I went to see The Damned at the Melkweg this week. Which was a slightly surreal experience.
I've seen them twice before. Both times in 1976. First time on their own. The second time along with The Sex Pistols and The Clash. On both occasions they were dead good. And the first punk band I ever saw.
Watching the audience stream in, a couple of things occurred to me.
I wondered what the older audience members had looked like back in the 1970s. How many of those bald heads once sprouted mohicans? Or had they been part-time punks, dressing up at the weekend? Was that what I was? I cropped my hair short but I never had the classic punk look.
Seeing some surprisingly young punters, I realised not only had they not been born last time I saw The Damned, their parents might not have been, either. A sobering thought.
Something I often do when comparing two periods of the past, is to move the dates to the present. Here I was doing the opposite. What was 48 years before 1976? 1928. What music was popular then? George Formby? Odd to think how music has changed less in the last 50 years.
It's been a couple of years since I was last in the Melkweg. To see Lee Scratch Perry. That was with Lucas and Andrew, too. Just as today. I used to go pretty often in the 1990s. When I had more time and energy.
We kicked off with a few beers in the Waterhole, which is just around the corner from the Melkweg. Where it's only 5.50 euros a pint. Along with De Balie, it's the only decent pub around the Leidseplein.
To maintain the beer theme, I'll let you know what I was drinking. La Chouffe. Not had it in a while. It's much less common than it once was.In the Melkweg, the beer selection is much worse thna it used to be. Just Grolsch Pils and Weizen on draught. I went for the latter. It was really bad. All diacetyl. Pretty much undrinkable. Though I did manage to force it down.
The Damned were surprisingly good. Very tight and full of energy. Pretty much as they had been 48 years ago. Very sprightly considering they're around the same age as me.
The Damned playing at the Melkweg, November 2024.
I wasn't feeling quite as sprightly. Having had my arm put in plaster a few hours earlier. I'd been walking around with a broken wrist for 10 days. So much for it not being broken if you can move your fingers. I should have known better. I've been told that you can't walk on a broken ankle. I know from personal experience, that isn't true.
Very pleased that they played New Rose. The first punk record I bought back in 1976.
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Reminds me of something I wrote about seeing an artist of a similar vintage:
"I didn’t feel old when I went to see Robyn Hitchcock the other month . I was a bit startled by how old everyone else was, though – the venue seemed to be packed out with grey-haired men, with a scattering of grey-haired couples. There were a lot of more or less smart-looking older men, a smaller number of ageing rockers and folkies and a few people who looked as if life hadn’t been very kind to them; what there wasn’t, as far as I could see, was more than a handful of people under 40. I realised what was going on, and wondered if anyone else had been in the audience the first time I saw Robyn, a Soft Boys gig at the Hope and Anchor in 1979; I tried to edit our over-55 selves into my memory of that pub back room, but we looked very out of place. Noticing the number of people checking their phones, I automatically edited my mental image accordingly – black or beige plastic, rotary dials, wires trailing – but now it just looked silly."
That was in 2018. I've seen RH again since, although I'm pretty sure the last gig of his I attended was online. (Couldn't get that on London Dial-A-Disc...)
https://gapingsilence.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/written-on-your-face/
My "flashbacks" were for imaginary experiences. I grew up on the US west coast in the 60s. But over the last 50 years we have gone to several folk concerts in New York City. An especially memorable one was Donovan at the Center for Ethical Culture on the weekend of the annual John Lennon memorial. We walked up to the venue with the similarly old crowd. I imagined their experiences in the 60s when they saw the great folk music boom in the Village,
Captain Sensible was set up to produce a record by American rock band The Supersuckers, or, The Worlds Greatest Rock and Roll Band, which they really are. Their initial meeting with the Captain did not go well so they wrote a song about the experience, unsurprisingly called “The Captain”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45Up1LFoATM
About half the shows I go to anymore are filled with all these old people. Please don't show me a mirror because I obviously don't want to mess with my cognitive dissonance. I just saw Crowded House in Vail last a couple months ago after having first seen Split Enz live in 1982 and I'm pretty confident I was the youngest person at both shows, then and now.
As for The Damned, although I pretty regularly encountered Captain in my California hometown (as he had a number of friends who lived there), I only ever saw them live in 1985, when they played with 45 Grave, which is weird, as I saw The Clash three times.
But the Venn Diagram of old punks and old beer guys is much closer to a circle than two circles than I'd have ever guessed 30 years ago.
Definitely do the same time shift thing - we used to tease my Dad in the 80's for listening to the Ink Spots and Al Jolson; pretty much the same as me listening now to anything actually from the 80's.
It's true about how much music is stuck these past few decades. The difference between 1962 and 1969 was huge, from the late 90s to today, not so much.
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