Welcome to vintage clothing night at The Powerstation; all across Auckland people in their 40s and 50s could be heard demanding to know where their Ramones T-shirt was.
"Unbeknown to my stepdad," whispered a diminutive young lad from Hamilton in a Sex Pistols T-shirt, "I'm stage-diving tonight." Hamilton also had very distinct ideas of what he wanted from the setlist. So did everybody else. It's been 35 years since The Damned were formed and 25 years since they have played in New Zealand, a remarkable statistic given that in the UK they never really went away. The back catalogue is extensive, occasionally patchy but often astonishing.
For example, track for track The Black Album is better than The Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks and The Clash's London Calling - there, I f**king said it. That was the point where frontman Dave Vanian spread his bat wings and enshrouded The (formally erratic, cartoon, but sporadically brilliant) Damned in an edgy darkness they have never lost.
They open with the first three tracks of The Black Album; Wait for the Blackout, Lively Arts, and the one song the only other original member (guitarist Captain Sensible) can be trusted to sing, Silly Kids Games. They later add a mesmerising 13th Floor Vendetta and a spine-tingling History of the World.
Vanian brought a slick vampire cool to punk rock before there was any such thing as goth, and he maintains his mystique by letting Sensible do most of the talking. He glides across the stage effortlessly for a man over 1000 years old, and the richness in his vocals on Shadow of Love and Feel the Pain is nothing short of magnificent.
