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‘The audience nearly soil themselves with excitement.’
The Damned
London Palladium
Britain’s first punks pull out all the stops, dive into the dressing-up box, slap on the slap and deliver a truly spectacular show. Oh, and they play some great and classic songs too.
There’s a horse-drawn funeral cortege slowly processing along Argyll Street towards the London Palladium. It’s being followed by a veritable horde of vampires. Hundreds of them. There are top hats as far as the eye can see, a significant acreage of capes, phalanxes of fangs and more tourniquet-tight corsetry than even Soho is accustomed to. Baffled tourists gape at the unexpected prevalence of freshly drained Victorian virgins and make-up-caked walking dead. “Is London always like this?” “And who’s in the casket?” There’s a floral tribute; white wreaths fashioned into nine letters that provide a solution: THE DAMNED.
“Well,” observes Dave Vanian, driving force behind the audaciously ambitious Night Of A Thousand Vampires, of which this mock ceremony is only the initial instalment, “they’ve
