Dave Vanian Talks About The Damned’s New Album Darkadelic

In some ways, British proto-punk Dave Vanian really missed his calling. Instead of fronting legendary outfit The Damned for the past four-plus decades, in another parallel universe he would have made a spooktacular midnight TV horror-movie host, the perfect Raybanned, ebony-garbed, shellac-haired, fang-sporting male counterpoint to Cassandra Peterson’s campy Elvira. At 66, the erudite gorehound knows his cobwebbed stuff, and can fluently discuss anything in the eerie genre canon. Late stop-motion animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen? He’s met him, along with Famous Monsters of Filmland publisher Forrest Ackerman, and more sinister stars than he can remember, almost, and he’s fluent in discussions on just about any arcane topic you challenge him with.

Vanian lives in an artifact-packed house on a haunted hill that could pass for The Munsters’ fabled1313 Mockingbird Lane, and one of his only regrets—after using a sample of Al ‘Grandpa Munster’ Lewis’ on a vintage Damned single—was never getting to hang out with the charismatic actor at his New York trattoria before he passed. And he did end up marrying the veritable poster girl of Goth-rock pulchritude, Bags, Gun Club, and Sisters of Mercy bassist Patricia Morrison, with whom he has an already hip teenage violinist daughter named Emily. And above all else, Vanian is funny. We’re talking droll, quasi-professorial, gallows-humored hilarious, and he has more than enough amazing stories to sustain a Ghoulardi-level weekly program, if they still made such vanishing anomalies in our new Netflix streaming age.

Vanian has a new Damned album to promote, the rollicking, pandemic-forged Darkadelic, released today, April 28, featuring co-founding member Captain Sensible on guitar and vocals, Paul Gray on bass, Monty Oxymoron on keyboards, and William Granville-Taylor on drums. And he’s more than happy to discuss its anthemic 12 tracks, from an opening piano-pulsing “The Invisible Man” through a Gothic-bass-anchored “Bad Weather Girl,” a Phantasmagoria-retro “Wake the Dead,” the squealing punk rocker “Follow Me,” and the “New Rose”-evocative “Leader of the Gang.” A perfect title, given that the Damned was one of the first outfits out of the punk movement gate back in ’76, and—over a convoluted series of style, lineup and label changes, plus periodic breakups and celebrated reformations—has remained just as vital and entertaining as ever, a truth clearly delineated on The Damned: Night of a Thousand Vampires, a recent video of its cinematic, over-the-top 2022 concert at London’s posh Palladium.

But an hour on the trans-Atlantic phone with the singer just flies by, and wends its way down fun nightmare alleys like Victorian mourning rituals, one of his favorite historical studies. “And it’s just that there was so much tied to it,” Vanian explains. “With jewelry, dress, the mourning, and the fact that when you mourned someone, it went on for a couple of years—it wasn’t just a week or a month or a day or something. And then there was all the paraphernalia that went with it, and they even did photography of people, funeral photography, and eerily the photos where they prop the people up and have them standing together are the most compelling. I mean, by today’s standards, it’s very ghoulish, but at the time it was quite normal. And I suppose the obsession, which was completely new at the time, might have started when Queen Victoria’s Albert died, and she went into permanent mourning, and it became a fashionable thing in England. I mean, the rooms where the deceased would lie in state, how their hair would sometimes be woven into wonderful shapes, the black and gold mourning raiments—there were a lot of things to it, as compared to now, where you’re lucky if anybody even wears a black tie to your funeral.”

Paste: I didn’t even realize until recently that you actually knew Vampira.

Dave Vanian: Yeah! Well, I didn’t know her that well, but I knew her enough. But definitely Patricia, my wife, knew her very well. But yeah, I did. But it’s funny though—originally, when we did “Plan 9,” I wanted to give her the tape of it back then, so she could hear it and see what she thought of it. But she didn’t have a machine of any kind to play it on at that point. But when she did, she wrote back to me and said how she liked it, which was great, because you can’t think to write a song about someone that you have some admiration for, and if they don’t like what you’ve done? That would be terrible. But she liked it. And I met her a few times, and then the last time I met her, I did a Phantom Chords show in California, and she came down, and we spent a few hours in a booth, talking about big bands of the ’40s that she used to like.

Paste: Apparently, she had her own little shop in L.A,

Vanian:Oh yeah, yeah—she used to do all kinds of weird stuff. She used to make jewelry, and bead jewelry and all that stuff. And she knew James Dean, too. But she kind of got kicked out of the show she was doing because she was a bit too explicit, a bit too sexy for that era. She was a bit more explicit than Mae West, and they always said that she was a bit of an eccentric, a bit tough to work with, but I’m sure it all wasn’t one-sided.

Paste: What new things have you accumulated in your personal collection? Or did you get rid of things instead?

Vanian: No, I haven’t gotten rid of anything, really. But what I did do—and this was much further back, a long time ago now—is, I decided I wouldn’t collect much any more in terms of monster stuff. It was too much to collect. And now it’s a big thing, and I meet people out in America all the time that have these incredible collections, but they almost have to move because of it, you know? Because it’s just too much. But if it’s something a bit more obscure and left of field, then that’s more important, because I know that there’s only a couple of things, or one thing there, and I don’t have to build cabinets to house it accordingly. But I don’t know. What have I got, really? Just…stuff.

Paste: Is there one Great White Whale you’re after?

Vanian: A Great White Whale? I mean, I’d like to have a stuffed dodo.

Paste: The extinct flightless bird from the island of Mauritius?

Vanian: Exactly! The very same one! The funny thing is, the relics you see of them are not real, because there are very few complete skeletons of these things since we managed to do such a good job of driving into extinction, and the ones that are in British Museum, which I think had one, and there’s another museum that had one, they’re actually composites made from a couple of birds, and the feathers are from swans or other birds that they match up to approximate the way that it looked. I mean, the bird had a sort of yellowish bill, but a lot of blue in its color, and its feet were bright orange, or orange-y-yellow. And it was a big bird. So the ones you see, you think, “Oh, it’s a dodo,” but it’s not, actually, because there are no original feathers. I don’t know how we managed to destroy everything, because it’s rumored that there’s now only one complete dod skeleton in the world. It’s quite a bizarre thing, so we did a great job on that one. But ironically, the other unreal side to this story is that apparently, scientifically, they’ve got enough DNA now that they can cross the DNA with a certain type of blue parrot and they think they could bring the dodo back. But it’s harder to do what they do with birds than with mammals, like the woolly mammoth, because with the whole fertilization structure of a bird, it’s really difficult. So it might not happen. But apparently, they’re very close to it, and they’ve actually considered doing it. And some of the DNA and genes of the blue parrot will obviously take over, as well, so you’ll have a hybrid creature. So I don’t think we should mess with it, myself—it’s a bit like the Frankenstein complex, isn’t it?

Paste: Spinning off onto the monster side-road here, what was your Night of a Thousand Vampires concert from 2019, now immortalized in film?

Vanian: The film was made by the 400 Company, but it was done on the sly—it wasn’t supposed to be filmed, and it was filmed, basically. And then edited. And it was termed an immersive event, because generally all these immersive events are things you go to, and I think Stranger Things, where you actually are part of the thing. And in this case, there actually were a thousand vampires in the audience. Everybody came dressed as vampires, of whatever era they wanted to be, and the whole point of it started off because I just wanted to make a very different type of show—I wanted to something we’ve never done, which was picking songs we’d never played and also doing it as a theatrical experience, so it wouldn’t look like anything we’d ever done. And then there was this idea that came from the management first—but they didn’t follow through, unfortunately—which was that we were going to get into the Guinness Book of Records, because someone discovered that there was a record for how many vampires they had in a room. Which is very strange. But we decided to have the whole of the Palladium as a room and we’d fill it, but I believe that the people who were clicking in the numbers of vampires were a little drunk and lost count—that’s the real story. And you have to pay to get into the book of records, a fair amount to substantiate everything, so it all got a bit messed up. But regardless of that, there were a lot of happy people that night in the auditorium, so that was good.

Paste: Didn’t you show up at the gig in a glass coffin, inside a horse-drawn carriage?

Vanian: We had a proper funeral procession come down Oxford Street with a horse-drawn hearse, with my body in it, basically. Then that was brought into the auditorium, and for the first half of the show, I was made up as a very typical Bela Lugosi type of vampire, with a cape and an evening suit and the same kind of look. And then in the interim, the 20 minutes between the shows, I then shaved all my hair off and completely converted into Nosferatu for the last part of the set—the classic Max Schreck look.

Paste: So many opportunities for things to go horribly wrong occur to me. Were there any?

Vanian: Yeah, yeah. Something very big happened to me, but you wouldn’t notice it except when I watch the film, I notice that I’m dancing around kind of oddly. There’s a part where I’m in a coffin at the end, and there’s all this dry ice, the whole of this huge stage dramatically over the stage into the front rows of the audience—it’s just masses of dry ice. And then the coffin opens, and we’re in Highgate Cemetery, basically, and I get out of this coffin, and I’m now no longer Dracula—I’m Nosferatu, so coming down the stairs is me singing a song, and I attack me, kill me, have me carried off, and do the rest of the set as Nosferatu.

But the problem was, as I came out of the coffin, I’m wearing in-ear monitors, and the monitor part fell off into the coffin, so I could no longer hear myself and most of the band, and the orchestra that’s playing. So it went deathly quiet, and what I could hear coming back from the PA was out of time, so I had to sing two songs without being able to hear them—I had to approximate and hope that I was doing the right job. So that was an accident that happened. And the thing was, I couldn’t find the monitor quick enough because of the dry ice that had filled the coffin—the dry ice smoke was being pumped from a tube, but the actual chemicals themselves were safely contained. But I used to dumb things like this in the past, in the ’70s and ’80s, I would just buy the dry ice, throw it in a bucket, and that was it. But nowadays, you have to have a handler and all this safety stuff involved, so it’s a bit more involved, shall we say. So I had to have an actual dry ice handler, so it was all safe. But it took very interesting turns. We had lots of theater in there, and lots of stuff could go wrong, as you say, because we didn’t rehearse any of it and the band didn’t know what was happening—only I knew. It was quite an interesting night!

Paste: And didn’t you recruit your daughter Emily on violin?

Vanian: Yeah, she came out and played. In the middle of “Curtain Call” she did a part, and then we had a battle with Yuri, who’s a virtuoso violinist, basically, and he was playing a violin that was worth nearly two million pounds, a proper Stradivarius. And the guy is brilliant, and we were very lucky to have him. But the two of them did a little duel in the middle of everything that was wonderful—it was the highlight of the show.

Paste: And Emily’s on the new Damned album, too.

Vanian: Yeah, she plays a little bit on that. And she’s often on things. I mean, she’s played violin on “Curtain Call,” but when she did it the first time, she was only 12 years old and she did it at the Royal Albert Hall, and she has no fear of the crowd or anything—she just walks on and does it, and it’s perfectly natural for her, which is fantastic. She’ll be 19 in a couple of weeks’ time, and I don’t know how quickly that time went by, but wow! But it passes by quickly, right? And that’s life.

Paste: What phases did you go through at home when the pandemic hit? Did you immediately decide to write an entire new album?

Vanian: No, quite the reverse. I basically turned my back on it completely and just did gardening and fixing things. I built a log shed, a Victorian log shed, and things that needed repairing that I hadn’t done for a few years, I did those. And while it was a terrible time, we had a really glorious summer, so it was nice and warm every day, it wasn’t cold at all. So it felt to me, with the advent of no traffic, no aeroplanes flying overhead or anything, it felt like a very long 1960s Sunday. It felt just like a Sunday—really strange. And it got to a point after that where we were thinking we may never work again. And a politician at the time—I can’t remember who it was, but I can’t believe these words came from his mouth—he basically said, “Maybe it’s time for people in the music business to think about another job.” And I thought, “What a terrible thing to say!” And then you thought, “Well, if the gigs never open again…” I mean, any other time in world history where there’s been wars or illness, music and entertainment always lifts everybody up, and it brings us a temporary release from it, I guess. All through the war, you had all these big bands, and the “We’ll meet again some sunny day” and the white cliffs of Dover and all that kind of stuff. And yet, unless you were on he Internet—which a lot of people started to do—music just wasn’t there. You couldn’t go anywhere or do anything with it, so it spawned a lot of these weird gigs where people got together in their living rooms and sort of played together via camera and all that sort of stuff, but we never actually got into that, unfortunately.

So it was a worrying time, and I knew that it would affect the smaller things terribly, because they were independently owned, and a lot of them, of course, never opened again. So yeah, it was a weird time. But I didn’t write anything until the pandemic ended, and then suddenly it was really good for me, because I think not having songs for nearly two years, not having thought about even wanting to do music, and just kind of escaping from it for the first time in my whole career—I mean, it was the first time I hadn’t sung in 40-odd years—suddenly, I realized that I really could write. And I wrote a bunch of songs, and a lot of instrumental music and things like that. So for me, it worked out in a good way, if you like, and when it came to picking tracks for the album, we kind of just brought all of our individual demos together and then sat around seeing which ones would go together. And I had plenty of them on offer. And I was actually in a tough spot, because the band picked five of my tunes, and I think two or three of them weren’t really finished, and one was just an idea. And I had to write lyrics for all of them, so I had my work cut out for me. But I have to say, I delivered everything on time, and everything was done. So it was good for me.

Paste: What is “Wake the Dead” about?

Vanian: That was written by the Captain [Captain Sensible], so I can’t really explain all of it. But the gist of it, as I understand it, is if he did go, he’d want a party big enough to wake the dead. In other words, he’s not gonna go easy, not gonna go gently into that good night. But my songs, specifically, were “The Invisible Man,” “You’re Gonna Realize,” ”Roderick,” and “Western Promise.” But “Follow Me” is the Captain, as well, and it’s about exactly what it says, how you can “open a box” and have a whole career without any particular knowledge of anything, and I think it’s the cult of celebrity we have now from just being alive. But I don’t have any real social media presence—I don’t do it, but Cap does. So I’m not the same, and I’m not affected by that side of things, but I think the Captain enjoys the spectacle of this kind of culture, even though he also doesn’t like it, if you know what I mean.

Paste: So what is the “Western Promise,” then?

Vanian: Well, “Western Promise” is basically a catch-all term. It’s kind of that promise that America once offered with “Go West, young man”—they offered you the world, and you would go for it. So the whole song is about you yourself going for it, and being driven forward by love. Because if you really love someone and really care for them, then that makes the whole thing worthwhile.

Paste: And “The Invisible Man”?

Vanian: Well, that kind of came about in two ways—it was more written from the point of view of feeling invisible yourself, that typical thing of you’re the last person to get served even though you were first at the counter, or maybe someone’s not paying any attention to you whatsoever in a room. But then it also morphed into more what is, which is the real Invisible Man, as in H.G. Wells and the Universal Monsters approach. But it’s also that thing where, if you were invisible, what things you could do, what madness you could achieve. So it’s not a deep, meaningful song—it’s on the surface, just a regular invisible man. And we have a long line of songs that we’ve done about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Interview With the Vampire, Grimley Fiendish. And I grew up with those characters, but I grew up more with the black-and white-Universal monsters than I did with the Hammer horror films that came later. And I still love the way they look. When I was a boy, I was always obsessed with the monster films because I liked the places they lived in—I wanted to live in a house like the one Baron Frankenstein did, off in a remote area on a rock, with huge great ceilings. That really appealed to my aesthetics, so that was the start of my morphing into who I became, because I was watching those films way before I should have been.

PasteAs a huge film fan, how was it getting brought into David Lynch’s cinematic world via an actual soundtrack you composed?

Vanian: Well, I didn’t work with David Lynch himself—I worked with Jeremy, the director of the film, but he had worked with David on Twin Peaks. And I was really hoping to meet David Lynch, because I thought we’d have a chat about things we had in common, and I could gradually work my way into his universe. But David was away, and the irony was that Jeremy had made this film, but it wasn’t edited yet. And the rough edit had gotten to David Lynch, who was on a plane to Australia or somewhere, and he watched it and turned ‘round and said to Jeremy, “I couldn’t understand a fucking thing—not my cup of tea.” That’s all he had to say about it. But I got a phone call in England one night, and my wife picked it up, and she said, “It’s something about a film soundtrack.” And everything I’ve been offered anything in the past, it’s usually Damned fans who haven’t done anything, or someone who’s got an awful idea for something, or it’s a porno—I remember once we were offered Bimbo in Limbo or something like that. So I talked to this guy, and it sounded interesting—he was making a film noir, based on blah, blah, blah, so at the end I said, “Oh, do you want a track for it?” And he said, “No—we want you to write the whole film!” So that was a shock, and I said, “Okay,” but I’d never written a film soundtrack. And I had no idea what I was doing, but I had an idea of what I wanted to do, so I was really putting myself into the deep end. But since they trusted me enough, and they loved the things I did with the Phantom Chords, I thought, “Well, let’s go for it!” And before I knew it, I was out in Hollywood, making this low-budget film noir,The Perfect Sleep in 2009, which sank without a trace, unfortunately. But it was great fun to do. I stayed there for six weeks, and I had a screen set up, so every day I would watch a part of the film and then write to it, basically on a computer, a keyboard with all the sounds in it, and I would put it together like that. It was the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done, and also the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. I loved it.

Paste: Final question, and I’ve asked you this before when you had only three choices. But last year, at Halloween, General Mills brought out two retro-hip more selections. So which spooky cereal would you pick for breakfast, Count Chocula, Frankenberry, Boo-Berry, Fruit Brute or Yummy Mummy?

Vanian: Oh, it would have to be Count Chocula. Still. Definitely Count Chocula.

Paste: Because nobody likes Boo-Berry. After Halloween, Target always has entire end racks still packed with it.

Vanian: Well, I like the taste of blueberry. But, uhh, just not in a cereal…