DAMAGED GOODS 5th September 2025
The Damned’s keyboard player takes on the catalogue with solo piano. Ideal for your dinner parties as you sit in Goth style with candelabras, black velvet attire and blood red lips. Deliciously grand guignol, the dramatics of Monty’s playing are ever-thrilling and never a watery version of the original.
Whether the songs of the Black Album, Strawberries or something later, these are great big tunes, full of vim and vinegar. Even ‘Smash It Up’ and ‘I Just Can’t Be Happy Today’ get the treatment and these paleo-punk destructo ditties become flourishes of piano action, stretched and dug into for melody and tension as an alternative to thrash and bluster. Rock and Roll is a percussive art and guitars are all very well but many of the great recordings are underpinned and propelled by piano – it’s just a less sexy and mobile instrument so the pianist doesn’t get to sit up front because they can’t strut.
The more I listen to this, the more I appreciate the breadth of The Damned, from punk to psychedelia to prog to gothic themes. Monty has an off-stage name of Laurence Burrow and piles of inventive music on Bandcamp and elsewhere if you listen and want to go further. Meanwhile, smile with delight as your favourites of the nation’s number one disreputable assembly of scoundrels and wastrels are taken apart and recreated right in front of your ears. If you like The Damned, you’ll love this. If you don’t like The Damned, what the hell is wrong with you? Discover the tunes you’ve been missing here.
You can buy this on “Pinot Noir red vinyl” of the CD / download has an extra seven pieces, three more Damned tunes and four of Monty’s compositions, named for each of his fellow band members.