Listen to the first British punk rock single
With help from producer Nick Lowe, The Damned made music history in 1976
When people think about punk rock, the Sex Pistols often are the band that immediately comes to mind. I certainly have discussed the Pistols quite a bit already in A Rebellious Noise.
But while the Sex Pistols were the most well-known — and notorious — British punk band to emerge in the mid-’70s, they weren’t the first out of the gate with a record. That honor goes to The Damned, a London-based quartet whose single, New Rose, was released on Oct. 22, 1976, on the fledgling Stiff Records label — more than a month before the Sex Pistol’s debut single, Anarchy in the U.K.
New Rose was produced by Nick Lowe, a man whose influence and contributions to popular music are woefully underappreciated. Lowe was no punk. A longtime veteran of the London pub rock scene (which by 1976 was oversaturated and in decline), Lowe, then 27, wasn’t far removed from the quiet demise of his band Brinsley Schwartz, an easy-going, country-tinged group that featured Lowe as lead singer, bass player, and chief songwriter.
Lowe had begun working as an in-house producer at Stiff after gaining a reputation for knowing his way around a studio, creating a good vibe for the band (much of which involved logging no small number of hours in nearby pubs), and for getting the job done quickly and cheaply. Not to mention Stiff label co-founder Dave Robinson, who had managed Brinsley Schwartz before quitting out of frustration over the band’s lack of commercial ambition, was keen to put Lowe’s talents to use. Lowe and The Damned recorded New Rose in September 1976 at tiny Pathway Studios in Islington, London.
“Nick was the producer because he was Jake’s mate,” Scabies said in Will Birch’s richly detailed biography of Lowe, Cruel to Be Kind: The Life and Music of Nick Lowe. Scabies was referring to Jake Riviera, the combustible aspiring music entrepreneur who had co-founded Stiff with Robinson and managed both Lowe and The Damned. “If Jake thought he was OK, that was OK with us. Jake could control us, there was a bit of a dad element to it.”
“Dad” Riviera was all of 28 years old at the time, an old man to a group whose most senior member, bass player Captain Sensible (Raymond Burns), was 22, while singer Dave Vanian still was only 19 when he laid down the vocals for New Rose at Pathway. (As for Lowe, he was the cool, older uncle who was a lot of fun but perhaps could benefit from a stint or three in rehab.)
A homeless riff
Damned guitarist Brian James wrote New Rose based on a riff he had kicking around in his head for a couple of years:
“I was in Brussels in late ’74 and I had this riff nagging at me. I played it with the drummer from Bastard, a guy called Nobby Goff, and he just didn’t get it. He didn’t set fire to it like he needed to. It was in limbo for a while, kind of like a homeless riff.”
And there New Rose could have withered on the bush, never to achieve its status as a punk music landmark. But fate, in the form of future Damned drummer Chris Millar (soon to be known to the world as Rat Scabies), intervened. As Paul Lester writes in Louder Sound:
“When I first got together with Rat,” explains James, who remembers trying out the song at an old church in London’s Lisson Grove, “we were still in the stages of getting The Damned together – finding a bassist and singer and all that stuff. So I played him the [New Rose] riff and he just took to it like water. Bang! He was off. He just attacked it. It was perfect. Now I had something I could build a song around.”
Attacked it is an understatement. Following a curious spoken-word introduction in which lead singer Vanian quotes the opening line of Leader Of the Pack, a 1964 song by The Shangri-Las — “Is she really going out with him?” — Scabies unleashes a furious double-fisted, four-bar Burundi-style tom assault. Guitarist and song author James enters with slashing fifth chords. Going against the recording industry’s longstanding practice of getting to the vocals as quickly as possible, Vanian doesn’t start singing until 30 seconds into the song, which thrashes along at an amphetamine-paced 173 beats per minute (BPM).
Punk has a reputation for favoring passion over precision and presentation over musicality — which is a nice way of saying punk rock by definition is sloppy and requires no real skill. While that may have been true in the case of some punk bands, The Damned infuses New Rose with bristling energy without sacrificing musicianship, notably pulling off a couple of perfectly executed stop/starts leading into the first and third verses. These guys are tight!
Vanian’s vocals are double-tracked or echoed (I can’t tell which), and there’s some faint harmonies from James and Captain Sensible. Scabies’ drumming on the outro threatens to lift the studio airborne.
Clocking at 2:41, Britain’s first punk single explodes from your speakers with a feral ferocity that one hardly would associate with Lowe, a witty, melodic, and not particularly hard-edged songwriter whose own catchy solo pop debut 45, So It Goes, released in mid-August 1976, was the first single from the Stiff label.
Coming from a new record label with no distribution infrastructure, New Rose was never going to crack the U.K. charts. Nonetheless, its place in history is assured.
The song’s meaning
Contrary to what some people believe, New Rose was not about a burgeoning romantic relationship. Rather, it was about the coming music revolution that James sensed was dawning.
“There was a feeling in the air of being able to play the kind of music I wanted to play, and there were people in London with similar attitudes to me,” he says in Louder Sound. “It was about that, not a woman. That’s why it says ‘it’, not ‘her’.”
James left the Damned in late 1977 amid growing tensions after the band recorded its second album. Sadly, he passed away on March 6, 2025, at age 70.
At the top of this post is a very high-quality promotional video of The Damned performing New Rose at the Hope & Anchor pub in London. I put it up there instead of at the bottom of the post to see if more people will watch it. That’s right, I’m experimenting on you.
Look for another post about The Damned in the near future. And have a great weekend, everyone!