Rat Scabies says cover versions of The Damned songs by Guns N’ Roses and The Offspring delivered some of the biggest royalty cheques the band members had ever received, decades after the original recordings helped define British punk.
by Paul Cashmere
As The Damned prepare to return to Australia and New Zealand for a September 2026 tour, drummer Rat Scabies has reflected on the unlikely financial afterlife of the band’s catalogue, revealing that cover versions by Guns N’ Roses and The Offspring generated more income for him than years spent touring in the original band.
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Speaking to Noise11, Rat Scabies said the band was struggling financially when Guns N’ Roses recorded New Rose for 1993’s The Spaghetti Incident?. The exposure introduced The Damned’s music to a new American audience and created a royalty stream the band had never previously experienced during its formative years in punk.
“When they did that, we weren’t really doing very well, pretty broke and all the rest of it,” Scabies said. “Then suddenly it’s a big thing.”
The bigger financial shock arrived when The Offspring covered Smash It Up for the soundtrack to the 1998 film Batman Forever and later as a B-side release. According to Rat Scabies, the publishing income dwarfed what the band had previously earned on the road.
“I suddenly had this big cheque arrive and it was more than I’d ever earned in The Damned,” he said. “I thought, ‘why am I bothering to get in the van and sleeping around doing these gigs for virtually nothing?’”
The comments underline the changing economics of legacy music publishing, particularly for first-wave punk bands whose original recordings were often released on small budgets and modest royalty structures. While The Damned were central to the emergence of British punk, commercial rewards at the time were limited compared to later generations of rock acts who built mainstream careers partly influenced by those early records.
Released in October 1976, New Rose is widely recognised as the first UK punk single. It arrived one month before Anarchy In The U.K. by Sex Pistols and helped establish The Damned as one of the foundational acts of the movement alongside the Sex Pistols, The Clash and Buzzcocks.
Rat Scabies said the strength of the songwriting has ultimately sustained the catalogue beyond the original era.
“It’s surprising the amount of people that do cover Damned songs,” he said. “I think it’s a testimony to the songs themselves. A good tune is a good tune and it stands up.”
The renewed attention around the band arrives as The Damned continue one of the more active late-career schedules among their punk contemporaries. The current touring line-up reunites Scabies with vocalist Dave Vanian and guitarist Captain Sensible, while also carrying the memory of founding guitarist Brian James, who died in 2025.
Rat Scabies recently told Noise11 that the band’s latest project, Not Like Everybody Else, was shaped partly as a tribute to James. The album revisits songs associated with artists who influenced the original members during the formative London punk years.
Despite the band’s legacy status, Scabies said assembling setlists remains difficult because of the depth of material accumulated over five decades.
“After 50 years, you’ve just got so many tunes,” he said. “There are some you have to play because everybody knows them. Then there are others where you think, ‘the punters really like this one and we enjoy playing it’.”
The Australian and New Zealand tour will begin in Auckland before moving through Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. The Sydney performance at the Sydney Opera House is expected to be one of the band’s highest-profile Australian shows in years.
THE DAMNED AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND SEPTEMBER 2026 TOUR DATES
Tuesday 8 September, Auckland, Powerstation
Thursday 10 September, Sydney, The Opera House
Friday 11 September, Brisbane, The Tivoli
Sunday 13 September, Melbourne, The Forum
Tickets available at
The Phoenix AU Tour Page
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