Old songs for an audience of elderly people: The Damned’s Not Like Everybody Else reviewed

I remember hearing ‘Neat Neat Neat’, the Damned’s second single, and actually falling off a chair laughing. Is that really the future, I wondered, clutching tight hold of my New Riders of the Purple Sage album. Yes, reader, I’m afraid it was, with the Damned pre-eminent, handmaidens to the whole thing. They made by my reckoning three half-decent singles – ‘New Rose’, ‘Smash It Up’ and the ‘Ça plane pour moi’ facsimile ‘Jet Boy, Jet Girl’. And that was it. Pantomime punk that morphed into pantomime Goth, mostly.

Now they are back doing what pensioned-off boomers have been doing for years, the 1960s (largely) covers album, a last resort when inspiration and public attention have left for other places. This is supposedly a tribute to their dead guitarist, Brian James: they chose the songs he liked and it’s fair to say the band’s only really competent musician (back then) had decent taste. R. Dean Taylor’s ‘There’s a Ghost in My House’ is reduced to pub rock and John Sebastian’s ‘Summer in the City’ just gets totally lost. They are better on the Stooges lowering ‘Gimme Danger’ and The Creation’s proto-metal ‘Making Time’. Of course there is ‘See Emily Play’ (with Captain Sensible taking the vocals, I think), which is handled with a certain reverence, but they then trample all over The Yardbirds’ ‘Heart Full of Soul’ and fail to match the Stones’ swing on ‘The Last Time’.

There is no doubting their competence now, though. And that was the point of punk, wasn’t it? To play old songs loved by a previous generation competently for an audience of elderly people? Was that it? I can’t remember any more.