It’s not the answer you’d expect from a man who helped invent British punk.
For much of the past fifty years, Captain Sensible (real name Raymond Burns), has toured the world with The Damned, one of the most influential bands to emerge from Britain’s punk explosion.
The group released “New Rose”, the first single by a British punk band, in 1976, followed by Britain’s first punk album, Damned Damned Damned, in 1977. While many of their contemporaries remained firmly in the punk lane, The Damned spent the next five decades veering through garage rock, psychedelia and gothic rock, influencing the emerging the goth scene while building one of the most diverse catalogues in British music. The Damned are embarking on a world tour: 50 Years, the Final Damnation, playing on Australian shores in September.
Despite a career that has seen him become a punk icon, Sensible remains motivated by a surprisingly practical fear.
“I’m basically saving myself from having to clean toilets for a living, which was my old job,” he says. “Even 50 years into the career, that’s my greatest fear – having to go back to cleaning bogs. So I go on stage and I play with a real passion and commitment, because I know what the alternative is.”
The comment is classic Captain Sensible – funny, self-deprecating and entirely free of rock-star ego. It’s also a clue to why The Damned are still filling venues half a century later. “The joy of The Damned, or bands like us really, is it’s unchoreographed,” he says. “To a fair old extent, you don’t know really what’s gonna happen at a Damned show. We don’t know.”
The setlist may be planned, but everything after that is up for debate. “The songs are different every night. Especially with Rat Scabies (real name Christopher Millar) sitting behind the drum kit, because he plays the songs differently every night. We’re a proper garage band.” In an era where live shows increasingly resemble precision-engineered productions, The Damned remain proudly rough around the edges. “It’s rock and roll, with all the rough edges left intact, as it should be. There’s an element of danger, and the audience has an involvement. A choice bit of heckling can kind of run throughout the show. The banter is important.”
In fact, Sensible actively encourages it. “I like the heckling. I think it’s great.” That unpredictability is part of what continues to attract younger fans, despite the band receiving little mainstream radio or television support.
“I really think people like a band like us because we are kind of unchoreographed,” he says. “Sometimes you play a festival and you see these other bands and they sound immaculate.”
Then comes the inevitable Captain Sensible punchline. “You realise you can hear an acoustic guitar and a tambourine and backing vocals and synthesizers, and there’s nobody on stage playing them. They’re cheating, basically.” His verdict is swift. “It’s not live. We are live. Live music should be live.”
The Damned’s refusal to stand still extends far beyond their performances. Unlike many bands from the original punk era, they never settled on a single sound. “Every album has its own sound really, and it was just a natural evolution which wasn’t contrived,” Sensible says. One of the biggest shifts came when vocalist Dave Vanian began exploring darker territory in his songwriting. “He was finding this voice which eventually became part of the goth scene.”
The result is a catalogue so varied that building a setlist has become one of the band’s greatest challenges. “There’s the goth side, the punk side, there’s the garage psychedelia bit that we do,” he says. “You could write three separate setlists really. How do you cram 50 years of music into an hour and a half? It’s almost impossible.”
For new listeners looking to understand the band’s journey, Sensible points to three key records.
The first is the raw energy of Damned Damned Damned.
“It was a glorious, gnarled, almost unproduced epic punk rock album,” he says. “The Clash and Sex Pistols albums were made in posh studios with decent budgets. We did ours in a real ropey demo studio, fuelled by copious amounts of cider and just banging it out.”
Then came Machine Gun Etiquette.
“We did a punk-psychedelia hybrid album and that was really adventurous. There are glorious moments of jamming in a psychedelic way that were kind of unexpected for a punk group at the time.”
Finally, there’s The Black Album.
“Dave was bringing these really dark gothic ideas to the table. That’s a standout album as well.”
Of course, surviving fifty years in rock and roll has come at a cost. If Sensible could go back and offer advice to his younger self, it would be remarkably simple. “Reduce the volume on stage by about 50 per cent and you might keep your hearing.” The years have taken their toll. “We’re all bloody deaf now.”
The same goes for some of the excesses that helped define punk’s most chaotic years. “The drugs and the boozing – maybe we exceeded that a little as well,” he admits. “I’ve definitely lost my marbles somewhere along the way. A lot of my memory’s been wiped because of that.” Then, after a brief pause: “Mind you, it was a bloody good laugh we had. It was just a non-stop party. So yeah, no regrets. Sod it.”
At 72, Sensibke finds himself reflecting on ageing in ways he never expected when The Damned first emerged from London’s punk underground. “I look back at the Captain Sensible and Rat Scabies of 1977 and I look at us now and think, wow.” “It’s incredible how, even though you may have the same mindset, your body changes. Life is weird. It’s an adventure and a fantastic journey, but there’s a sadness in there as well.” Like everything else, it eventually becomes songwriting material. “We all have to get old. We all have to kick the bucket. So there’s plenty of scope there for songs.”
What surprises him most isn’t getting older – it’s how much younger musicians seem to have changed.
“The young bands today are behaving themselves and wearing suits and having their accountants and managers and PR people in the dressing rooms,” he says. “I don’t get that.”
Instead, he’d like to see a little more chaos. “I want to see a bit of chaos and debauchery going on in these young bands. Come on. Someone’s got to carry on this tradition.” And if society insists on creating rock stars, he believes they should at least be memorable. “If you’ve got to have such a thing as a rock star, they’ve got to be nut jobs,” he says. “They’ve got to have a screw loose. They’ve got to be wild and ridiculous.”
Normality, he argues, has never produced greatness.
“You don’t want normal ones, do you? Brian Wilson, Syd Barrett, people like that. Such beautiful music. It doesn’t come from a normal, boring bloke wearing a suit. It comes from someone tinged with madness.”
Fifty years after helping launch British punk, Captain Sensible remains gloriously unconcerned with respectability. The hearing might be fading, some of the memories may have disappeared along the way, but the sense of adventure is still intact.
And, perhaps most importantly, he’s still staying one step ahead of a bucket and a toilet brush.
The Damned: The Final Damnation 50 tour dates
Auckland: September 8th, 2026 – The Power Station
Sydney: September 10th, 2026 – Concert hall, Sydney Opera House
Brisbane 11th September, 2026 – The Tivoli
Melbourne: September 13th, 2026 – The Forum.
For tickets here HERE
Images supplied by PR
