Only one band can be credited with releasing the first-ever punk single, and that band is The Damned. Prior to their 1976 track “New Rose,” there wasn’t even a name for the genre—you can thank The Damned for that. While it never achieved the same level of fame as peer acts The Sex Pistols and The Clash, it has maintained its legacy for the past 40 years and also helped spearhead the goth movement, continuously touring and churning out fantastical and brooding records. We caught up with frontman Dave Vanian while he was at home in London to talk the band’s history and influence, its 2018 album Evil Spirits and its upcoming show in Las Vegas.

I’ve read some recent interviews with you and guitarist Captain Sensible, and one thing that seems to come up over and over again is how modern production is too clean. How did you manage to capture an older, rawer sound on Evil Spirits? We used a combination of the two things. All the equipment that was being used was basically valve-driven amps and sounds. I was singing through an old valve microphone, and you do that through that equipment, and the editing is done with the technology of today which is tremendous because that makes that fast and easy and lossless as oppose to the old days where if you made a mistake cutting a piece of tape, you were stuck, you know? So I like the mix, I think the problem is people rely on the technology so much, because it can make anything sound fantastic, and to me, it’s just my opinion, but it seems to stifle a bit of creativity because people are relying on that more than anything else.

For Evil Spirits you had no songs fully written and you only had nine days to record everything with producer Tony Visconti. And yet you came out with this magnificent, theatrical album. How did it all come together so quickly? I can’t tell you how it happened so fast (laughs). But having said that, no Damned album has had the luxury of time. All of our albums in the past were made in three to four weeks at maximum. We’ve never had this kind of thing where some bands spend six months or even a year in the studio—I’ve known people who spent six months on a guitar sound, which is to me a total waste of money. Regardless of that, obviously what happened was we signed a deal with Tony. When [he] came in, he didn’t hear anything because we didn’t have anything to play, and although we didn’t have anything demoed, we pulled our ideas and went into a demo studio and started putting things together and came up with about 23 pieces of music all in all, some of which were finished completely, a lot of which didn’t have any vocals at all, and we cherry-picked the best of those songs that we thought would link together nicely [and] concentrate on making those work. It kind of quickly came together. I wouldn’t say it was easy, but we work well under stress. I tend to work well when time is limited.

Adrenaline kicks in. Yeah. And plus, somehow when you’re single-mindedly thinking of a track, you get ideas that you never would’ve thought of before, your mind is so focused on what you’re trying to do. I had a certain sound in mind, Captain had a certain sound in mind, and Tony was an ideal producer because we felt that there were producers that we talked to that wouldn’t have understood what we were trying to do and their sounds were quite clinical and modern. I heard [David Bowie’s] Blackstar—Tony did Blackstar … I’d never met him and it was kind of one of those things where I had a list of producers and I went to the record company and said put this one at the top of the list, and they were resistant because they knew it was such a big name and he’d probably say no, but he actually said yes straight away. It worked out very, very well, but it was difficult. It would’ve been nice to have had a little bit longer. The album’s great, but I feel it’s just missing that one extra track that comes together experimentally in the studio. Other albums have had those over the years, and I felt that one big kind of long track didn’t happen, but there’s no reason why we can’t do it separately at some point.

Do you find time to write while you’re on the road? Yeah, I mean, there’s lots of things happening and the problem is I don’t—personally when I write, I never know what it’s going to come out like until it’s fleshed out. I write a lot of music, but a lot of it isn’t suitable for The Damned, so I have to think, is this going to work or not? I have written quite a lot, I think once these two tours are over we’ll start putting out … a couple tracks here, a couple tracks there.

This album has a noticeable political bent. I would assume current events are driving your writing right now. I think we’ve always had political songs on the albums even if it’s not so apparent. There were always some tracks with messages should you choose to read them, but we don’t have it right in your face. With this album, I found I couldn’t not put it in somehow. Everybody’s thinking the same things at the moment and we’re all kind of worried about certain things, so it happened whether I wanted it to or not. And it’s not like me, because I don’t write political songs very much, I tend to write more emotional or fantastical songs, or they’re about situations or relationships. And there I was writing a song about—the first single we put out, “Standing on the Edge of Tomorrow”—it’s basically about when we do head out into other planets, not to take our prejudices and rubbish with us and do everything over again. So there’s a little bit more gritty realism with this album, but there’s still the lightness and everything else.

Backing up to your heyday, I read that you guys got a telegram from The Rolling Stones back in the ’70s. Were they fans of yours and vice versa? It was quite an odd thing. It was when we played CBGBs in New York in ’76, and The Rolling Stones sent us a telegram and I think 12 cream pies and a bunch of hookers, would you believe? (Laughs.) And of course you could imagine where the cream pies went—the whole audience got totally covered. I can’t remember what it said, I think Captain might have it still, but it said a very short message, ‘Good look lads,’ you know? And we never had any other contact with the Stones.

You supported T-Rex on its final tour, right? How was that? When you meet what you call rock royalty, you often wonder if you’re going to come up against a horrible person with a massive ego and you’re not going to like them. [Marc] Bolan, I believe he had been an egomaniac before but not with us, he was an absolute gentleman and his band were great. We all traveled in the same coach together. In that day there weren’t any tour buses, so we had this bus that we all traveled on and we had a very good time and it worked perfectly because his audience liked us and our audience liked him and he was getting a whole new audience. I think he would’ve come up with an interesting album had he not died. If you look at his career, he changed his career several times. He started as a kind of beatnik type and then followed it with a kind of hippy sound before he went into the glam rock thing and then when he toured with us it was harder and grittier and had more gravitas. It would’ve been interesting to see what he’d have done next. You could see that there was a movement he wanted to be part of. I believe, tentatively, the papers dubbed him the godfather of punk. (Laughs.) Everybody—the punk scene, a lot of the bands and the audience—didn’t like the older bands, but [they] loved Marc Bolan.

It’s interesting because there’s so much crossover with The Damned. You guys toured with The Sex Pistols, worked with Pink Floyd’s drummer and were into a lot of early ’60s bands like The Kinks. People make such a huge distinction between punk and everything else that was happening at the time, but it seems like everything bled together a lot more than we realize. The only thing that separates us is the word. You can put The Damned in amongst other eras of rock music and it would still work. The punk umbrella was both a boon and a curse for some bands ... When we originally came out [punk] was a derogatory term, certainly in England, to basically say that these bands were crap and they were musically inept. And then of course it took on different meanings, but I think people forget that. When we first started, the term “punk” hadn’t been coined. [People asked] what kind of music are you? And I said we’re based on the garage bands of the ’60s, so I suppose we’re a garage band. But that didn’t stick, and once punk happened in the press then everything was punk rock.

You’ve played Las Vegas a lot over the years. What do you make of it? I used to like Las Vegas when you would drive over the desert and then suddenly this tiny little square would come in and there it was. Now it’s this sprawling metropolis with houses everywhere. It’s kind of a like an adult theme park, kind of Disneyland for adults, but before it had a feeling more of the original kind of gangster days, a little bit dodgy. I kind of liked it the way it was, it seemed more special before. But I do love some of the marvelous casinos.

Your show in Vegas is just a few days before Halloween. I know you always dress up in very Edwardian attire, but are you hoping people dress up for the occasion? That’s what I hope, yeah. I hope the audience goes all out because it’s great to see that, and it gives you an excuse to do it. If you want to [dress up] and don’t normally do it, suddenly it’s free reign.