By 1979, The Damned were doomed.

Their incredible debut album, Damned, Damned, Damned, had been followed up by their equally terrible second effort, Music For Pleasure. A record that was not only blasted by the critics, ignored by the fans, and all but hated by The Damned themselves, that saw Rat Scabies quit the band due to a self-implosion during its subsequent tour.

According to Brain James; 

Rat had a bit of a breakdown in France. He built a campfire in the middle of his hotel room. It was quite cute in a way. Except that he’d drunk a bottle of brandy or something and was threatening to jump out the window.

But this was only the beginning of The Damned’s problems.

After they failed to find a replacement for Rat Scabies – due to the band themselves going to the boozer instead of seeing the people who had shown up to the auditions – Brain James decided enough was enough, and The Damned broke up.

In the space of a year, they’d released two albums and fallen apart as a unit. This would be the death toll for any band, but The Damned aren’t just any band.

In late ’78 Les Punks appeared out of The Damned’s ashes, featuring Dave Vanian on vocals, Captain Sensible on guitar, Rat Scabies on drums, and a certain Lemmy on bass. Over the next few months, the lineup would change again with Algy Ward becoming the permanent bassist – due to Lemmy’s obligations to Motorhead – and the name would be changed to The Doomed and then back to The Damned as they signed with Chiswick Records, before entering the studio to record Machine Gun Etiquette.

And Machine Gun Etiquette would change everything.

From the opening bass riff of Love Song to the final notes of Smash It Up (Part 2), Machine Gun Etiquette is a perfect album. There isn’t a single dud track on the entire record and every single song is a mini masterpiece. At its heart, Machine Gun Etiquette is still a punk album, as the likes of the title track, Liar, and The Damned’s cover of hreat MC5’s Looking At You attest to, but it also has layers to it previously unthought of from any band from that genre, and especially from The Damned who were always unfairly looked down upon for some reason.

For example, the haunting, almost psychedelic Plan 9, Channel 7 tells the tale of the strange friendship between James Dean and Vampira, while Melody Lee even had the nerve to start with soft piano before going balls to the wall. But the real stand-out moment, at least in my eyes, is These Hands. A terrifying nightmare, delivered by a circus clown, who finally grows sick of everyone laughing at him and starts to dream that he’s strangling his audience every night.

It’s not only a fantastically unsettling piece of music, but it showed that being allowed to step up to fill Brian James’ shoes was something The Damned, as a unit, were more than capable of doing. The Damned were never a band who’d go down without a fight, and Machine Gun Etiquette proved that as they came out swinging.

As Dave Vanian once said about the record;

I think people thought we were washed up. The songwriter of our hit album, gone. Guitarist, gone. You’d think that was it. But Captain had always been a great guitarist and when we all started writing it was obvious there was a lot of chemistry there. We went in different directions and I think that’s what has kept the band alive, somehow: each album moves somewhere.

Machine Gun Etiquette was, and still is, one of my favorite Damned records of all time. It ushered in a new era for a band that had, seemingly, had its life support turned off and was halfway through being buried before they came back to life. It was the start of a trilogy of albums – including The Black Album and Strawberries – that would see The Damned spread their musical wings and shed the punk label that would weigh down so many of their contemporaries to the point that many of those other groups would be nothing more than a footnote in musical history.

Even now, Machine Gun Etiquette stands as a lone flag, jammed into the musical landscape in defiance, stating “Don’t you wish that we were dead?”, while flicking two fingers at its detractors, and pouring a pint of lager down its throat.

It is a turning point, a rebirth, and because of the refusal of three men to just lay down and die, it still sees The Damned recording and touring to this very day, some 46 years later.

And thank god for that, as The Damned should never, ever die.