Relentless

“Relentless” appeared as a B-side on the Phantom Chords’ debut single “Johnny Remember Me,” released in 1990 on M&G Records in the UK and Polydor in Australia. The Damned had broken up the year before. Vanian, guitarist Roman Jugg, and bassist Bryn Merrick took the downtime and built something adjacent to what they’d been doing but pointed in a different direction. Rockabilly structures. Gothic atmosphere. The name for the hybrid would come later. Gothabilly. This is what it sounded like before it had a name.

Dave Vanian was born David Lett in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1956 and moved to Hemel Hempstead as an infant. Before music, he worked as a gravedigger. He changed his name to Vanian, a play on Transylvanian, during that period. When he co-founded The Damned in London in 1976 alongside Captain Sensible, Brian James, and Rat Scabies, he arrived with the look already complete: pale makeup, jet-black hair, all black clothing. NME wrote that November that he “resembles a runaway from the Addams Family.” That description was accurate and also undersold him. He was building a visual language that goth would adopt wholesale.

The Damned were the first British punk band to release a single, the first to release an album, the first to chart in the UK, and the first to tour the United States. Through every lineup change across five decades, Vanian has been the only constant. The Phantom Chords existed in the space the 1989 split opened up: a band free to follow the rockabilly obsession without negotiating it through The Damned’s framework. The full album arrived in 1995 on Big Beat Records. The Damned reconvened. The Phantom Chords became a footnote. But the records are still there, and this is one of the better ones.