Walking down Sunset in what is both the "upscale" part of Hollywood and the "low scale" part of Beverly Hills, I thought of what a strange picture this made: two rather small females - looking a little too gothic to be ignored, though not quite strange e nough to be really interesting - ambling out of an economy car on which one door was held closed by a bungy cord. It didn't surprise me when we got carded at the liquor store.

Crossing the street at the light, which we waited for in a manner neither of us would have been caught dead doing 8 years ago, we discussed going backwards for birthdays from now on: this year, we're both turning 24 instead of 26. It was regression time, and time to mourn our disappearing youth. We were definitively pathetic - you would have thought we were turning 65.

It occurred to me that the prospect of interviewing Rat Scabies of The Damned was perhaps the cause of all this dismal reflection. We were going to meet the drummer for a band which had broken up and gotten back together countless times since their recor ds had first graced my turntable way back before vinyl was a dirty word. Here we were, two people whose "scene" had now endured long enough to be regarded as average, though ten years ago it was looked upon as quite bizarre and unusual, on our way to interview a man whose "scene" was the predecessor and inspiration of ours.

This train of thought lasted all the way up until we were face to face with the tall, slender, reddish/blonde haired symbol of our early teenhood. Rat Scabies invited us in, looked for his keys for about 20 minutes, and then excitedly presented his new ve ry expensive LCD Digital Camera like a little boy who'd just gotten a new big wheel. It was then that I realized the secret to immortality: retain childlike wonder and never reject change. These are the qualities which have kept The Damned's albums on tur ntables for the past 20 years.

Scabies was in L.A. working on licensing for The Damned's soon-to-be Cleopatra release, "Not Of This Earth," which is due out in August. We met up with him in Hollywood during May to chat over tempura.

A: How long has it been since the last release?

RS: I really don't know. I think it's been about six or seven years since the last studio album - since the last album where we did new material - and that was one of the things about the group... I really didn't want to have anything to do w ith it unless it was new. I really don't see the point in, you know...

A: Rehashing old stuff.

RS: Yeah. I mean, it's a great dilemma because you have your audience, which obviously wants to hear you play your hits or whatever, and you really are sick to death of playing them. So it's a case of trying to not be bored with it, which is a bit difficult after twenty years, you know, to do New Rose again. So you try to keep your enthusiasm for it. But really, I think the whole thing with the Damned is that it was always forward thinking, and it was always the group that never stayed the same, and it always did new things, and it always took a chance musically, you know.

A: And what have you been doing between then and now?

RS: Loads. I came out to America for a while, lived in Huntington Beach and wrote with a couple of people - a guy who's most famous right now for singing back up vocals for the Chili Peppers and doing that kind of thing. He's a really kind of cool guitar player and he and I wrote a lot of songs together. I really enjoyed working with him. But it all had a terrible, bitter, twisted ending and we ended up doing nothing.

So then I got this band from Hungtington Beach and took them to London and we got a band together there called Dog Exercise Area.

A: Dog Exercise Area?

RS: I'm afraid so.

A: Oh what a wonderful name!

RS: Well, we went through quite a few. One of my favorites was 11,000 Apologies. That was another good name.

So, I took them to London and they went home because it was snowing, and the IRA blew up Victoria Station and you could hear the explosion, and they didn't have any money and they didn't like starving, and they decided they'd rather be back home. They sta yed for a couple of months and we did get the recording done, so it wasn't wasted. I've started seeing them again and we were talking about maybe finishing up the album and doing a whole record. That's kind of a good prospect, I like that one.
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A: Sometimes when you kind of have beginnings of a lot of things it helps you try and figure out where you really want to go.

Yeah. Certainly leaves the door open. Very much. Very much. And I just really like them as people - they're all really cool. One of them played guitar in The Bangles.

When I came back from there, I started getting into writing. I did a little bit of work as a food and restaurant critic for a comedy magazine which collapsed miserably. So I was quite happy hanging out at the edge of that and getting free food and really good service. It all came about because I was asked to write an article for a magazine called Mojo about what it was actually like being on the road in a band and why did we keep doing it. I hadn't really written anything at all since I left school , so I suddenly remembered, "Hey, I used to enjoy this."

So I just really got into words and a sort of concept that I call "Think Space," which is that you kind of trigger your imagination into an area that's not necessarily inside your head - you go into a collective pool of consciousness.

A: You generated this concept for something you were writing at the time.

RS: No, one of the projects I was working on was for a spoken word script of a comic book called The Watchmen. One of the deals about this was that the authors had to give their consent for me to do the work, which was great because it meant that I got to speak to Alan Moore and Dave Givens. Dave Givens was one of the greatest comic book artists in the world and Alan Moore has got to be one of the best storytellers, certainly of my generation - there's was nobody I'd prefer. And so I talked w ith them and we got onto this thing and Alan Moore said, "Have you heard about thinkspace?" It was just one of those things where the concept arrives and you recognize it. It's the same way that now when I said it to you, you recognized immediately what I was talking about. That's part of thinkspace - it's the collective consciousness.

Imagine, if you will, the way Alan Moore explained it to me: a giant lake with lots of pools and rivers that run off them. You're at the end of one of these little tiny creeks right about where the river starts, and if we use our imagination, we actually start moving further down the river into the big lake, which is where the collective consciousnesses meet. And that explains quite a lot of strange phenomenon - you know, that sort of thing where one person knows something and suddenly a lot of other peop le will know it as well. You'll know it immediately in the way that you recognized it when I discussed it, so suddenly now the ripple effect is moving even further because you'll discuss it with someone and they'll recognize it.

And maybe that's where you go under hypnosis and maybe that's where you get ghost stories. Maybe certain events are registered within this thinkspace concept area. I think it's much closer than the kind of spooky unexplained thing that we're told to belie ve - you know, I really don't believe in that paranormal thing. I don't believe in anything unless you can scratch it, you know, scratch a window with it. But at the same time, being cynical like that means I have to accept that there's a certain need to, if you like, accept new ideas - and that's what I liked best about this one.

What I always find amazing is that only human beings can come up with a concept, such as infinity, that the human mind is incapable of understanding.

A: We think, anyway. For all we know, a cat, or any other animal, could be thinking of such a concept they're unable to understand as well. Unlikely, maybe, but possible.

RS: And that's probably very likely.

A: You think so?

RS: That it's likely, yes. Cats, dogs...

I think where animals have the advantage over people is that they don't understand the concept of death. That's why animals are always happy.

A: What do you think of death? Does death scare you?

RS: No. I've already been there once.

A: Have you? {And suddenly memories of vampiric references from The Black Album started wafting into my head. But alas...}

RS: Well, we all have. Before we're born, we're in a state of nonexistence. So why be afraid of it? We've already been through there.

A: On a slightly more mundane note, how did you learn to play the drums?

RS: Taught myself when I was about 8. One night there was a drummer on t.v., and I just thought, "That's what I'm gonna be." I just love the sound of drums.

A: Did you ever think about being anything else? Or take anything else in school?

RS: No. Well, in school I wasn't allowed to take music, despite the fact I was playing in the orchestra and taking music lessons every week. Because I didn't care about any other subject apart from music, the rest of my grades were really bad. It's hard when you don't care about something to be interested in it and work hard at it. And so I didn't ever bother with anything except that. Then they said, "Well, you can't take music for your exams." That's when I realized that this kind of education thing just didn't work. Well, it didn't work for me.

A: How did you get stuck with the name "Rat Scabies?"

RS: I had scabies, which is this kind of termite thing that lives on you. I went down to play with Tony James, Mick Jones, and Brian James and they asked me what was wrong and I told them. And suddenly I had that name. I didn't like it.

A: How did you get scabies? {which elicited a frown} You knew I had to ask that question.

RS: I think I got it from some girl - a bloody woman.

A: Have you ever thought about writing some more.

RS: Oh yeah. I'm still working on The Watchmen script. I mean, I doubt it'll ever see the light of day, but I really enjoy it.

A: It sounds like you've been pretty much the one doing most of the arrangements for getting all these things to happen with The Damned. Has that been the case all along?

RS: It has for the last ten years, yeah.

A: You're obviously very good at the business end of things.

RS: I'm very good at it, yeah, and we made a lot of money. We made a lot more money with me doing it than they would with anyone else doing it and we travelled first class every time.

A: You're kind of the motivating factor recently?

RS:I'm the only one who could be bothered.

A: You've kind of had to whip those guys into shape, huh?

RS: I love them dearly and respect them greatly as musicians. They're my closest friends, but...

A: You sound a little, uh... Is there some animosity going on among the original members of The Damned?

RS: No, but basically it's... It comes down to 20 years of nothing until the end result is that we squabble about the money. And it just became very tedious, and to be completely honest, you know, some people value their solo career far great er than they value The Damned's career.

A: Do you think you've thought that way sometimes too? I mean, like you were saying earlier, you get to the point where you're so tired of doing the same thing, and that's what people come to expect.

RS: Yeah, and you'd really like to do something new.

A: Yeah. Do you think maybe they are just kind of giving up on that and figuring their only outlet is solo?

RS: No, I think it's about money and I think it's about ego and about people who want to be seen as a valuable asset in their own right. We're all valuable assets in our own right in one way or another. But if that's what the people want you to do, then that's what the people want to do. It just kind of sucks when reality gets to them and they realize the people really only care about your past achievements. It's nice to remember it now and say, "Yeah that's really cool," but fuck that , I want to do something now.

{And what we all decided to do "now" was start in on our tempura}

A: Yeah. Well, there's that new Damned album coming out.

RS: That's right.

A: And it's not old stuff.

RS: No, it's all new songs.

A: Very new sound?

RS: Naw, it's a very old sound.

A: Very old sound but very new songs?

RS: Uh-huh.

A: Like a VERY old sound, like on Machine Gun Etiquette?

RS: Kind of like on the first album.

A: Oh, Damned Damned Damned?

RS: Yeah.

A: Where exactly did Music For Pleasure fall into everything?

RS: Well, badly really. It was our second album. Haven't been able to listen to it since we made it. We got Nick Mason from Pink Floyd to produce it - the idea being that we wanted to become more psychedelic and more drug related.

A: I see. And you didn't think about just going to the corner and buying some drugs?

RS: We didn't have any money.

A: I do suppose that if you wanted to become more drug induced musically, Pink Floyd would be the place to go for it.

RS: We always dug Pink Floyd's first two albums with Syd Barrett.

AY: Tell us about the new cd.

RS: The line-up for the band was me, Dave Vanian a guitarist from the Godafathers called Kris Dollimore and a bass player from New Metal Army called Moose. We all wrote the songs for it. Glen Matlock played bass on two tracks. And we had someb ody playing Hammond organ called James Taylor, who's English and not the other James Taylor. He's sort of the best Hammond player in the country and he's got this band called the James Taylor Quartet and they do just t.v. themes like Hawaii Five-O and tha t kind of thing. There's 11 songs from that band and then there's what was originally a bonus track - and this was just me and Brian James - which was done as sort of an experimental thing.

And of course there was the tour. We didn't do any rehearsals or anything like that. I really didn't see the point because we already knew the songs, because we'd already done them for so long. So I just booked us a tour. In Germany we did about 27 shows with no days off, so the band was really really tired. On about day 28 we went into the studio and encountered the first major problem, which was that we were so used to playing live every night that we really didn't know how to work in the studio where y ou do all the overdubbing and all of that stuff. So every night we just said, "Right, nine o'clock, show time." And so we just went in at nine o'clock and played a set. The first night we got about five tapes, and the second night we did it again a nd got another four or something. We did the whole thing in about three days and then we just kind of repaired bits and pieces and overdubbed the vocals and stuff.

A: And when can we pick up a copy?

RS: Um, I think in August it will be out.