE DAMNED were the band of ‘firsts’ in UK punk rock, releasing both a single and an album before the Sex Pistols and The Clash, it was all down to their visionary leader, Brian James, who shaped the aesthetic of punk’s first wave.
The sound in James’s head was “action rock’n’roll”, a distinctly British evolution of the feral music he’d obsessed over in his teens – turn-of-the-’70s Detroit failures The Stooges and MC5, together with beat-pop flops The Pretty Things, whose mid-’60s repertoire he once assured me, “shits all over the Stones”. Just like his heroes, however, James never got his dues, to the last a gentle soul who didn’t shout as loud as all the other self-appointed punk originators.
Born Brian Robertson on February 18, 1955 in Hammersmith, aged 18 he already had a band up and running, gigging alongside Hawkwind and the Pi
Fairies at free festivals. Even so, he admitted, “it was hard for the straight clubs to promote us with a name like Bastard.”
“It was hard for the straight clubs to promote us with a name like Bastard.”
BRIAN JAMES
So, the combo relocated to Belgium. When James nipped home for Christmas 1975, however, he answered a ‘musicians wanted’ ad which mentioned The Stooges, and hooked up with Mick Jones (later of The Clash) and Tony James (Generation X) in the legendary proto-punk band the London SS, who duly rehearsed the majority of what became the first Damned LP. After a few months, though, the guitarist broke away and formed The Damned, who soon took flight under his relatively experienced leadership. Thus they beat their rivals to the punch with October ’76’s pulsating New Rose single, and four months later, the immortal Damned Damned Damned.