Author: u0zp4y

Heart are that rare band who were successful in the 1970s, saw their career drop off, only to come back in the 80s bigger than ever. In 2004, as the band prepared to release their first album in 11 years, Jupiters Darling, sister Ann and Nancy Wilson looked back on the highs and lows of their turbulent career.

Someone once said that the the Devil is in the details. If that’s the truth, then I’m more than a little worried. I’m sitting in a small café in Santa Monica, California, and there’s an eerily prophetic sign propped against the counter: ‘Seattle’s Best’, it claims. And although it’s a seemingly innocuous sticker actually advertising a brand of coffee, today it holds far greater significance as I wait here for Ann and Nancy Wilson, the sisters from that north-western, rainy US city who for the best part of three decades have been the heart of Heart .

Looking fit and healthy, Ann and Nancy arrive. They’re dressed casually, and for a pair who have been responsible for shifting millions of records, they’re refreshingly down to earth. They are the antithesis of the big-haired, stiletto-heeled image that they became stuck with during their megastardom years in the mid- to late 80s; in 2004 they appear to have more in common with the two sisters who became involved with music for the sheer love of it while they were still at school as the 60s were drawing to a close.

They’ve come a long way from the bar band that used to play four sets a night in dingy clubs in Vancouver, Canada, and throughout the Pacific Northwest of the US in the early 70s. Heart had already been a going concern for well over a decade before the UK decided to sit up and pay attention. It took the monster, piano-led power ballad Alone for them to break into the British charts in the summer of 1987. By then Heart had already enjoyed significant success in America, survived one line-up change and almost imploded. But somehow fate had contrived to give them a second, bigger shot at success.

“They say the average lifespan of a band is about three to five years,” Nancy Wilson begins with a grin. “So we’ve had many lives with this band. We’ve not used our nine up yet, and this is a whole new life now.”

Fuelled by a love of Led Zeppelin and The Beatles, the Wilson sisters picked up instruments at an early age and began playing music together, writing songs and forming groups at school. Ann would assume lead vocals while Nancy soon discovered that the guitar – particularly the acoustic variety – was her forté.

“That’s gone on to prove to be Heart’s signature,” Ann states. “Sometimes it’s big and loud, but there’s an acoustic guitar at the centre most of the time.”

“That’s something that we loved about Zeppelin,” Nancy interjects. “We’d go and see them play live, and they would weave this big, magical spell with the smoke and the whole androgynous moody rock thing, and then in the middle of the set they’d sit down with acoustics and just play Going California

.

“Rock doesn’t have to be all about, ‘I’m a sexy man looking for a sexy girl’ or, ‘I’m a sexy girl having a relationship with sexy man, call me baby, call me, baby…’ There’s gotta be more than that.”

And it was listening to Zeppelin that proved that to the fledgling songwriters, as they started to tell stories in their songs. It also got them tagged the ‘female Led Zeppelin’ – which they’ve carried around with them ever since. In fact Heart were already a going concern when Ann got the invitation to join the band.

It was the early 70s, and having a female singer in a heavy rock band was something of a novelty. “It was unusual,” Ann says, “but it never occurred to us that we couldn’t be in a band, we had no concept of specific gender roles. We were unusual among friends at school in that we wanted to wanted to be The Beatles rather than marry them.”

Along with Ann in the first line-up of Heart was guitarist Roger Fisher, drummer Michael Derosier and bassist Steve Fossen. Nancy, who had gone off to college, would be persuaded by Ann to join the band a while later. During this time the sisters spent apart, Ann was falling head over heels in love with Michael Fisher, guitarist Roger’s brother, who was managing the band and avoiding the Vietnam draft by staying in Vancouver.

Once the Wilson sisters were together in the band after Nancy had ditched college, Heart started to make real progress. The younger, guitar-playing Wilson had brought an acoustic element to the band – the light and shade – and in 1976 the band signed to small Canadian label Mushroom. But it wasn’t to prove the blissful ride they had imagined.

Heart set to work on their debut album, and completed their line-up with the addition of Howard Leese, a multi-instrumentalist. Over the years, Leese would prove to be the guy with most staying power, being the only one who would survive the two main line-ups of Heart.

Of all the tracks on Heart’s debut album Dreamboat Annie, Magic Man was particularly autobiographical, illustrating Ann’s deep love affair and infatuation with Michael Fisher. While this was going on, her little sister was falling for Fisher’s brother, guitarist Roger.

Despite a good reaction from the press, it was some time before Dreamboat Annie captured the public’s attention. Much attention was paid to the sleeve by certain sleazy factions of the notoriously sexist music industry – the artwork showed Ann and Nancy bare-shouldered and back to back – and before they knew it it was being suggested in the press that they were lesbian sisters.

“There was a print ad, ‘it was only our first time’, that intimated that there was something more between us than just being sisters,” Nancy recalls.

Nearly 20 years later, ‘it was only their first time’ has developed into something the Wilsons joke about, but at the time they were furious. The cloud did have a silver lining, though, as it was their fury than spurred the writing of one of Heart’s early signature songs, Barracuda. At a party after a show, Ann was approached by a record executive who intimated that the lesbian rumours were true. She responded by leaving the party and writing the lyrics for that song.

Things were on the up, and more people were discovering the band as they traversed the country support the likes of Rod Stewart. They also made their first trip to Britain, playing university unions and small clubs. Magic Man and Crazy On You achieved a degree of commercial success, but soon it was time for Heart to return to the studio.

Having assumed they had put all the record company problems behind them, Heart commenced work on Magazine, the album intended to be their second release. But it was not to be. Mushroom wanted the album quicker than the band were ready to record it. So Heart signed with Portrait, and pre-empted Mushroom by recording and rush-releasing Little Queen in 1977, which would become their second record by default.

Mushroom responded by releasing a grab-bag of unfinished demo tracks and some live recordings from 1974 as the album Magazine. Early copies bore a sticker proclaiming that this was the new record from Heart. A protracted lawsuit ensued, and the band were allowed back into the studio to remix the demos, and a second, band-approved version of Magazine was eventually released.

The pressure on the band from outside sources was proving detrimental to the relationships within the group. Cracks were beginning to show between the Wilson sisters and also between the Fisher brothers.

“Yeah, inter-band relationships weren’t necessarily a good thing,” Nancy says with the benefit of hindsight, of Heart developing into something of a Fleetwood Mac-style soap opera. “Especially in the first incarnation.”

The Wilsons’ relationships with the Fishers would eventually lead to the destruction of the band. Ann and Michael floundered first, while the disintegration of the romance between Roger and Nancy would have ramifications that would resonate throughout the group. It didn’t really help matters that following the split Nancy went on to date drummer Derosier.

Everything came to a head on stage in the late ’79 with something known to the band as the ‘kerbong!’ incident. Essentially, tensions within Heart had reached melting point, and Fisher freaked out on stage in Oregon and smashed his guitar, not in a demonstration of over-the-top Pete Townshend-style showmanship but in the manner of a hurting ex-boyfriend.

“It was complete mental anguish,” Fisher has said of the incident. “It was not a healthy situation to be in.”

That display of anger – a frightening event – was caught on video, and has been broadcast as part of VH-1’s Behind The Music. Needless to say, shortly afterwards the guitarist was informed by management that his services were no longer required in the group he had helped create. Heart had become Ann and Nancy’s band – they called the shots. The rhythm section of Fossen and Derosier continued to work with the band through the break-up album Bebe Le Strange and until the release of 1982’s Private Audition. Understandably, it was a low point for the band. When they are asked about the latter record today, Nancy’s response speaks volumes: “Well, it’s not all bad.”

These days, the reunion tour has proved an incredibly successful and financially very lucrative game plan for bands with a heady history that have slipped from the limelight. Witness the massive success of the likes of The Eagles and Duran Duran regrouping and going back out on the road. All the former members of Heart are thankfully still drawing breath, and therefore potentially available for a reunion.

“No way, not me!” Ann exclaims immediately at the suggestion of a reunion tour by the original line-up. “They’re all still alive, but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily up to the job of recreating that music or being able to emotionally hang around with Nance and I,” she continues. “We were only able to hang around with each other at a certain age, during certain years and under certain conditions. And then it became impossible – just like a marriage. When a marriage breaks up, if you asked: ‘Hey, you guys going to get married again?’ the reply is usually: ‘Well, not any time soon’. And that’s the case with us.”

With Heart now reduced to the skeleton staff of Ann, Nancy and Howard Leese, it was time for an injection of new blood. That new blood was found in the shape of former Spirit and Jo Jo Gunne bass player Mark Andes and Montrose drummer Denny Carmassi. The pair had worked on some sessions with Leese in Los Angeles and he felt they’d be a good fit. After the initial settling-in period of touring the Private Audition album – Heart even managed a brief series of dates in the UK supporting Queen, and while they were in the country they also headlined London’s Dominion Theatre – Heart Mk II were ready to go into the studio with producer Keith Olsen to start work what would become Passionworks.

Heart’s seventh studio record was not the success they’d hoped for. But it does illustrate a transition. The acoustic guitars had all but gone, Carmassi was using one of the first Simmons electronic drum kits, and there was an over-reliance on synthesisers. The record far from set the world on fire, and Heart (by this time on the Epic label) were left without a record deal. Many bands would have called it a day at that point. But, as Nancy said earlier, Heart have had many lives, and they began second phase of their career.

Discovering that not all record labels had written off the band, they signed with Capitol and underwent a total reinvention. Outside songwriters such as Martin Page, Bernie Taupin and Holly Knight were brought in, and the band recorded Heart, released in’85. To say it was a success would be a massive understatement; the album yielded no less than four hit singles. But although this was the most successful period for the band it was also to prove the darkest.

“I think we survived the eighties fairly well,” Nancy says.

“We lived to tell the tale for one thing!” Ann laughs.

“We lived through the drug part of it,” Nancy continues with a rueful smile. “We also managed to survive emotionally through the huge imaging part, too.”

That was also the part where Heart started to come apart at the seams. Prior to the 80s their strength had come from their songwriting and live performance; videos and being concerned with image were anathemas to them.

“When we first hit through the middle to end of the seventies it was before the invention of MTV,” Nancy explains. “We were really children of the late sixties who didn’t have a lot of gender-specific self-image going on. We had a sexy thing going on, but it wasn’t a ‘media’ sexy thing of what our music was about.”

But one was soon created for them by their record company, Capitol. In order to capitalise upon their new radio-friendly sound, Nancy was pushed to the fore in videos, showing a lot of cleavage and sporting preposterously big hair. “Oh, it was big,” she laughs. “It was wide and tall. Thinking of the eighties now, my feet automatically begin to hurt – all those stupid stilettos.”

Ann was becoming marginalised in videos, and reduced to just head shots due to her having gained a lot of weight. Weight gain is something she has had to fight all her life, and the excesses of success certainly weren’t helping.

“Ah, the whole drug haze of the eighties,” sighs Nancy. “It got pretty intense.”

Things never got to the point where it jeopardised the band, though. “We were able to do our concerts and everything,” Ann insists. “We missed very few – and never because of drugs.”

“We were lightweights compared with a lot of people around us that we saw,” Nancy shrugs. “But drugs were present, and we had our parties, for sure. We had to go there to know where it was to not go.”

At one point Heart were the biggest band in the US, with These Dreams a No.1 single and Heart topping the album chart. But things weren’t as rosy as they may have appeared from the outside.

“Heart had reached a point in this country [the US], especially when we were so big, that Nancy and I had become prisoners of the hotel suite,” says Ann. “We’d get to our hotel, and you’d just have to be locked in and stay there. We had bodyguards, because there were people in the halls, and everyone wants to get to you.”

In a typical double-standards way, the guys in the band weren’t affected. “They could go out and get chicks and do whatever they wanted,” says Ann.

Nancy: “They were happy to be in that position! But it wasn’t very comfortable for us. So we got our video players and would just smoke pot, or take drugs and watch movies… and drink too much. We watched Gone With The Wind a thousand

times, watched Lady And The Tramp, Local Hero, Cal, Amadeus…”

Not exactly the most rock’n’roll of cinematic viewing for the linchpins of one of the biggest rock bands on the planet at the time. But contradictions have always been at the very heart of Heart. The band has always existed as a series of dichotomies and opposites: the blonde and the brunette; the boys and the girls; the harsh rock song and the fragile lullaby.

“We’ve never fit in,” explains Nancy, in regard to Heart’s inability to be pigeonholed. “It wasn’t cool to be from Seattle until the nineties, and then when grunge happened we were afraid we wouldn’t fit in to Seattle. We found that we did in the end, but we weren’t sure.”

In the end, hanging out with the Los Angeles set proved too much for the sisters – their huge roller-coaster success continued through the release of 1987’s Bad Animals and 1990’s Brigade – and it came time for Heart to take a break.

“We just got so tired of it that in the end that we just left,” says Ann. “It was too hard to feel terrible all the time, to feel alienated and be trying to score and be trying to play music and look fresh. It was just too hard.”

Today, the Wilsons remain philosophical about the decade that for them included the best of times and also the worst of times.

“Looking back now, it’s a mixture of emotions,” Ann says. “It’s always wrong to only remember the bad parts of a hard-struggle time. You’ve got to remember the real sweet times too, when we were hanging together, when we were at the stage when it was working, when the band were clicking and playing well.

“Or if you can’t think of that, think of the people who came to see us with those big lit-up eyes, or people who were going to commit suicide but didn’t because they heard These Dreams or whatever and then told us about it.”

“The eighties were really difficult even though it was our most successful time,” says Nancy ruefully. “We were even more successful then than our first time out. But at the end of it, we needed to go underground. And so did rock music.”

As the 80s went into its death throes, something was afoot in Heart’s hometown: the great grunge uprising, the birth of the Seattle sound that was essentially the antithesis of everything that Heart were a part of. The young bands were rallying against corporate radio-rock – the big, glitzy videos and synthetic nature of so many of the ‘hair metal’ bands. But, in a startling twist of fate, and unlike so many of their contemporaries, Ann and Nancy Wilson and Heart were able to escape unscathed. In fact, grunge was to embrace them as homecoming heroes.

“We were so scared about going home,” admits Ann today.

“When we got back to Seattle we thought we were the most shallow band around,” Nancy continues. “We thought: ‘Oh, they’re gonna hate us, they’re gonna think we’re old big-hair, sell-out, dinosaur has-beens!’ Which at the time I think people could be forgiven for thinking.”

But it wasn’t like that at all, as Nancy explains: “We met some of those guys when we got back home, and they were all like: ‘Can you show us the chords to Magic Man? We grew up with you guys and you rocked!’ They were really forgiving about the eighties, and the imaging ,and the MTV part of what Heart had become.

“We always say that we went down the sheep-dip with the rest of the bands in the MTV eighties. You go down that chute, they douse you with pesticide, and then you’re lucky to make it out alive.”

But make it out alive they did, and rather than head straight back into the studio, Ann and Nancy Wilson decided to take some time out to rediscover themselves before re-launching the band that had given them the world, but had also taken over their lives. The reliance on outside writers had also proved a shattering blow to the sisters’ songwriting egos.

“It didn’t work well,” laughs Nancy now. “We’d get our songs on the albums but none of them were ever chosen for singles or leads. So after that we were really relieved to meet guys from Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, and they were all really respectful about where we’d been and what we’d brought originally to music. So that’s when we formed The Lovemongers, and we didn’t re-sign with any management or record company, we just went straight out there out of our own pocket, managed ourselves and made a couple of records.”

The Lovemongers were a four-piece band comprised of Ann, Nancy, longtime friend and songwriting partner Sue Ennis and Seattle buddy Frank Cox. Their first recorded appearance was a cover of Led Zeppelin’s Battle Of Evermore which surfaced, along with a litany of grunge bands, on the soundtrack to the movie Singles – it was a case of getting back to basics. The other records in question might prove somewhat surprising to Heart fans – The Lovemongers’ studio debut Whirlygig eschews big guitars in favour of quirky samples and a pop sensibility.

The shows with The Lovemongers were a voyage of rebirth and rediscovery for the Wilsons. “We had to go under the radar for a while,” says Nancy. “Because we were trying to live behind the image of the big sexy rock chicks with big sexy rock hair and big sexy rock clothes.”

They can laugh about it now, but at the time it was serious business. “During the nineties we worked to regain our identity and kept writing songs, kept playing shows, started families and had kids. I started working more on score music for Cameron’s movies and things like that.”

Cameron, of course, is Cameron Crowe – Nancy’s husband of nearly 20 years – the former Rolling Stone journalist and now Oscar-winning writer-director of films such Singles and Jerry Maguire – all of which have been scored by his wife while Heart were on hiatus.

“So we were not sitting around on our butts doing nothing, we were just regrouping,” Nancy says.

They needed that time off. Heart’s last studio album was 1993’s Desire Walks On, then they all but disappeared for the rest of the decade (although Ann and Nancy did have one release under the Heart name in the shape of the Unplugged-style live set The Road Home, produced by Led Zeppelin’s former bassist John Paul Jones).

“I missed a lot during the nineties, I was busy being a mom,” states Ann. “We were doing a whole lot of benefits and political stuff. We did a lot of stuff for Clinton and Gore, then Hillary Clinton’s Health Campaign, the environment, breast cancer, pediatric Aids, regular Aids…”

“God, we were benefit whores!” chuckles Nancy.

“You come to us with a cause and we’ll play,” giggles Ann. “Oh, and we did Artists For A Hate-Free America. Yeah, that worked.”

When asked about their band’s apparent disappearance during the intervening years, the reply often came from the Wilsons that Heart was an ace they had up their sleeves that they didn’t want to waste. Now, they’re finally returning under the Heart name with a new studio album, Jupiters Darling, their first in 11 years. Why is now the right time?

“Having done some of that other stuff during the nineties our feet are back under us and right now there’s an interesting dichotomy in music,” explains Nancy. “There’s the force-fed pop thing going on again. If pop music was food right now, there’d be no actual food in the food, it would all be chemicals, additives and packaging. But there’s another element coming in with bands like The White Stripes or Queens Of The Stone Age. Some real rockers are coming back. There’s a bit of an attitude coming back. There’s a crack in the sky.

“I think there’s a real yearning for something authentic,” Ann says. “Something they can be sure isn’t being imaged and sold to them from Madison Avenue.

“MTV changed a lot of things and the Seattle movement was a reaction to that. But as healthy as it was for music it was difficult to sustain because of the impossible artistic integrity at its core. I think now there’s a swing back toward authenticity but with maybe a little bit more realism.”

And with that, we leave the coffee shop and head out to The Village recording studio to prepare for an upcoming tour. Even after all this time, there’s work to do. The beat goes on.

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 64, February 2004

Classic Rock editor Siân has worked on the magazine for longer than she cares to discuss, and prior to that was deputy editor of Total Guitar. During that time, she’s had the chance to interview artists such as Brian May, Slash, Jeff Beck, James Hetfield, Sammy Hagar, Alice Cooper, Manic Street Preachers and countless more. She has hosted The Classic Rock Magazine Show on both TotalRock and TeamRock radio, contributed to CR’s The 20 Million Club podcast and has also had bylines in Metal Hammer, Guitarist, Total Film, Cult TV and more. When not listening to, playing, thinking or writing about music, she can be found getting increasingly more depressed about the state of the Welsh national rugby team and her beloved Pittsburgh Steelers.

This article was first published in Classic Rock 34, December 2001, and is reprinted here in tribute to guitarist and founding member Brian James. Like he says in the article: “If things are flat and boring and you’re being programmed to be like your grandparents then something’s wrong. Something’s wrong if you’ve gotta spend all your life working for a fucking pittance. We just loved music and we just wanted to play. It was about expression – action, y’know? The fun was a bonus.”

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“At one point Lemmy came up to me and said, ‘I wanna have a word with you about your drinking’,” says Captain Sensible. “Well, when someone like Lemmy says that to you, you listen. He said, ‘Remember: it’s not what you drink, or how much you drink, it’s how fast you drink.’”

The Captain finishes his Grolsch and orders a glass of water. “I’m pleasantly surprised to have come through it and still be alive,” he says.

Welcome to an epic tale of fast living and faster music. The Damned were the first UK punk band to release a record, the first UK punk band to tour America, the first to split up (in 1978), and the first to reform, six months later (when the Clash were only on their second album).

They’ve had more line-up changes than Marlon Brando had hot dinners (with both Motorhead’s Lemmy and Culture Club’s Jon Moss joining briefly). Their guitarist became a red-beret wearing novelty pop star. They became synonymous with the 80s goth movement and dented the charts with Eloise. Along the way they’ve been shot at, beaten up, hoodwinked, spat on and chased around venues by three-legged dogs.

Meet Brian James, guitarist, songwriter and the man who was The Damned for a short while. “We used to do a fair bit of speed,” says Brian, “but we used to drink a lot so we needed it to stay awake.” He shrugs: “I like playing fast. I like playing loud.”

“I didn’t want drink, drugs and women. All I wanted was the haunted mansion on the hill, with the bats flying around it…”

Meet Dave Vanian, vocalist and wannabe vamp: “People would ask you why you joined a band,” says Dave, “and other people would say, ‘Well, I want to drink as much as I can, take as many drugs as I can, fuck as many women as I can…’ and all that stuff. What I wanted was the haunted mansion on the hill. With the bats flying around it and the laboratory. And if I got a couple of girls inside of it, great…”

Meet Captain Sensible, sometime punk legend, novelty pop star and Damned bassist, guitarist and songwriter: “We had a saying in the band,” says Captain. “‘The first rule is: there’s no rules’. I’m a working class bloke. I genuinely was a toilet cleaner. Rat was a toilet cleaner. Dave genuinely was a grave digger.

“If someone comes up to me and says ‘Will you do an ad for Cheesey Wotsits?’ Am I supposed to say, ‘Fack off! I ain’t doin that shit! I’m gonna stand up for me principles, mate, fuck off! I don’t need that fifty grand!’ When I’m eating Pot Noodles, living in a council flat? I don’t think so. I’m like, ‘Gimme that cash!’”

Meet Rat Scabies, punk pioneer, hell-raiser and The Damned’s surrogate Keith Moon. “…….. ” says Rat. “ …….”. By all accounts, Rat isn’t normally this quiet. Rat, you see, has refused to be interviewed about The Damned, having had a bit of a falling out with the rest of the band over a small business matter.

A shame, but that’s The Damned all over: a tempestuous tale of gob, vomit, cider, sulphate, haunted mansions, Cheesey Wotsits, arguments, breakdowns and mad, bad and dangerously loud rock music.

The band’s entry in the All Music Guide used to say: “The Damned weren’t revolutionaries, they were drunken louts that would do anything for a prank”. It’s a misconception that has done the band no favours over the years: while the Sex Pistols have been the subject of movies, TV shows, documentaries and books, and The Clash have had a posthumous number one and an Ivor Novello Lifetime Achievement Award, The Damned have been taken less seriously.

“We were outsiders even in the early days,” says Vanian, “‘cos we used to say what we actually felt rather than words that were put in our mouths. I always felt that The Clash’s political stance came from their management more than anything else. He [Clash manager Bernie Rhodes] seemed to have heard about how the MC5 did it in the 60s and decided to copy that. People were believing statements like ‘We’re only here for the kids’, when we’d hear them saying stuff like ‘Oh, when’s the limo coming round?’”

While Johnny Rotten poured negativity on everything (packaged up nicely, meanwhile, in Vivienne Westwood clothes) and The Clash tried their hardest to live up to a manifesto, The Damned were a whole other kettle of fish.

“We wouldn’t be hypocritical. We’d say we wanted money – it’d be stupid to say otherwise.”

“We just adopted this persona of being as troublesome and chaotic onstage as possible,” Rat said later. This generally meant alcohol-fuelled destruction, nudity, vomit, reckless behaviour, verbal abuse and lashings of gob. The kinda stupid shit young working class people do, in other words.

“I was only interested in politics in terms of stirring things up,” says Brian. “If things are flat and boring and you’re being programmed to be like your grandparents then something’s wrong. Something’s wrong if you’ve gotta spend all your life working for a fucking pittance.

“We weren’t shouting about anarchy or giving it the big Clash number but that was never what we were in it for. We just loved music and we just wanted to play. It was about expression, action y’know? The fun was a bonus. We might’ve been larking about a bit onstage, but we were still coming up with the goods.”

They weren’t hypocrites either. “On the Anarchy In The UK tour [the short-lived punk tour with the Pistols, The Clash and Johnny Thunders],” remembers Dave, “we were in the back of a van, they were in four star hotels. We wouldn’t be hypocritical. We’d say we wanted money – it’d be stupid to say otherwise, y’know, we wanted to make a living – and in some sense that classed us as outsiders.”

Significantly, The Damned refused to go along with the idea that all the music that had come before punk was for hippies. “We refused to go along with the old farts thing,” says Vanian, “saying that all the older music was rubbish. We were only ever against the stuff that was rubbish.”

That said, the music scene at the time more sorely lacking in excitement. “In ‘76 there was nothing to listen to,” says Captain, a confirmed Santana and Hendrix fan. “I didn’t really like The Band and Little Feat and all that stuff. Clapton had gone down the toilet, and that slow country rock thing really wasn’t my cup of tea. And it was that or the Osmonds. So when the Ramones came along it was a revelation. All that ‘1-2-3-4’ stuff: that’s what it’s all about!”

“The charts were pretty crappy at the time,” remembers Dave who – as a teenager in Hemel Hempstead, got his kicks from 60s garage bands like The Seeds and Strawberry Alarm Clock, as well as early Gene Vincent, Alice Cooper and film music.

“I managed to see the New York Dolls when they came over back in ‘73 or ‘74. They were like a throwback to the ‘50s Shangri Las period. I thought Johnny Thunders was a great guitarist and of course Brian had come from a long line of those Keith Richards-y type guitar players.”

No-one in England would book us. We were just too fucking UP FOR IT for them.

Guitarist Brian James had played at Phun City, the legendary 1970 festival in Worthing that had been the largest free festival in the UK. Headlined by hippy’s militant wing – the MC5, the Pretty Things, Pink Fairies etc – it had a huge influence on the young Brian. When his high-octane rock failed to land an audience in the UK, he took it to a more appreciative audience in Europe.

“I had a band previous to The Damned called Bastard and we were located in Brussels,” he says. “No-one in England would book us. We were just too fucking up for it for them. It was the aftermath of the hippy thing, pub rock – this would be like ‘73/‘74 – so we fucked off to Belgium where people were into the American bands like the Stooges, MC5, the Dolls, Lou Reed, all these good people…

“When I came back in ‘76 I teamed up with a couple of guys in England, Tony James and Mick Jones. They were trying to get a band going called London SS. And then we started auditioning people and I was just really, really surprised at the people coming out of the woodwork that were actually into that kind of music – there was no sign of them a year before.”

“I met Brian through an ad in Melody Maker,” says Captain. “He had vision. He had this plan of taking over the world through thrashy punk music. And he had a bunch of songs that were exactly what I wanted to hear. It booted butt, and there was nothing like it over on this side of the Atlantic.”

Brian had already hooked up with drummer Chris Miller, soon re-christened Rat Scabies when, at his audition for the London SS, a rat appeared in the rehearsal rooms. Miller had scabies at the time; his nickname was sealed.

“To me, punk was like a fucking dream come true,” says Brian. “Suddenly I was able to play these songs I’d written. Finding like-minded musicians: finding Rat was such a fucking *turn-on*, a drummer that wanted to play like I did. And then there was these guys we were getting introduced to called the Sex Pistols, and they were playing – not with the same musical flair – but with totally negative attitudes to all the hippy-dippy stuff that was still lingering about.

“Then Mick had teamed up with a couple of guys and they’d got The Clash together, Tony James had Generation X. There was a lot of attitude, bands forming and splintering and other bands forming out of that. It was a really exciting time for a while.”

Dave Vanian had been hanging around Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop, at that point called Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die (later to become Sex). “I bluffed my way into the musical industry,” says Dave.

“I sang in my bedroom and realised that I could hold a note or two. McLaren was looking to put people together and I told him that I’d sang in some local bands. He liked the way I looked, I s’pose. I was all in black, but a little weirder looking. All made up, spikey hair and six inch tall granny boots: high lace up Victorian boots with massive heels.

“I suppose I used to look quite androgynous and I used to get loads of stick. I was forever getting into fights. It was a nightmare. When Captain was brought in he had all this corkscrew hair like Marc Bolan. I remember Malcolm saying, ‘I don’t wanna use ‘im – ‘e’s just a facking ‘ippy!’”

I was making a hell of a lot more money digging graves than I was with The Damned, I’ll tell ya.

While McLaren went off to manage the Sex Pistols, the nucleus of the Damned was formed. Brian asked Dave if he’d like to audition as singer. “I found out that there was another guy auditioning so I turned up early to see what he’d be like. He never turned up and I got the job.

“The weird thing is, the guy who never turned up was Sid Vicious. I often wondered whether, if he had showed up, he’d have become the lead singer in The Damned.”

Getting the gig meant Dave had to leave his job as a grave digger in Hemel. “I actually only did it to give me some time to think about what the hell I was going to do with my life,” he says. “But they offered me some perks to stay and stuff, and I was making a hell of a lot more money digging graves than I was with The Damned, I’ll tell ya.”

New Rose was released in October 1976, pipping the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy In The UK to become the first record released by a UK punk band. Stiff had rushed them into the studio to record the single and album before the Sex Pistols and the pace was matched by the music. It didn’t stop to mess around.

“The album was raw,” says Sensible. “It’s all first takes and hardly any overdubs at all. Fuelled on sulphate and cider, if I remember rightly. We knocked it out in two days with [producer] Nick Lowe. It doesn’t seem that fast nowadays, but at the time, people used to say, ‘Did you speed the album up?’ Ridiculous.

“But it’s raw and it doesn’t sound polished at all, compared to the Pistols stuff. I mean, take Rotten off and it could be Bad Company or somebody like that. Slow and turgid, I thought. We laughed when we heard Anarchy – couldn’t believe it.”

Rat’s pounding drums, Brian’s razor-sharp riffs and short squealing solos, Sensible’s manic driving bass lines and Vanian’s snarling vocals (his throaty gothic croon didn’t come until a couple of years later) created the sound of a band in a rush to get to the point (or, more likely, the bar). A frantic and furious British version of the Stooges and the MC5, it made The Clash look timid and the Pistols look turgid.

We laughed when we heard Anarchy In The UK – couldn’t believe it. Slow and turgid. Take Rotten off and it could be Bad Company.

The single came out in October, the album was scheduled for February, and in between was the small matter of the Anarchy In The UK Tour with the Sex Pistols, Clash and Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers.

The tour started on the 3rd of December. By the 7th, the Damned had been thrown off and labelled ‘punk traitors’: in Derby, the council had refused to let the Pistols play, but said the other bands could. The Clash and the Heartbreakers refused, but the Damned were willing to consider it. And that made them sell-outs.

If you believe Malcolm McLaren’s side of the story, that is. “The truth is,” says Brian, “the only reason Malcolm wanted the Damned on the Anarchy tour was because the Pistols had hardly ever played outside of London. I don’t think the Clash had ever played outside of London, and we had. We had a bit of an audience going, so he wanted to make sure the Damned were on the bill otherwise 30 miles outside of London there’d be no-one there.

“The night before all the bands were doing a soundcheck when the Pistols came running in: ‘You won’t fucking believe it! We’ve just done The Bill Grundy Show… blah blah blah’. Laughing about it. The next day, it’s all over the fucking papers, Bill Grundy’s sacked, the whole thing.”

The full effect of that kicked in two days into the tour. At that point, the line-up was the Pistols headlining, The Damned before the Pistols, and then Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers and The Clash on first.

“Two nights into the tour,” says Brian, “Malcolm starts having a go at our tour manager. He was like an office boy at Stiff, he wasn’t an experienced manager or anything, he was just there to make sure we got to our hotels and stuff. We weren’t travelling with the rest of them. They had record company support: EMI, CBS and stuff like that. They had a big coach, we had a little Transit. We weren’t part of ‘the Malcolm McLaren gang’.

“So Malcolm gives this kid such a hard time, saying, ‘I don’t need The Damned’ and all this shit, that he’s in tears. So I steamed in and I had a go at Malcolm: ‘What the fuck are you on about?’ I didn’t give a fuck in them days, I was ready to fuckin’ hit ‘im to tell you the truth. But he had his bodyguards.

“So it comes to this big showdown. Malcolm wants The Damned to go on first, then Heartbreakers, then the Clash… It turned into this big political number. Meanwhile, the gigs were being cancelled because the promoters were getting the heebie-jeebies because of all the bad press.

“We’re getting all this crap from McLaren and there’s people contacting our office saying, ‘Will The Damned play anyway?’ We’d turn up somewhere like Manchester to find the gig’s cancelled, but they still want us: ‘Fuck it, we’ll do it’. What are we meant to do? Say, ‘Oh no, we’re not doing it! Not if our mate Malcolm’s not doing it!’? You know what I mean? I could’ve fucking killed that bastard!”

The incident as reported in the music press ruined some of the band’s credibility. Years later, in Jon Savage’s respected punk tome England’s Dreaming, it was still being distorted: The Damned weren’t good enough, The Clash wanted to be higher up the bill, The Damned couldn’t be trusted.

“Total nonsense. Him [Savage] and McLaren have re-written things,” says Sensible. “These people – they refuse to allow the rest of us any credit for dreaming things up or having intelligence. So of course, punk didn’t start in the bars down Portobello Road with the bands, it was McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. Nothing to do with us…”

The Anarchy Tour wasn’t the only tour the Damned got thrown off. A support slot with US rockers the Flamin’ Groovies was also short lived. “They couldn’t keep up with us, I’m afraid,” says Captain.

“We had banners made up that said ‘Gob now!’ And we’d hold the banners up behind the band we were working with. The audience, of course, would comply and the band would be absolutely covered in stuff. We had one support band, they got the whole fisherman’s outfits – sowesters, everything – and they wore them every night onstage! The Flamin’ Groovies didn’t approve! They’d never seen anything like it.

“There was another band that came over from New Zealand, called Split Enz. They had weird haircuts and funny clothes. In Australia they were shocking people by the way they looked. They came out on stage in the UK and the audience shocked them! Straight on the first plane back home they were. They were pretty manic days.

I wouldn’t have liked to work with us back then. It was dangerous. There was serious amounts of lunacy going on.

“I wouldn’t have liked to work with The Damned at the time, to be quite honest. It was quite dangerous, I’d imagine. To have come through it still alive… I’m not overstating it: There was serious amounts of lunacy going on. If the hotel was next to another building, we’d jump from roof to roof, pissed as parrots, just to get the flag off the roof. I’m scared of heights! The things you do when you’re paralytic…

The mania continued. For their second album, Brian decided he wanted a second guitarist. Rat and Captain disagreed. “We thought Brian could cover it,” says Captain. “When you’ve got that big wall of noise, you don’t need two of them doing it. Throughout the auditions we were doing everything we could to put people off.”

Like what? “Like spitting at them as they were auditioning. And we’d be playing with our trousers and pants down around our ankles, y’know, urinating on the floor, stuff like that.

“Out of the 30-40 people we saw that day, most of them didn’t even last one song. This character Lu gave loads back, he loved it. His name was Robert Edmunds, but we called him Lu, short for Lunatic. We were like, ‘Get that lunatic back, he was the only one that had any bottle!’”

The album, Music For Pleasure, recorded with Lu and produced by Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason (The Damned share a publishing company with Floyd – they were hoping for Syd Barrett), was a disappointment to the band, fans and critics.

Today, Brian blames the record company rushing them into the studio with half-finished songs, the posh studios it was done in, and the fact that the band were knackered. (Why didn’t they take a break? “They kept us on the road,” says Brian, “kept us working. They wanted the money coming in.”)

The album came out in November ‘77, their second in one year, and despite standouts like Problem Child, Stretcher Case Baby and Creep, it didn’t live up to expectations. On their UK tour that month, Jon Moss – better known later as the drummer for Culture Club – replaced Rat Scabies.

“Rat had a bit of a breakdown in France. He built a campfire in the middle of his hotel room. It was quite cute in a way,” laughs Brian. “Except that he’d drunk a bottle of brandy or something and was threatening to jump out the window. At that point, our only bit of normality was the three quarters of an hour on stage.

“It was only then that no-one was sticking stuff down our throats or up our noses. Offstage, people’d be… celebrating. And it’s hard to wind down when you’re not used to it. And I think it’d got to Rat. He’d partied hard, real hard.”

“We’d be spitting at them as they were auditioning, playing with our trousers and pants around our ankles, y’know, urinating on the floor…”

Jon Moss took over for the UK tour, but auditions for a permanent new drummer didn’t go smoothly. An old rocker who’d drummed with the likes of Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran turned up. ““He had all these great stories,” says Brian, “and you don’t meet these people very often. There were all these drummers queuing up to do their bit – I did feel a bit sorry for them – but we left them waiting and went to the pub. For about two hours.”

Brian had lost interest: “I said to the other guys, ‘Look, I want to break the band up’. I don’t think the Captain was very happy about it. But it wasn’t working.”

“It was Brian’s baby,” says Captain now. “It was his vision and his songs that made us. And when that happens people say, ‘You’re the talent in this band, you don’t need the rest of them.’ I think people were saying that to Brian.

“I was pretty pissed off, to be quite honest. I could see the toilets beckoning. They’d said they’d keep me job open for me! I didn’t know what to do with myself. Six months later we got back together again, without Brian.”

Captain moved over to his first love, lead guitar, and they got a new bass player, Algy Ward, previously of Aussie punks The Saints. The remaining members, meanwhile, discovered a songwriting chemistry they didn’t know existed.

The Captain’s first attempt at a song was Love Song, a blistering two and a half minutes of punk pop thrash. It went to number 20. The resultant album, Machine Gun Etiquette is now thought by many to be their best.

“I think people thought we were washed up,” says Vanian. “The songwriter of our hit album, gone. Guitarist, gone. You’d think that was it. But Captain had always been a great guitarist and when we all started writing it was obvious there was a lot of chemistry there. We went in different directions and I think that’s what has kept the band alive, somehow: each album moves somewhere.”

1980’s The Black Album was double vinyl and a deliberate nod to the Beatles’ White Album. Neither as indulgent or as streaked with genius as the Fab Four’s creation, for a punk band it nevertheless pushed the boundaries. At 17 minutes, the epic Curtain Call filled a whole side of vinyl.

Keyboard wizard and soundtrack composer Hans Zimmer produced History Of The World Pt. 1. Dave Vanian, meanwhile, revealed himself to be one of the most distinctive and gifted singers of the era (“My voice dropped about an octave,” he says. “I could reach much lower notes than I had ever been able to previously. Consequently I wasn’t able to reach the higher notes either”).

Algy Ward was out, Paul Gray was in, and this time around they produced the album themselves on an old pig farm in Wales. “The record company said, ‘You can’t produce yourselves, it’s the kiss of death’,” remembers Dave.

“They were freaking out. They sent this guy down to hear the results, so we recorded a really terrible track – out of tune vocals and all this bullshit – and we arranged it so that as he pulled into the car park I was shooting a shotgun at one of the band as he ran off screaming, ‘I’m never fucking working in this band again!” The guy arrives in the middle of all this chaos, comes in and hears this terrible track, turns around and says, ‘Sounds great!’”

Despite a lack of commercial success, the band had hit a purple patch. Follow-up album Strawberries was even better: concise pop songs with beautiful melodies, great rock hooks, clever arrangements and brilliant production.

They switched record labels, lost and gained personnel (Roman Jugg joined on keyboards), but still the big hits eluded them. Well, not all of them. Captain Sensible’s version of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Happy Talk, recorded as a joke filler for a solo album he’d been working on, was released as a single in June ‘82 (months before the release of Strawberries). It went to number one and made Sensible a novelty pop star.

“I suppose it happens in other bands, but usually it’s not the guitarist it happens to,” says Captain. “Sounds had described me as ‘one of the world’s most disgusting slobs’. We were pretty rancid and disgusting and the joke was that I wasn’t the sort of person that should’ve sung a song like that. People were playing it for that reason at first and then it became a monster hit. A few months before it I’d done a single with [anarcho-punks] Crass! That was me. Happy Talk wasn’t.”

Over the next couple of years, tensions set in. “I thought we could co-exist, but I just didn’t realise it wouldn’t work,” says Sensible. “I remember a gig in north Wales where a limousine came and picked me up and whisked me off to do some promotional thing and the rest of them had to get in the back of some Transit van. It must’ve upset them.”

Vanian disagrees: “That never worried me,” he says. “All this bullshit of people selling out. If the TV people want to pay for some nice car to pick you up, why not take advantage of it? Why go on the bloody bus? Take it – it’s not going to last forever.

“To me, it was great ‘cos here was this great eccentric character, part of our British heritage, getting in the back of a limo going ‘Lend us a fiver. Ah, fuck you mate!’. The thing about Captain is: what you see is what you get. It’s not an act. He genuinely is a complete… weirdo.”

When his solo career took off, the good Captain was hitting the sauce pretty hard. “We used to have this thing called the 24 Hour Club,” he says. “If you went to bed you’d be ejected from the club. So the 24 Hour Club would sometimes run for four or five days, gambling all night, drinking, substances. The Ruts, the Damned – and a bunch of coke dealers – heh-heh, I didn’t say that.

“So I ended up on kids TV several times, completely blitzed out of my mind. I remember Mike Read said to me on one Saturday Superstore: ‘Captain, you seem to be on very good form this morning – why don’t you sing us a tune?’ I was like, ‘I’ll give you a tune!’ I jumped on the table, tap-dancing, kicking everything all over the place, singing at the top of me voice. I slipped on the table, fell off backwards, banged me head on the studio floor and passed out. I was carried out by two blokes on a stretcher, live on Saturday Superstore. Completely zonked.”

Down but not out, The Damned made their biggest comeback yet. Their new material won them a major label deal with MCA, Roman Jugg moved on to guitar, and Grimly Fiendish a comic up-tempo Goth-meets-Madness number went to number 21 in the UK.

The Phantasmagoria album saw them flirt with goth (albeit a far more fun and melodic version than the po-faced doom of the Sisters Of Mercy or Fields of the Nephilim). It reached number 11 and was repackaged in 1986 when a single not on the album reached number two in the UK, their highest chart placing: Eloise, a cover of a 60s hit for Barry Ryan, and written by his brother Paul.

“I’ve got this short list of covers I’ve always wanted to do and that was on the list,” explains Vanian. “I liked Paul Ryan’s writing because it’s not as straight as you first think it is. On the surface they seem like sugary love songs, but really they’re all quite twisted songs about weird situations. The original lyrics of Eloise were banned by the BBC: it’s about an obsession he’d had with a stripper.”

“It’s a sad story,” he says. “When we covered it, I ended up on TV with Paul and Barry doing interviews, and it was great. Lovely guy. We rekindled his whole interest in writing and he went out and bought a keyboard and started writing again. He recorded some demos and it was the last work he ever did: he killed himself in a bout of depression. In fact, I have a demo of a song that he gave me which at some point we may do. It’s about John Lennon and it’s probably the last song he ever wrote.”

MCA rushed them into the studio for a follow-up, despite the band’s protestations. The result, Anything, was the worst album of their career: over-produced and lacking classic songs. For the first time, the band faced absolute disinterest from fans and record company.

MCA dropped them at the end of 1987, then began a series of reunion gigs. “Things really started to fizzle out for us,” says Vanian. “The MCA thing had ended and certain people in the band had got used to that kind of lifestyle. We just didn’t know where it was going.

As the popular music scene was gripped by grunge and then Britpop, The Damned seemed out of step. Vanian threw himself into his side project, The Phantom Chords, while Rat came up with a plan.

According to Vanian, the idea was to record an album of guitarist Allan Lee Shaw’s songs for release in Japan only. With the money from that, they’d go in to the studio and work on a proper Damned album. The album, Not Of This Earth was released in Japan and then America, against Vanian’s wishes but with Rat’s approval. It spelt the end of a long relationship. “I don’t bear any animosity towards Rat,” says Vanian. “We hadn’t spoken for a while but we do now. It took me a while to get over it though.”

Six months later, in February ‘96, the Damned were back together without Scabies, but with Sensible. Vanian’s partner Patricia Morrison, formerly of The Gun Club and The Sisters of Mercy, joined on bass. Years of gigging and songwriting paid off with a record deal with Dexter Holland of The Offspring’s Nitro Records.

The album, Grave Disorder, was an amazing return to form. So, Who’s Paranoid? followed seven years later. At the 2012 Classic Rock Awards, they won the Outstanding Contribution Award.

“Some people burn very brightly and then they dim for a while and then they suddenly come back better than ever,” says Vanian. “I don’t know if anyone has been consistently brilliant throughout their whole career – not if they’ve had a long career anyway. At the beginning you’re hungry, you’re broke… In some ways that hasn’t changed for us! Maybe that’s what gives us an edge.”

“Yeah,” says Captain, “I can’t think of any bands that’re absolutely stinking rich that make good music, can you? And we’ve always been brassic…”

The story first appeared in Classic Rock 34, December 2001

Scott is the Content Director of Music at Future plc, responsible for the editorial strategy of online and print brands like Louder, Classic Rock, Metal Hammer, Prog, Guitarist, Guitar World, Guitar Player, Total Guitar etc. He was Editor in Chief of Classic Rock magazine for 10 years and Editor of Total Guitar for 4 years and has contributed to The Big Issue, Esquire and more. Scott wrote chapters for two of legendary sleeve designer Storm Thorgerson‘s books (For The Love Of Vinyl, 2009, and Gathering Storm, 2015). He regularly appears on Classic Rock’s podcast, The 20 Million Club, and was the writer/researcher on 2017’s Mick Ronson documentary Beside Bowie. 

The Wildhearts were never backwards in coming forwards, and their latest album – arguably their most cohesive and complete yet – is, according to the band’s only real mainstay, Ginger, a journey through the troughs of pessimism and self-doubt to the sunny uplands of hope and optimism. That’s paraphrasing, but you get the picture: he’s looking up, not down.

It might be a new Wildhearts – and they’re up there with The Fall when it comes to the number of members who’ve been through the door – but the vibrancy that made ’93 debut Earth Vs The Wildhearts such a welcome surprise or 2019’s Renaissance Men a latter-day delight remains: unrelenting bombast, pop notes, visceral rage. Although, as Ginger says, he’s been on a journey, and this record ultimately skews towards the positive. Case in point: lead single Failure Is The Mother Of Success ends with the mellifluous refrain: ‘You took a lot of knocks to get where you are today’, and you know he’s talking as much to himself as he is to his audience. Self-affirmation and reaffirmation, this isn’t a solitary journey he’s taking; everyone’s welcome, nay encouraged, to come along on the ride.

That said, The Wildhearts aren’t all introspection and meaning. Kunce is a delightful, thrashing middle finger to ‘superior cyclists’, and people who say ‘hollibobs’ or ‘leave their bags on seats’. It’s a glorious ode to the litany of wankers we all have to deal with every day and a reminder that life isn’t always the big overarching questions, sometimes it’s just that dick on the train.

It’s not a standalone, though, this album is stuffed full of songs. The fizzing Troubadour Moon reads like a country lyric in a hard rock song, painting a vivid picture of the failed muso living in a bedsit, early ambition now realised as hours on the nightshift, dreaming of the arenas never played. The raging Eventually and the quite brilliant Scared Of Glass come at you like attack dogs, but have introspection at their core and sound like Ginger’s pop outfit Hey! Hello! with a hammer in each hand. Then there’s the stark Hurt People Hurt People, a slow-building loop set around the old adage: get knocked down three times, get up four; another left turn that feels right. The devil really does have all the best tunes.

“Were there any good moments?” Steve Jones ponders, thinking back on the Sex Pistols‘ ill-fated January 1978 US tour. “No, there were none.”

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

In 2010, a bright-eyed 21-year-old Janine Shilstone went to London to try out for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical adaptation of The Wizard Of Oz. With a passion for musical theatre and a yearning to escape into fantasy worlds, it seemed like becoming Dorothy was her destiny – but then, she realised her heart wasn’t in it.

“I got down to the last 21 girls, but I hated it,” she recalls of the auditions. “Once I was singing for Andy, and he said, ‘I can tell you’re not enjoying this. You want to be yourself – you’re a rock star.’”

For the last 14 years, Janine’s been the rock star frontwoman of Scottish pop-metallers Vukovi. Onstage, she shines, and is far more chaotic than a poised performer in a Webber production. Powered by Buckfast, she stagedives and goads the crowd into a frenzy with the rallying battlecry, “LET’S FUCKIN’ GOOOOO!” But scratch beneath the sass, and you’ll find Janine’s introspective side, evident on all three of Vukovi’s albums.

On 2017’s self-titled debut and 2020’s Fall Better, she explored toxic relationships and the pressures of social conformity, and expressed suicidal thoughts on the latter with the heartbreaking I’m Sorry. For 2022’s Nula, she stepped things up a gear, addressing similar themes – and her OCD diagnosis – via a concept about the title’s character being held captive in a sci-fi world. Its single, I Exist, saw a more hopeful Janine sing: ‘You’ve gotta stay, you’ll be glad one day / And you know that better days will come to light.’

Chatting to Hammer today from a studio, where she’s working on a secret collab with a friend, anxiety is kicking in. Vukovi – Janine and lead guitarist Hamish Reilly – are about to release their fourth album, My God Has Got A Gun, their first for new label Sharptone.

“Talking about the record is a bit of a reality check,” Janine admits. “It’s a piece of myself, and it’s terrifying to think it’s going to be out in the world.”

With Nula’s sci-fi concept abandoned, My God Has Got A Gun begins with the operatic declaration: ‘This is my life and my trauma.’ It’s surprising, candid and dry – classic Janine.

“Opening on that, singing about ‘my trauma’ like it was holy and operatic, was a joke at first,” Janine laughs. “We were in the kitchen discussing the record, and I just started singing it. But we recorded it because… well, it is exactly what the record is about.”

Bursting with unnerving synths and frazzled screams, My God… feels like an uncontrollable descent into a tormented mind. Janine is lyrically volatile, flitting between gut-wrenching depression, bruised innocence and sensual lust. It’s her unfiltered self.

“When we were writing the album, I had just started going through some quite intense therapy,” she explains. “This record tracks my journey of purging all the shit that I’ve been carrying around for years. It’s like an exorcism of the darkness inside of me.”

You can see it in the album artwork, which Janine painted in the emotionally raw aftermath of a therapy session. The red and black piece oozes an unspeakable pain, almost like an abstract depiction of a bloody crime scene, and features a figure with dark hair.

“It’s this entity that I kept going back to,” she explains. “It felt like she was a part of me that was darker, but she could handle all the shit I try to separate from… I call her Sno.”

Not only does Sno appear in the artwork, there’s a track named after her. It’s the most intense one, with Janine acknowledging her inner child, wishing for emotional disassociation, and wondering who could love her, as her feelings reach a crescendo.

“That song is the hardest song to listen to and perform,” Janine admits. “It’s about forgiving yourself and the things that have happened to you. It’s the result of someone that’s been traumatised and is in survival mode.”

OCD, or obsessive compulsive disorder, is a mental health condition where a person experiences obsessive thoughts and feels driven to perform repetitive behaviours or mental acts to relieve their anxiety. While Janine was diagnosed in 2018, she had struggled with OCD traits since her early childhood. She refers to Sno as an “alter ego”, a side of her personality capable of combating her past traumas and spiteful thoughts.

“Sno was something I created as protection,” she says. “Onstage, I’d say I’m more like Sno, because I’ve got no fear. She’s not soft, she’s not vulnerable, she’ll fucking kill you to survive. It’s a barrier I can hide behind.”

Compartmentalisation and escapism have been some of Janine’s most powerful coping methods over the years. From distracting herself with musical theatre and sci-fi movies in her youth, to finding solace in a story-based album like Nula, she’s sought out ways to detach from pain.

“It’s always felt safer to lose myself in creative worlds,” she admits. “With my type of OCD, I often liken it to religion. It feels like there’s something that follows me around and punishes me or rewards me for certain behaviours – which is similar to the idea of God always watching, punishing you for your sins. It has that same element of control.”

Hence the album title: My God Has Got A Gun. Janine feels hounded by an omnipresent OCD presence holding a barrel flush against her temple, finger weighing on the trigger. Fuc Kit Up captures it best, with ominous electronics bolstered by rumbling riffs as Janine begs the tormentor in her mind to ‘put me out of my misery’. The video for standalone single Mercy Kill was filmed in a church; Janine worships an unseen deity before being asphyxiated by something shadowy,

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Ultimately, My God… sees Janine learning to love herself, a process she had started during the Nula cycle, and documented on I Exist. On that song, she declared she wanted to ‘find myself while I’m alive’.

“With Nula, I had started to get some help,” she admits. “Before then, there were points where I didn’t see a future for myself. But Nula was me admitting, ‘I can’t live like this, and I want to be happy.’”

“It does make me quite sad listening back, because I realise how much I was tortured by it. During the first album, I was so lost. My mental health was so bad, and the only thing that helped me was writing music and creating. I was too immature to think I needed any therapy.”

Cowboy is perhaps Vukovi’s most vulnerable song to date, Janine acknowledging she is worthy of love.

“Going to therapy made me realise that maybe I wasn’t involving myself in ‘healthy love’. Cowboy is about when you meet someone that is very good for you, and your mind tells you that you don’t deserve it,” she says, a flicker of sadness on her face. “It’s battling against that gut feeling that you fucking deserve someone shite, that you need to self-sabotage and run.”

The distress on My God… is balanced out with some absolute bangers – how would Janine be able to howl “LET’S FUCKIN’ GOOOO!” if she was sobbing the entire time? Onstage, she loves to play the temptress, dancing in playful mesh bodysuits with a maniacal glint in her eye. While Nula track Quench was enough to have your mother gripping at her pearls, lead single Gungho is a fantasy about fucking and getting choked by Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep. Misty Ecstasy offers even more explicit content and a ton of blissful energy.

“I’ll joke about having someone ‘fuck me like a siren’ – I enjoy the tongue-in-cheek sexuality,” she grins. “It’s fun, it’s flirty and it’s another way of allowing myself to feel desirable.”

As Andrew Lloyd Webber recognised all those years ago, Janine is herself. She’s a rock star. And while she’s still on her journey of self-discovery, she hopes My God… will make people feel alive on theirs. “We wanted this album to help people, but also be a bit of a celebration,” she says. “It’s ultimately an amalgamation of a human just trying to fucking get by and trying to exist.”

My God Has A Gun is out now via Sharptone. Vukovi play London’s Kentish Town Forum tonight (March 7) and Manchester’s O2 Ritz on March 8, as well as 2000 Trees this summer. If you need someone to talk to, call Samaritans free on 116 123.

Full-time freelancer, part-time music festival gremlin, Emily first cut her journalistic teeth when she co-founded Bittersweet Press in 2019. After asserting herself as a home-grown, emo-loving, nu-metal apologist, Clash Magazine would eventually invite Emily to join their Editorial team in 2022. In the following year, she would pen her first piece for Metal Hammer – unfortunately for the team, Emily has since become a regular fixture. When she’s not blasting metal for Hammer, she also scribbles for Rock Sound, Why Now and Guitar and more.