The Collapse Board Interview: Paul Gray (The Damned)
When the Damned last toured Australia in 2024 (billed as their final Australian tour…), we were offered interviews with the band and the choice of talking to either drummer Rat Scabies or bassist Paul Gray. I said I didn’t mind, either would be good. “What!” you say, “You were offered the chance to talk to Rat Scabies, one of the band’s founding members, who was back in the band after a 35 year absence and you didn’t choose to talk to him when you were offered the opportunity?” Well, no. Although in the end we did talk to the band’s legendary drummer.
This time around, we were offered the chance to talk to either Rat Scabies, Captain Sensible or Paul Gray. We’d already talked to Rat Scabies so I said it would be great to talk to either of the other two band members available. “What!” you say, “You were offered the chance to talk to the good Captain, one of the band’s founding members, some would say the absolute heart of the band, and you didn’t demand to get some time with him?” Well, no, because although Paul Gray wasn’t there at the start, and has been in and out of the band a few times, he has an amazing CV, sadly something we were never going to get to cover in much detail in our allotted 20 minutes interview.
I mean, we didn’t have time to talk about his fantastic bass playing on the ‘Police Car/On Parole’ 7” he made with Larry Wallis (Pink Faries/Motörhead).
We didn’t have time to talk about making the ‘Till The Night Is Gone (Let’s Rock)’ single with the MC5’s Rob Tyner.
We didn’t have time to talk about teenage Paul Gray playing bass on half of the songs on Johnny Thunders’ So Alone album (some guy called Phil Lynott played bass on most of the other tracks), including ‘You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory’, Thunders’ signature tune.
We didn’t have time to talk about Linda McCartney providing backing vocals on ‘The Power & The Glory’ from Eddie and the Hot Rods’ 1979 Thriller album. We didn’t have time to talk very much about his tenure in UFO, which started out with him following in Billy Sheehan’s footsteps as their touring bassist, with Billy Sheehan then going on to a career that seemed to involve him winning World’s Best Bassist in various guitar magazines across the rest of the 1980s. We didn’t have time to talk about his work for the Musicians Union. We did manage to squeeze in a final question about his tinnitus and how he manages it, only for Zoom to crash and miss his response other than a few clear and random words that came through the garbled mess. Maybe next time we will take up the offer to talk to Captain Sensible. Maybe we’ll decide to have another chat with Paul Gray and ask him a few of the questions we didn’t get around to asking this time.
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You started playing in the Hot Rods when you were 18. Did you have any plans for what you were going to do if music hadn’t happened?
I started playing in the Hot Rods when I was 15 years and 11 months, a month before my 16th birthday. I thought it would last six months if I was lucky.
And then what would you have done?
Fuck knows. Stack shelves in a supermarket. I don’t know, I had no idea what I’d be doing. I wanted to be a pilot or a farmer when I was a kid. I wasn’t good at maths and my eyesight was rubbish, so I couldn’t be a pilot. I didn’t have the muscles to be a farmer, and I didn’t like smoking pipes, so that was out. My dad worked in a bank and I thought that’s one thing I’m never going to do, work in a bank and go up to London on the train every day and come back. So I didn’t know. I thought I’d be literally stacking shelves in supermarkets. And here we are 51 years later.
You started playing bass at 13 and only a few years later were playing professionally. Did you consider yourself or do you consider yourself a natural musician? Did it come easy to you?
My mum was a concert pianist and a singer in the 1950s and she was trained at the Royal Academy in London. She was a beautiful pianist. She could sight read, you know, Rachmaninoff and Chopin, just wonderful, but she couldn’t improvise, because when you’re classically trained, improvising is frowned upon. You have to play every single instruction that’s on that page of music, otherwise, it’s, you know, a slapped wrist. So I had piano lessons, not from my mum, but from piano teachers, and right from an early age, I started going off, and of course, they didn’t like it. You don’t pass exams by not playing the music that’s put in front of you. So I got up to about grade four or five, and then it just all got a bit too rigid for me. So I had a musical grounding and that really helped because it gave me a knowledge of chord structure and harmony and melody, I mean, on a very basic level, you know, we’re talking about grade four. I was rubbish at theory. I wasn’t really interested in theory, hated scales, but I loved melody, and I especially loved the melody that the left hand did, all the bass stuff.
Back in the day, I watched Top of the Pops and all the music programs that were here, and it was the bass players that I always thought looked and sounded the coolest. The bass had the longest necks and the biggest headstocks, and the bassists had the longest hair. They weren’t all that, “Look at me, me, me!” like the singers and the guitarists were. I was a bit of a shy and retiring chap back in the day, and so I gravitated towards the bass and I took to it like a duck to water and that was it.
Your bass influences were very, I guess, these days you call it classic rock. So although you were already playing when punk came along, did you feel any affinity for it? Or did you look down on what punk music was about at the time?
Punk didn’t come along, but punk was a term invented by music journalists at the NME. Punks to us were like, you know, Clint Eastwood, Clint Eastwood films, or Elvis or the Kinks or, you know, the garage bands. That was punk to us. It was just another term that had been used before, and re-appropriated, as these things go around and come around. The Hot Rods were called a punk band, but we weren’t a punk band, we just played very fast, frenetic music, which is kind of what punk was. So a lot of the punk thing came from the younger people who maybe didn’t have any musical ability, seeing bands like the Clash and Sex Pistols, who also didn’t particularly have any musical ability, and thinking “Well I can do that,” and that was the great thing about it, it was very liberating. I grew up with the classic rock stuff. I even had some Emerson, Lake and Palmer albums, but I didn’t like them because I thought I can’t be playing on Persian rugs, it’s not me. I like the raw, gritty stuff, and that’s how I learnt to play the bass. The Who were raw and gritty, Mountain were raw and gritty, Deep Purple could be really raw and gritty. I liked melodic bass players, and that’s what I got, from Felix Pappalardi out of Mountain and Entwistle, Roger Glover. I was never a two note bass player.
Very early on, the Sex Pistols supported the Hot Rods. Did you did you feel at the time that you were witnessing something that was going to have the impact it did?
No, we thought they were terrible. I mean, they did their second or third ever gig supporting Hot Rods at the Marquee and they trashed all their gear. [Johnny] Rotten claims it because it was the first time he’d heard his voice through our monitors, and he didn’t like it, but we could see McLaren at the side of the stage sort of telling them all what to do. It was quite kind of choreographed. But I’m good friends with Glenn [Matlock] now and good friends with Paul Cook. We’ve just done a bunch of shows with them. It was like kids in different gangs, really, and none of the bands really liked each other, really got on. None of the bands mixed apart from the Hot Rods and the Damned, which is how I got to know the Damned.
Presumably you were having the time of your life as a young man with the Hot Rods. Was it an easy decision to to make, to leave and join the Damned?
No, because I love the Hot Rods and I love the people in the band. They were the loveliest people in the world. But every band has got a trajectory. You go up and you go down and with the Hot Rods, we knew we’d reached our peak, we knew we were on the way down, the audiences were dwindling. To be honest, the songs weren’t as good as the songs we’ve been writing two, three years previously. We’ve been dropped by a record company and it becomes a bit of a chore. You always say when it becomes a chore, don’t bother, go and do something else. And that’s quite hard to do when it’s the only thing you can do. I’d never had a job. I mean, playing the bass was my job. But I love the Damned so much and I love them as people. I love them on the stage and off the stage because they’re exactly the same on and off, unpredictable. So I threw my lot in with the Damned and I’m really glad that I did.
I think this is your third stint with the Damned. What keeps bringing you back?
I love them, you know, and they love me. We’ve got mutual respect for each other and the chemistry that we’ve got. We’re all very different characters and blah, blah, blah, everybody knows that, but it’s fun now. There’s a lot of laughter. We’re all getting on. We’re all sitting together on planes that we never used to do, we’re all crammed in a van together, and it’s fun.
And we’ve got mutual respect for how each other play, and this lineup musically just works. You know, it’s a spiky lineup. It doesn’t really matter whether we rehearse or not. The songs are equally unpredictable every night. They could start and end and finish in different places entirely randomly, depending on who can remember what, or how long somebody wants a string out, which makes it fun and exciting. And at 68, which is what I was a couple of days ago, it’s nice to have that, because it’s not a job. Anything could happen.
The Damned got through a lot of managers. Even in your time, I think you wrote over seven in three years…
Yeah, loads of them.
Was the band unmanageable?
Yeah, absolutely unmanageable. I mean, herding sheep was a piece of piss compared to managing the Damned, because everybody was a really volatile character and everybody thought they knew best. We had some pretty unsavory characters managing us who ran off with the money. When you’re touring all the time, you can’t keep an eye on the cash, and that’s not what you join a band for. You join a band to play your instrument and have as much fun as you possibly can with your clothes on or off, and so you’re not interested in the business. Of course, every band’s got that story, but with the Damned, we seem particularly unlucky at attracting the more nefarious characters around the edges of the music industry who professed to have our best interests at heart and fundamentally didn’t, which didn’t really help. But, you know, we’ve had the same management now, Raw Power, for, I think, six, seven years, and they’re really good. They get us and we get on well with them.
Is there regret about how unmanageable the band were, about how much impact that had on the band’s success?
Not really. I mean, not for me, but I was in and out of it, of course. The others might say differently at different times in their career, but it made the band what it was. I think if we’d have had a big corporate manager and a big corporate record company, we wouldn’t be the band that we were because we’d be chivving down a more narrow commercial straight path, “Oh, you’ve got to make a record like the last one,” or, “You’ve got to sound like this.” If somebody tried to tell us that, they’d be shown short shrift, we just wouldn’t listen to them. So we were just left to get on with it, which is why there’s so many different sounding versions of The Damned, but it still sounds like The Damned. We didn’t play one style of music, and still don’t.
The Damned is still making music together. Since you’ve been back in the fold you’ve made Evil Spirits and Darkadelic, as well as the Not Like Everybody Else covers album. It’s still important to the band to still keep making new music?
Yeah. We did that album in five days, the last album, at the end of a really gruelling American tour. We thought we’d probably get two or three songs finished if we were lucky or the backing tracks down even, and we got the whole thing done in five days, which was remarkable, absolutely remarkable, vocals, and all, because we enjoyed it so much and it was sounding so good. Lovely studio, nice old vintage gear, wooden floor, and we were sparking off it. We’ve all got ideas, we’re all creative people, we’ve all got ideas in the pot. I think we’d all be really chuffed if we could get a final album of our own stuff knocked out. Just time. We’ve been pretty busy the last couple of years, but I think, I hope that will happen. I think we all hope that will happen.
With a lot of the bands you’ve played in – the Hot Rods, the Damned, UFO – you’ve joined already established bands. Is it difficult to come into those situations where you’re the new guy and you possibly don’t have the sort of power to influence decisions?
I’m not interested in influencing decisions. I’ve got my job to do, and that is to provide bass to the songs in the best way that I can, and the best way I think I can, and I’ve been very lucky in that I’ve not had to change the way that I play the bass for any of the bands that I’ve been with, or any of the sessions that I’ve done. I’m really lucky with that.
With UFO, it was different. I was friends with their guitarist at the time, Paul Chapman. Pete Way left, Billy Sheehan was on his way out, and Paul knew me from drinking in Cardiff, and he said, “Well, let’s get Paul in.” So the manager phoned me up and said, “Are you busy? Can you come out to Spain next week to join UFO on an eight month world tour?” I was looking out for an out from the Damned, because of various reasons, so I jumped on a plane, went out with them. It could have not worked at all, but I got on with them absolutely instantly, straight away. Billy left after a couple of shows and we did one show and he had a nervous breakdown, Phil [Mogg], the singer. So that was the World Tour cancelled. I came home to turn the telly on to see the Damned on the Young Ones playing ‘Nasty’, and I think, “Oh, fuck, I should have stayed with them!” But then UFO got back together and I spent four or five very happy years with them, that happily worked. With the Hot Rods, we all started off as, you know, 16, 17 year olds together, it was just a laugh, and pretty much the same with the Damned. It’s not a band where you’re constantly making decisions. It’s very democratic now, it’s very organic, and really, whatever happens, happens. It’s still as unpredictable as it ever was. It keeps it fun.
I think everyone always asks you about working for Andrew Ridgeley. Was that an easy decision to make? Did you feel you were selling out or was that not a concern?
I didn’t care about it. If someone asked me to play on their record and they pay me enough money and I like it, I’ll do it. And Andrew was making a rock record. I mean, very, very odd. I went into the studio and it was strewn with AC/DC and Def Leppard CDs. I thought I was in the wrong studio, but he sauntered in, and he said, “Oh, I really like the way you play with UFO. Can you play like that on this song?” So I did. And then I did a couple of tracks in his album and did some TV stuff in Japan with him. You know, what’s not to like about being wined and dined by Sony Records.
So you didn’t have any regrets about doing it?
Why would I? I was paid handsomely for doing not very much. I met some other great people with it and became good friends with his brother. I had nothing else going on so why not? You know, an ex-Wham person who’s got a budget of millions. I’d never seen anything like it. It was the first class treatment that sadly I didn’t get used to. But it was fun, I liked it.
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THE DAMNED AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND SEPTEMBER 2026 TOUR DATES
Tuesday 8th September AUCKLAND, Powerstation
Thursday 10th September SYDNEY, The Opera House
Friday 11th September BRISBANE, The Tivoli
Sunday 13th September MELBOURNE, The Forum
Tickets On Sale Now From: https://thephoenix.au/the-damned-2026/
