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Review: The Damned “Damned Damned Damned”

By | April 30, 2023

Each week The Hard Times looks back on a classic album from punk history. We also consume enough ketamine to kill an adult zebra every week, but this is unrelated to our reviews. This week we checked out the debut record from punk pioneers The Damned, “Damned Damned Damned.”

The Damned truly were groundbreakers in the early UK punk scene. They were the first English punk band to put out a single, the first to tour the United States, and “Damned Damned Damned” was the first full-length studio album to be released.

But The Damned’s list of first doesn’t end there. Such a prolific band spent much of their early days racking up an impressive string of historic firsts. So we thought we’d take a look back on just a few of the ones they hit during or around the recording of triple D.

  • First UK punk band to not pay back their recording advance.
  • First UK punk band to hold a band meeting that they forgot to tell the drummer about.
  • First UK punk band to fuck with those big hat guards at Buckingham Palace and actually get a reaction out of one of them.
  • First UK punk band to try tapas. They didn’t like it.
  • First UK punk band to publicly denounce Benjamin Disraeli even though he’d been dead for like ninety years at that point.
  • First UK punk band to be on tour and think they forgot a piece of gear at the last gas station and have to drive all the way back to get it and then not find it at the gas station and then check the van and it was in there the whole time just in a different place than it usually is.
  • First UK punk band to visit a waterpark in East Lansing, Michigan. They all bought souvenir photos from the log flume ride.
  • First UK punk band to think that The Poseidon Adventure was “an intriguing concept, but the production ultimately fell flat.”
  • First UK punk band to break up, then get back together like four days later but without the bass player.
  • And finally, first UK punk band to use a picture of Margaret Thatcher with eyes cut out as show flyer art.

SCORE: 1 out of 1 for everything all the time ever, apparently.