Though the Clash and the Sex Pistols tended to hog all the limelight when punk rock arrived in the mid-1970s, it was the Damned who could claim several memorable firsts. In October 1976 they were the first UK punk band to release a single, New Rose, and in February 1977 Damned Damned Damned was the first full-length album released by a British punk band (it reached 34 on the UK chart). The group’s guitarist Brian James, who has died aged 74, wrote New Rose and most of the material on the album. In the spring of 1976 the Damned also became the first British punk act to tour the US, where they would be credited with inspiring the hardcore punk subculture that swept the US west coast.
With members named Rat Scabies and Captain Sensible and a singer, Dave Vanian, who looked like Count Dracula, the Damned had a cartoon-like aura about them and never exuded the anarchic malevolence of the Pistols or the politicised rage of the Clash. James himself also defied the primitive, DIY ethos of punk by being an excellent guitarist who earned the praise of Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, the kind of rock aristocrat the punks wanted to overthrow. Page even had the Damned’s records on his home jukebox.
James once again dominated the songwriting on their second album, Music for Pleasure (1977). It was produced by Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason, a great musician but about as punk as the archbishop of Canterbury, and flopped commercially. This prompted the Damned to be dropped by their record label, Stiff, and James quit at the end of 1977.
The group dissolved in early 1978, and James formed a new band, Tanz Der Youth, though they split up after releasing the single I’m Sorry, I’m Sorry. The Damned reformed without James in 1979, and despite numerous lineup changes are still active today. In 1988 James joined them for two shows at the Town and Country Club in London.
He was born Brian Robertson in Hammersmith, London, and adopted the surname “James” in 1976, to avoid being mistaken for Thin Lizzy’s guitarist Brian Robertson. In 1959 his family moved to Crawley in West Sussex. As he grew into his teens Brian liked to divide his spare time between the local tribes of mods and hippies. “I’d be hanging out with the mods scoring blues [amphetamines] and hanging out with the hippies scoring dope,” he told the biographer Kieron Tyler for his 2017 book Smashing It Up: A Decade of Chaos with the Damned.
Brian attended Hazelwick comprehensive school until he was 15, but was then summoned to the headmaster’s office. “He said, ‘You don’t want to be here, we don’t want you here, why wait? Go now.’” He was becoming increasingly fixated on music, and practised assiduously on the acoustic guitar his parents had bought him. He took some tips from the guitarist of a local blues-based band, Monty Cavan & The Kingbees, and with financial help from his father, Stan, he was able to buy an electric guitar.
The first band he joined was Blues Crusade (the name borrowed from the album Crusade by the bluesman John Mayall), and he then assembled his own group, Train, which mixed some jazz influences with their blues-based music. In 1969 the group released a single, Witchi Tai To, with Speakin’ My Mind on the B side, but it did not sell and Train’s commercial prospects were clearly negligible.
James formed a new band, Bastard, a quartet which took much of its inspiration from the raw power of the Detroit band the Stooges, in particular their 1970 album Fun House (in 1979, James would tour as a member of the Stooges vocalist Iggy Pop’s band). However, Bastard found concert bookings hard to come by, and when their vocalist Alan Ward proposed to move to Brussels to work in a recording studio, the whole band moved with him. They were able to find enough gigs in Brussels to stay for a year and a half before returning to Britain.
It was now 1975 and the first glimmerings of punk were stirring. James was briefly a member of London SS, along with the future Clash guitarist Mick Jones and Tony James (later of Generation X and Sigue Sigue Sputnik), but the group never played any gigs. Brian James was also part of the Subterraneans, a band comprising the NME journalist Nick Kent, the drummer Rat Scabies (real name Chris Millar) and the bassist Ray Burns, who would become Captain Sensible.
This foreshadowed the creation of the Damned in early 1976 with the line-up of James, Scabies, Sensible and Vanian (real name David Lett), and they made their performing debut on 6 July at the 100 Club in London, supporting the Sex Pistols.
In 1980 James formed the Lords of the New Church with the former Dead Boys vocalist Stiv Bators, and their punk-glam sound brought some success on the UK indie chart with the singles New Church, Open Your Eyes, Russian Roulette and a version of Madonna’s Like a Virgin. From 1992 until 1996, James played with the Dripping Lips (based in Brussels), with whom he recorded a brace of albums, including the soundtrack to the Belgian director Harry Cleven’s film Abracadabra.
In 2001 he was part of the supergroup Racketeers, alongside Clem Burke of Blondie, the Police’s Stewart Copeland, Duff McKagan from Guns N’ Roses and Wayne Kramer of MC5, and they recorded the album Mad for the Racket.
Between 1990 and 2015, James also recorded five solo albums, including Damned If I Do (2013), for which he re-recorded a batch of Damned songs that he had also been playing live with Scabies. In 2022, he joined the three other original Damned members for some UK concerts. “We did it! And nobody died!” exclaimed Captain Sensible after the opening show at the Eventim Apollo in London, harking back to a previous reunion effort in 1991, which ended abruptly in Washington DC following a row between James, Sensible and Scabies.
James is survived by his wife, Minna, and son, Charlie.
