Things were not happy in the camp.  The Damned had been touring relentlessly since the release of 'Damned Damned Damned' and Brian was not so far forthcoming with material for the second LP.  At the same time, he was discouraging Rat and Captain from contributing ideas they'd been working on together.  There was, additionally, a great deal of discontent in the band over Brian's determination to recruit a second guitarist.

Other problems were beginning to surface to add to the general atmosphere of despondency.  Stiff Records were getting fed up with the group's mischief-making and growing notoriety; Captain was becoming frustrated on bass; Brian's girlfriend, photographer Erica Echenberg, was involving herself in the band too much for Rat and Captain's liking.

The Damned, the first punk band to do almost everything, were about to become the first punk band to screw up.

Captain:  "I thought if ever there was a guitarist who didn't need a second guitarist, it was Brian.  We had a couple of rows with Brian at the time.  I think he wanted another guitarist to play his part and he wanted to slip in more licks and stuff.

"Anyway, we placed an ad and me and Rat took the calls in the Stiff offices.  We'd say 'Are you the greatest guitarist in the world?'  If they said 'No' we'd put the phone down on them.  If they said 'Yes', then there were five or six more questions they had to answer in the right way or else the phone would go down.  The next one would be 'Do you like Eric Clapton?'  If they said 'No', they were on to the next.  'What would you do if you were standing onstage and all the power went off and you were in front of two or three thousand people?'  If they said 'I'd brazen it out, make fun of it, start entertaining the crowd without the guitar', they were on to the next question.

"Some of the people who came for the actual auditions were really dreadful.  After two or three, we thought 'We'll have to liven this up a bit'.  They'd put the guitar on, plug in and we'd all pull our trousers down.  If they didn't mind that, then we'd start gobbing at them while they were playing.

"This one guy was really grooving on it.  He was shrieking with laughter while he was playing, doing this tricky routine while we were naked and gobbing at him.  We said 'That was marvellous.  We'll definitely put you on the short list'.  By the next evening, we said 'We've gotta get that lunatic back'."

That was how Robert Edmunds -- born in Welwyn, Herts., on September 24, 1957 -- acquired the name of Lu and got a job in The Damned.  He had no previous experience and was, at the time, living in a cupboard under the stairs in a house in Cromwell Road, London.

Lu, tall and skinny with angular features and freckles, made his debut at the beginning of August at the second Mont De Marsan festival in France.  It was a remarkable occasion.

Captain: "Someone gave me some stuff.  I think it was angel dust.  I went berserk.  I let stinkbombs off while The Clash were playing and instead of running offstage, I just stayed there and hovered about -- 'I'm enjoying this, sodding their gig up'.  So I started pulling plugs out of amps while they were playing songs."

Allan Jones, Melody Maker editor:  "It was the best Clash set I ever saw for that reason."

Captain:  "The stage hands chased me.  I went flying off the stage and I fell on this scaffolding stuff in an awkward position.  Then I passed out.  The next thing I know I'm in an ambulance and they're just about shutting the doors and I'm going to be driven off to some French hospital.  I didn't really fancy that much.  I jumped out the back of the ambulance and got chased by all these coppers.  I jumped on top of this articulated lorry that had brought the gear.  I was petrified.  I'm screaming 'Get my manager, he'll sort it out'.  I'm kicking them off as they're climbing up.  Eventually someone came along and sorted it out -- 'It's OK, it's just Captain'."

The Damned went on from Mont De Marsan to Bilzen in Belgium.  And it was on the way home from there that Elvis Costello joined the distinguished list of Damned victims.

Captain:  "We were all going for it on the way back.  Costello passed out on the back seat of the coach, drunk and mumbling 'I feel sick'.  He shut his eyes.  Me and Rat collected all the butts from the ashtrays and emptied them into his mouth, putting fag butts in his ears, up his nose and tied his shoelaces together.  We poured a can of lighter fuel all over his feet and set fire to his shoes.  So Costello went 'Waaaagh... cough, cough, cough'.  Which I thought was excellent.  I'd like to think that's where he got his vocal technique from.

"If someone ever said to us 'You're totally out of order', we'd play up on it.  It wasn't Elvis who said it that time, but he was the only one who went to sleep.  That's the other thing.  When you tear someone's tee-shirt off and do things like that, it doesn't mean you don't like them.  It's a friendly act, I would've thought.  You don't do things like that to people you don't like.  Well, I don't."

The Damned came back from London to play a venue called the Sundown in Charing Cross Road where Dave Vanian found and attempted to make off with a coffin:  "Have you ever tried getting a seven foot long coffin in a taxi cab when you're drunk?  In the end, I gave it to the roadies and it got smashed to pieces in the back of the van."

The Damned spent the rest of August working on their second album with a variety of unlikely people.

Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, for instance, was producing because the Floyd's publishing company Rock Music was also The Damned's, and Britannia Road studios, where the recording took place, was owned by Pink Floyd.  The original idea had been to get the elusive Syd Barrett in on production to give the album and unusual, eccentric slant, an early Floyd influence.  Failing to secure Barrett, The Damned hoped they might achieve the same objective by working with Mason.  They additionally brought in sax player Lol Coxhill, who'd previously jammed with them, to contribute to the track 'You Know'.

But despite the extra guitarist, despite the efforts of Mason and Coxhill, it was clear that this LP was never going to work.

"The only good thing that came out of the album for me was Lol Coxhill.  He was really funny.  He walked in with these two life-size kiddies' puppets, one on roller skates and one in a pram.  They had names and he was leading them along.  He'd consult them.  He was so brilliant.  He did some gigs and being a teacher too, he'd sit there marking papers onstage with these books on his lap while all the mayhem's going on around him."

Brian:  "To some degree, we'd lost the original energy.  We'd run out of ideas for new songs.  We got rushed into recording it.  We thought 'Oh, we'll get another guitar player and extend it a bit more' and it never really worked.  We thought it would give it more scope so we could sustain ourselves.  We were definitely being too arty for our own good, getting Nick Mason and Lu in.

"Nick Mason, we learned after a couple of days, wasn't really the man for us at all.  He just did not know the band, didn't understand the energy that we had before.  Also the songs weren't really there, and he didn't give us any guidance in that.  Lovely geezer and all that stuff, but in a different world from us.  We were trying to get into his world and he was trying to get into ours and the two never met.  There was a hell of a lot of disillusionment.  Rat was getting more and more pissed off, like a slow burning fuse."

'Music For Pleasure' was indeed a dismal, desperate record, a heartless, uncomfortable mixture of riff rock, punk rock and 'experiment'.  Its only real flash of wickedness came with the 'Idiot Box' lyric.

Brian:  "When we did that first American tour, we had a gig on the West Coast supporting Television.  We got there and they said 'We're not letting this bunch support us'.  We were stuck on a limb.  We went down to see them and play and we had tee-shirts saying 'Television are cunts'.  It really intimidated them.  Captain wrote a song called 'Idiot Box' -- like TV -- about them."

The album deserves no further comment -- except for a backward glance by Nick Mason:

"It was a difficult period because there was a big split in the band at the time and Brian was doing most of the writing.  There was lots of disagreement between them all.  As a producer, I try to help any band produce what they want, but Brian was hoping to get a cleaner, more commercial sound, looking to do more overdubs and make more structure out of it, which the others weren't.

"I really felt I could've done a better job on it.  I could've contributed more if I'd understood better what was going on, and forced them to sort out the politics before we continued.  Quite often, the songs could've been knocked into shape if Brian had accepted the others contributing to it.  It was a bit of a washing of hands."

The band put their troubles aside, temporarily, for the wedding of Dave and Laurie Vanian on September 7 although Captain, violently anti-church, appeared only at the reception.

Laurie:  "Pete Watts drove me and my friends and family to Acton Register Office.  There were supposed to be about 10 people at the wedding, and 75 turned up, including Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe and people I'd never met before in my life.  Kid Strange (of Doctors Of Madness) was our best man.  He got there and he didn't have a tie.  I wore black lace and magenta satin.  David's mother made us a wedding cake and put two black roses on it.  The reception was at Pete's house and it went on for two days.

"We went on honeymoon for three days at Rye, Sussex.  Pete Barnes (Damned publisher) had bought us a crate of champagne, so I don't remember very much of that."

Captain:  "When Dave drove off for his honeymoon, everyone was putting shaving foam and balloons all over the car, but me and Rat decided to do something special.

"Rat knows how to get into the air thing.  When you turn on the heating in the car it comes from the engine and goes through this filter and heats up the whole car.  We found this dog shit in the street.  Rat managed to put this dog shit in the heating thing.  Not only that, we had a little bit of dog shit left over and we put it in the inside of the handles of the car so they'd get an instant reminder.   We also put little stones inside the hub caps so this rattle was there all the time they were driving along, which would sound like the car was falling to bits."  (Author's note:  it appears that Sensible knows more about the Vanian's car engine than he has so far admitted...)

The Vanians returned from Sussex and continued their honeymoon on The Damned's European tour at the end of September, while the first single, the appalling 'Problem Child', was released in Britain.  The first gig, in Nancy, France, was invaded by the local National Front who threw chairs, trashed gear and brought the show to a halt after three numbers.  For Rat, who had already decided that he didn't want to be in Europe at all, it was almost the end of the line:

"Brian had Erica on the road, which I found quite disturbing.  The first day we were in the van driving down to Dover or whatever, and me and Sensible were clowning around, lighting newspapers and throwing them around the bus.  She gave Captain a sharp 'Hey, cut it out you guys'.  We thought 'Hang on a minute, this is our idea of fun'.  We realised the tour was not going to be very happy.  I realised Erica and I would clash, and then I'd be clashing with Brian and I thought 'Is it worth it for a bunch of second-rate songs on an album that I don't like anyway?'"

By the time The Damned reached the second gig at Colmar, Rat had made up his mind to leave.

Rat:  "I'd emptied the mini bar at the hotel.  I went to the gig and met this American who said 'You take speed, don't you?'  He gave me a big handful of pills which I immediately took.  Then I don't really remember much at all except for the drum solo and getting much drunker.  Then I remember getting back to the hotel and asking a guy where the disco was.  The lift arrived and some people in evening dresses  got out.  I went to get in and the porter pulled me out.

"I started to wreck the lobby and then I remember being pulled down by these two geezers trying to beat the fuck out of me.  I remember the band turning up and the tour manager dragging me back to the hotel and putting me in the lift.  The only other memories I've got are drinking beer with Captain and running up and down the hotel, in and out of various window ledges, which was quite normal behaviour.  I did that sort of crazy stuff all the time."

This was variously reported as a suicide attempt and a nervous breakdown by other members of the band and by the press.  Whatever, Rat left the Damned immediately and spent two days trying to get home to London.

"No one bothered to talk me into going back to the band.  I remember trying to convince Captain to come with me  and he said he would stick it out to the bitter end.  But it was finished for me.  It was time to do something, anything, rather than become one of those awful, jaded groups that I despised for so long."

Rat finally arrived back in England and stayed at Moped Dave Berk's place.  Berk, meanwhile, was on his way out to Europe to take Rat's place in The Damned.  The repercussions of Rat's departure were particularly dramatic for Sensible:

"I was going to leave with Rat, but I bottled out.  I was going to stay just to see if it improved, but they stopped giving me my PDs (expense money) every day so I didn't have enough to get back to Britain.  The Damned wasn't the same at all.  I went on a drinking spree that only made things worse.  I got told off for my bad behaviour more than usual.

"I remember when I passed out just before we were due on stage.  Some froggie was going 'Ladies and gentlemen, The Damned' and I just collapsed.  Someone gave me some dope and I've never been able to smoke dope.  I can't handle it at all.  It just sends me to sleep.  They went on and I think Lu played bass for the first half of the set.  I woke up and thought 'Fucking hell'.  I staggered onstage, grabbed the bass and stumbled through the rest of the set.  I was in the doghouse for a few days.  It was an unpleasant period."

Incident followed incident on that tour.  The Damned had machine guns pointed at their heads by armed police looking for Schleyer, the head of the German CBI who was found in a car boot several days later, murdered by the Baader Meinhof gang.  They played in Venlo, Holland, supported by The Police and Wayne County and rejected Stewart Copeland as a potential replacement for Rat because "he was an American".  They visited hippie communes, stayed at a punk rock farmhouse near Lyons and played in a stinking cattle market in Rennes.  They entertained 60 2nd Paras dressed in bin-liners in Osnabruck, Germany.  They braved a barrage of beer bottles in Berlin.  They were caught driving along the hard shoulder between Hanover and Osnabruck at 70 mph and escaped by handing the coppers signed copies of 'Damned Damned Damned'.  They painted Lu's face with blue grease paint for gigs.  They raided hotel drinks cabinets.  They failedto explain themselves to a deputation from Stiff who flew to Hamburg to "give them a talking to".  And Captain met his future girlfriend Cursty in Germany.

Captain:  "We passed addresses and then she turned up in Britain when we got back.  She came over and asked Dave Berk if he could put her up for a few days.  He said 'No, maybe Captain could'.  He plonked her on my doorstep.  And that was that.  She didn't fancy any of us.  In fact, when I spoke to her about it after going out with her a few years, she said she never fancied me in the slightest.   She came round to my subtle charms.  Hmmmmm."

By the time the band returned to London, Jake Riviera had left Stiff and gone off to work with Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe, leaving Dave Robinson in sole charge of The Damned.  Even now, Riviera has only one comment to make about them:  "It was a privilege working with The Damned and I hope never to be involved with them again."

His departure served to deepen the general dissatisfaction within the group, a dissatisfaction which, despite the typical scenes of hilarity and adventure in Europe, was gradually ripping the Damned to pieces.

Lu:  "The whole time I spent with the group was mayhem.  The Damned just caused mayhem in every part of the life that they lived.  The whole thing was a scream.  I just laughed all the time.  But at the same time, the atmosphere was serious riftage.  When I first joined and went to Mont De Marsan, I kept saying 'Why do you need me?'  'What am I doing here?'  'Don't you think I should just go away now?'

"But most times I just didn't care about the arguments.  I didn't mind about being in the middle.  I was always on the outside to some extent.  They were so caught up in it themselves that they didn't really want to make it work.  They wanted to destroy it.  They wanted to go out with a mad rush.  Destruction, earthquakes, blizzards, hurricanes.  That's the level they always worked on anyway.  I knew that and I didn't care.

"Every now and again there would be huge flare-ups, big arguments, serious tensions.  It was the rooming, always Rat and Captain sharing, and Brian and Dave, which was at the root of a lot of it.  There were geographic arguments too, in that Rat and Captain were both living in Croydon then, and Dave and Brian were in North London.  Rat and Captain tried to get me to move down to Croydon.  They suspected me being really matey with Brian, of being on his side.  I never was.  I was just floating around getting paid £40 a week to play guitar in a band that I thought was really funny and dangerous and mad and likely to explode at any moment.  I was happy with that.

"Another thing that went wrong was that Riviera left and he was the only person who could sort them all out, because they respected him, but he just left The Damned dangling there.  I remember Brian saying the only person he trusted in the whole of the music business was Jake Riviera and three weeks later Jake dropped them.  Stiff just wasn't there.  They were doing something else entirely.  That was the time of power pop.  The press were being really wicked to The Damned.  I think everybody thought we were old hat.

"You also have to remember that everything that happened was against a background of extreme drugs, mostly speed.  It was just everywhere.  Captain stopped taking drugs generally, but they were freely available.

"At the end of that tour, we drove all the way back to London in one go.  I've never been so far gone.  I was just over the abyss.  We attracted the oddest people.  I've never met such a collection of complete nutters and nuttesses in my life."

'Music For Pleasure' was released in November 1977 to justifiably disappointing reviews, followed by a single, 'Don't Cry Wolf', in December.  During those two months, The Damned were on tour, supported by The Dead Boys, with a new drummer, Jon Moss.

Jon, born on September 11, 1957, in Wandsworth, London, had previously played with Eskimo Norbert, briefly with The Clash and then with a punk band called London.

Jon:  "From London on, I'd seen Captain around.  The next thing I heard was that Rat had gone completely off his head and tried to throw himself out of a window.  The obvious contender for the job was me.  I had about a week to rehearse at Shepperton, and that was the first time I met Dave properly.  I wasn't quite sure if he was being serious or not.  He had a big black fedora and cape and his make-up, but the thing is, he's not weird at all and that's what's so weird about him.

"From the beginning of the tour with The Dead Boys, I shared a room with Dave.  He was very charming and he used to say 'You use the shower first'.  So I used to go in and then go to bed and he'd be in the bathroom for another four hours.  In the morning he freaked me out.  He used to sleep on his back and when he woke up, he'd just sit straight up.  He had the whole act right down."

Lu:  "Dave's living it up to the hilt.  He keeps walking into plate glass doors.  He claims he can't see his reflection.  When I first joined the band and went to Mont De Marsan, the PA was emitting high frequency signals and all these bats, thousands of bats, were gathering, checking out the PA.  Vanian dragged himself along a bar about ten feet up and he got right under the eaves around the top of the bullright, he was just sitting looking at the bats.  He was so happy."

Jon Moss, a good-looking five-foot-seven, was smaller than the rest of the band but tough too with a background in boxing.  He wasn't going to take any nonsense from the others:

"It was very much like going to a public school.  You were the new boy and they played tricks on you and called you the tosser.  You learn very quickly to laugh at it or do worse on them and they leave you alone.  Captain threw something at me the first time and I got a can of lager and threw it over his head.  He was a bit shocked.

"He came to my house once, and that was really funny 'cause I come from a rich Jewish middle-class background.  He was wearing his Doc Martens with mud all over them.  I said 'Right, get 'em off'.  He was stunned that someone should ask him to take his muddy boots off before coming into the house.  When I joined The Damned, I was surprised at how talented he was, really.

"Brian James...  I always thought he was a bit evil.  A bit weird.  Double jointed in every bone in his body.  He looked like he'd kill you, like a mad drunk guitarist.  I remember going onstage once and he drank a bottle of vodka on his own.  He never did me any harm anyway.  None of them were really vile or horrible.  Lu was great, a complete genius."

Jon was under no false illusions when he joined The Damned:

"It was pretty obvious that they were going to split up because Rat had been so much a part of The Damned I couldn't see it going on, really.  As an outsider, you could see who wasn't getting on with who.  Captain wasn't getting on with Brian.  There was no vibe."

There certainly was not.  Sensible was becoming increasingly upset because of his frustrated writing ambitions:  another selection of songs, co-written with Lu, had been rejected.  But in the glorious traditions of showbiz, the show went on with all its customary lunacy, the Captain dolled up in wigs and ridiculous costumes, shooting his mouth off as ever.  'The Queen gives good blow jobs' became the slogan for the tour; it appeared on tee-shirts, badges and as a central part of the Captain's anti-Royal onstage speeches.

Lox Coxhill was still in the picture, turning up for the odd gig and, on one occasion, dealing with a gob in a way which would later be copied by the likes of Toyah.

Lu:  "Coxhill stood up and one enormous grolly went on his head.  He picked it off his head, looked at the punk that did it, and ate it."

The tour included three nights at the London Roundhouse on November 25, 26 and 27.  Rat went along to one of them:

"I met the Captain and Dave in the bar and they said 'Come on back to the dressing room and have a drink'.  Brian arrived with Erica and the tour manager, an absolute bastard who I despise.  They had me thrown out of the dressing room.  Maybe they thought I'd be hitting Jon Moss."

The industry, by this time, was beginning to note that The Damned were having problems.   Both NME and Sounds ran articles which questioned the future of the band.  Even Peter Barnes, their publisher and loyal supporter, felt that "it looked as if The Damned had written all they were going write".  At the end of 1977, Stiff records decided to rid themselves of what they considered to be a sinking ship.

Dave Robinson:  "When we first signed them, they fitted the Stiff image which was fun rather than serious music.  We were interested in them more than in the music, although 'New Rose' changed that and the first album was just fantastic.

"The Damned at that time was Brian's.  Dave just enjoyed playing Super-Dracula.  Then Rat and Captain really started coming forward as personalities and they decided they should have more of the decision-making.

"At the time of 'Music For Pleasure', which was a bit more contrived than the first album, they weren't getting on at all.  I think the Captain and Rat was one little team and Brian was the other who felt it was his group still, although he'd gone into the background in terms of personality.  Also, Brian had a girlfriend who interfered a bit and I think this caused problems.

"Their first album sold about 45,000 copies around that time, but it went to pay off all the excesses they had over the time we had them.  The second album did about 20,000.  They stopped selling as many records as they did when we signed them.

"We had several meetings.  We'd be saying 'Look, what are you going to do?'  They were saying 'Who cares?  We're not having fun any more'.  It was touch and go as to whether they'd survive.

"It was mutually agreed that The Damned should go somewhere else.  I had a real affection for them, but to deal with them in business was really impossible.  A band has got to motivate itself and by that means, motivate the record company.  As they were fighting amongst themselves, whingeing a lot and generally being bitter and twisted because their position in life had changed, there wasn't a lot of motivation going on."

It should be pointed out that The Damned, and various of their representatives including Rat's dad John Millar, an accountant, have always insisted that they were owed a good deal more from Stiff Records than they ever received, that their earnings from records released not only while they were with the company but records which were released by Stiff in the years after their departure, far outweighed any costs they may have incurred during 1976 and 1977.  After years of wrangling, the situation was finally resolved to the Damned's satisfaction in 1986.

Captain was particularly crushed by the group's dismissal from Stiff:  "They told us 'You're in the dumper, lads.  Your 15 minutes is up and The Damned are finished'.  I felt as though I'd been crapped on.  I actually believed them when they said we'd had our 15 minutes.  I didn't have any more confidence in the band in that format.  I couldn't see us working as a team with Brian again.  It didn't occur to me we could have something if we resurrected it without Brian."

Lu:  "When I started, we got £40 a week, then it went up to £50 and then £60 for two weeks and then back down to £40.  And then Stiff said 'No thank-you any more'.  It was a lean Christmas."

It was an even worse one for Jon Moss who was involved in a car crash on New Year's Eve.  He smashed up his face, broke his nose and had 250 stitches.  Nobody from The Damned came to visit him, although Lu did get in touch.

Eventually, he recovered -- "Lucky I'm still handsome" -- and rejoined The Damned who were struggling on against the odds with a new manager, Alan Edwards.  Edwards, recruited in the first two weeks of 1978, first met The Damned while working for Keith Altham's PR agency which represented T.Rex.  He bumped into them from time to time after that, and admits that "I didn't have a lot of experience" when he took on their management.

"I sent them down to rehearse near the Tower Of London and I got a phone call from the manager of the studios, very worried that someone had set something on fire.  He wanted to send me a bill for hundreds and hundreds of pounds.  The rehearsal fee was only going to be £40.  That gave me a taste of things to come.

"I remember going to Oxford for a show and it was a riot, basically.  Things got smashed up and that.  They got £1,000 or so for the show, but the damages came to £2,500.  The group supporting that night were Japan.  They went down so badly that they had to be escorted out of the hall.  The audience were trying to kill them.

"My time with The Damned went by in a blur of damages.  I invested whatever I had at that stage, maybe £3,000 or £4,000, and it went in about 48 hours in damage bills.  They definitely weren't an easy band to work with.  It was genuinely chaos.  It was very exciting.  Total drama.  I  couldn't say it was highly professional.  But you could never be bored around The Damned.  It was an experience with a capital E.  I only wish I'd been able to contribute a more positive role at a more positive time."

By the end of February, 1978, The Damned had split.  They would play one final gig at The Rainbow on April 8.

Alan Edwards is now in partnership with The Damned's first agent, Ian Grant.  They run a PR company called Modern Publicity and manage Big Country and The Cult.

Edwards says of The Damned split:  "I can remember miserable memories.  The final rehearsal session down in Putney, just before they broke up.  Brian told them that day, and I remember Jon Moss being absolutely destroyed.  He had nothing.  He was thrown into this thing and all these people were falling out around him and it was really depressing.  I remember him having to borrow money off me for a packet of cigarettes."

Captain Sensible was no less shaken:  "After Brian split The Damned, I came back to Croydon, and nothing was the same.  I went to see 'Abba -- The Movie' and I cried all the way through it.  Leaving the group, really, and seeing this band onstage and that, I just found everything really emotional.  People were sitting watching 'Abba -- The Movie', a fairly flippant piece of candyfloss, and there was this hard core punk in the middle of the audience blubbing his eyes out."

Brian:  "After Ratty left, it just wasn't the same old Damned.  There were no other issues from my point of view that were causing dissention, there was just like a slow unhappiness growing in it.  We said 'Without Rat it's nothing, let's knock it on the head'.  And so we just split the band up."

Despite the dressing room incident at the Roundhouse, Rat turned up for The Damned's last gig at the Rainbow.  "It was pretty awful," he says.  "I thought they missed that something extra and then I realised it was me."  Rat ended up onstage at the end of the night, back on the drum stool.

Not that Jon Moss minded.  He'd cheered up, he had his own plans now and he was enjoying rather than mourning the ceremonial passing of The Damned:  "My grandad came to the gig and he thought it was brilliant.  I went into the pub and he's sitting with these two punkettes on his knee.  Really dirty old man."

For Lu, though, it was not an occasion to get sentimental about:  "The Hounslow dorks were all tripped out of their heads, causing many troubles.  There was blood everywhere and fucking security did nothing.  There were girls at the front.  Some guy was giving this girl a hard time, beating her around.  I had to pull her out of the crowd.  I saved someone's life that night."