Seriously, who could pass up seeing The Damned on their final and fiftieth anniversary tour on Halloween night? Not I. I bought tickets for their show at Concorde Music Hall as soon as they were available, and how this show wasn’t a sell-out is beyond me. At least three-quarters of the crowd was in costume, and there were some great ones. Two guys dressed as bikers from Psychomania, a man dressed as Vivian from The Young Ones, a couple in Star Trek uniforms to honor Patrick Stewart, a young woman dressed as Captain Sensible, another woman dressed like Adam Ant, and a guy in a Rat Scabies pink gorilla costume who must have been sweating liters of water the whole show were among the standouts. For the record, I was John Trent / the late Sam Neill from In the Mouth of Madness, my wife was a pirate, and my stepdaughter was Death from the Sandman comics.
First up for the night were The Courettes (sometimes known as The Fabulous Courettes), who put on a raucous set of solid garage rock and “wall of sound” riffs that had everyone fired up by just a few songs into their set. You could tell they were having a blast.
Three-fifths of The Damned were fighting colds, but you wouldn’t have guessed it as these guys in (at the least) their late sixties and put on a goth-punk clinic with some deep cuts like “Street of Dreams,” “Wake the Dead,” “Stranger on the Town,” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (a big favorite in the crowd around me).
“I Just Can’t Be Happy Today” is still rocking and still relevant, as (unfortunately) is “Gun Fury (of Riot Forces).” The three-piece set of “Long Song,” “Machine Gun Etiquette,” and “Neat Neat Neat” practically knocked the walls off the joint. I didn’t miss the opportunity to get into the pit for those tracks as it will most likely be the last time I could mosh at a Damned show.
They played two encores. One included “New Rose” and “Smash It Up” and the other included an unexpected and great cover of Jefferson Airplane‘s “White Rabbit” and the horror movie-tribute “Nasty.” It was a perfect song to end the night and leave the crowd reeling.
Don’t miss them. They’ve added extra dates on this tour. You’ll regret not seeing these legends if you miss out.
Keep your mind open.
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