UK punk icon Captain Sensible on Hong Kong protests, the crazy early days and becoming sensible

With Hong Kong gripped by mass protests, the band that was the pioneer of punk rock will perform live in the city as part of the Spirit of ’77 Punk Festival. The event celebrates the year disaffected youth in the UK turned to music to vent their frustration with the political establishment.

The Damned predate the Sex Pistols and The Clash and were in the vanguard of the punk movement in London in the mid- to late 1970s. Charismatic, energetic and defiant, they were the first UK punk band to record a single, (New Rose, 1976) the first to record an album, (Damned Damned Damned, 1977) and the first to tour the United States.

“We’d done more gigs, got more press than the Pistols and it looked like we’d be the UK’s No 1 punk band,” says Captain Sensible, the band’s guitarist, speaking from his home in London. Sensible has miraculously survived the excesses of being a professional punk musician for some 43 years and still relishes every moment.

“Oh, I was made for punk rock. I love a drink, especially a free one, and the more badly I behaved, the more my notoriety grew,” he says.

Raymond Burns adopted the stage name Captain Sensible, ironically because, as he freely admits, “far from being sensible, I was a disaster zone.”

Fans from the glory days of the punk scene remember him ripping off his signature synthetic pink fur jump suit and performing naked on stage with co-members Rat Scabies, Dave Vanian and Brian James, destroying guitars and generally acting like a lunatic.

The Damned became the first superstars of punk music. He and Vanian still front the band, which now includes Monty Oxymoron (keyboards), Paul Gray (bass) and Andrew “Pinch” Pinching (drums).

Sensible recalls that their early rise to fame was nearly halted in its tracks when he and drummer Scabies decided to stop on the way to performing on a TV show in London – to buy air rifles.

He and/or Scabies (who left the band in 1996) managed to shoot a TV cameraman in the buttock with an air rifle pellet before they were due to perform live on TV, though Sensible insists no one was seriously hurt by the prank. It meant the band were banned from all TV stations in the UK for six months, which allowed the Sex Pistols and the Clash to claim the media spotlight and overtake them on the ladder of punk success.

“The band’s ‘chaos years’ lasted about a decade – it’s not really wise to behave like a maniac for much longer than that, I’d have thought,” he adds, philosophically.

Sensible has matured a little since then. Now he is a 65-year-old family man and confessed foodie who rides a bike to keep in shape and enjoys taking his wife out for lunch near their home in London.

“For me, touring used to be all about the booze, whereas now, it’s all about the food,” he says.

The Hong Kong gig, on August 15, is part of a 17-date international tour. It started on July 30 in Bremen, Germany and includes venues in Belgium, Japan, Australia and the US, before the ultimate show at London’s Royal Albert Hall on October 28, which is sold out.

This will be The Damned’s third visit to Hong Kong (they also performed in the city in 2012 and 2017) and one enthusiastic reviewer of the band’s 2012 gig at Grappa’s Cellar in Jardine House, in Central – now closed – wrote: “To say it was fun to watch would be to insult the atmosphere, such was its surging joy,” and it seems Sensible enjoys Hong Kong too.

“I’m so happy to be coming back – a trip to the local markets and then to Temple Street for spicy crabs is top of my to-do list,” he says.

 There are obvious parallels between the creative scene inspired by punk in 1977, spawned by the social unrest and youth discontent at the time, and the current creative scene in Hong Kong, associated with the pro-democracy and localist protest movement.

“We wanted our own music, so we had to do it for ourselves – the punk DIY thing was extremely creative” says Sensible. He explains how fanzines started, indie labels were invented and how all the band members at their record label (Stiff Records) would help each other out, packing records and being roadies for one another.

Despite its aggressive energy, in its early days the punk music scene was very egalitarian and democratic.

“The bands and audience were, and still are, the same,” says Sensible, and punk’s egalitarianism was what was in demand after all the mega groups of the early 1970s had “seemingly disappeared up their own backsides”.

The band’s intensely loyal fan base still expects not just masses of energy but lots of interaction with band members at live gigs. “We don’t behave like arrogant rock gods, and I find all that stuff ridiculous – you’re not suddenly special just because you play a guitar,” he says.

Sensible was the founder of a political party in the UK in 2006 called the Blah! Party which set out to address the political frustration of disaffected youth.

“The Blah! Party was my reaction to [UK Prime Minister] Tony Blair, who had promised to renationalise the railways – my passion – but took the UK instead to war with Iraq,” he says.

“I could either put a brick through my TV screen every time his lying face popped up, or start my own political party,” he says, and adds that the Blah! Party got a surprising amount of support.

“I thought it showed how unpopular real politicians were, if people would rather put their trust in a daft punk rock guitarist like myself,” he says.

While he wishes he was better informed, Sensible does take an interest in the current series of Hong Kong mass protests. “Telling the truth can get you into trouble these days,” he says.

Punk as invented by The Damned and their contemporaries like the UK Subs and Cockney Rejects (who will also play live in the city as part of Spirit of ’77 festival) may have been spawned by social injustice and political frustration, but it’s subtly different in Hong Kong.

“The hard core and punk music you hear locally is more of a contemporary reinvention of the original UK and American punk – the musical connection is blurred but the attitude and the energy is the same. There are still punk attributes even if it’s not old punk style,” says Samuel Wu, events manager and publicist for This Town Needs – formerly called Hidden Agenda – the spiritual home of live underground music in the city. The venue in Yau Tong will host The Damned in August.

Those in the Hong Kong underground music scene say there’s no direct connection between the current mass protests and popular local punk-style bands like David Boring, Maniac, Instinct of Sight and Bulletproof.

“Punk may have represented disaffected youth in the West but it does not mean it has that meaning or feel in Hong Kong,” suggests Chris B, driving force behind The Underground, a bastion of underground and original live music in the city. She thinks lyrics are more important than any particular style of music.

“Please don’t try and politicise the local music scene,” she warns.

Wu, though, says: “It’s interesting, though, that after every political upheaval like in 2012 and 2014, we have seen a surge in new bands, and since the start of the 2000s, we have heard more and more anti-establishment lyrics.”

The punk scene in Hong Kong in 2019 is small, vibrant and fragmented, the latter largely because it’s so tough for new bands to flourish amid an acute shortage of live music venues – the fault of high rents and heavy government regulation. Sensible is very curious about punk in Hong Kong and China.

“I hope we get plenty of Chinese attendees in the audience and if they’d like to bring CDs with examples of Chinese punk music that’d be interesting for us too,” he says, and explains why he never gets tired of being a punk rocker in Hong Kong or anywhere else.

“I used to be a toilet cleaner” he says. “I never take my current job for granted – we are exceptionally lucky to be able to travel the world … spreading ‘joy and happiness’ as I like to put it.”