The moment an Mi5 agent trapped The Damned drummer, Rat Scabies
It is no secret that when punk music burst onto the scene in the mid-1970s, the establishment felt threatened. From the BBC to the monarchy, early punk bands had their hearts set on the total destruction of authority in the UK – burn it all down and start again was the prevailing ethos. Unsurprisingly, this caught the attention of certain government bodies and security forces. The Mi5 security service famously kept a dossier on anarcho-punks Crass for most of their existence. However, when a former Mi5 agent trapped Damned drummer Rat Scabies, it had little to do with his music.
As the original drummer for The Damned, Rat Scabies (otherwise known as Christopher Miller) has a place in the history books of punk rock. Their single ‘New Rose’ is credited with being the first punk record to be released in the UK, spawning a subsequent music scene which changed rock music forever.
Although the group were criticised at the time for the lack of substance in their tracks, with Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock pointing out, “Pistols first single was ‘Anarchy’, and The Damned’s was about a bird,” the band nevertheless earned their stripes in the early punk movement. The Damned are also credited with pioneering the goth subgenre, owing to frontman Dave Vanian’s vampire-like appearance and their tracks about video nasties.
Scabies left the group in 1995 due to creative differences during the release of the band’s eighth studio album, Not Of This Earth. A fairly forgettable record, the album provided a depressingly lacklustre end for Scabies’ time with the band. However, since he departed from the goth rockers, he has certainly managed to keep busy. Playing with a variety of acts ranging from The Specials’ Neville Staple to punk supergroup The Mutants, Scabies even gave the incredible Ebony Bones her stage name, for whom he worked as a producer and touring drummer. It is during these extracurricular activities that Scabies had a run-in with a former Mi5 agent, who sent the punk drummer through a trapdoor.
In a weird move, even for him, the drummer was once the chairman of the Saunière Society – a secretive society surrounding the conspiracy theories of 19th-century Catholic priest François-Bérenger Saunière. During this time, the society recruited former Mi5 agent Delores Kane.
Born David Shayler, the agent was prosecuted by Mi5 after sharing state secrets with the Mail on Sunday. Kane has tied herself to various conspiracy movements over the years, including the 9/11 truth movement, so Scabies’ Saunière Society seems a fitting place for her to pop up. The agent was reportedly a very paranoid person during this time, so Scabies was sent to fetch her when he suddenly found himself at the bottom of a trapdoor. “I arrived, the front door opened, and I walked in.” the drummer explained to The Guardian, “Suddenly, I had an incredibly weird sensation of floating, or flying. It was an amazing feeling. Someone had left a trap door open. There was a ten-foot drop.”
So, although not for his anti-establishment ethos during his days as a violent young punk in London, Rat Scabies can still truthfully claim to have been trapped by a Mi5 agent. The drummer did not expand on the ordeal or how long it took him to get out of the ten-foot hole, but presumably, Scabies and Kane had a good old laugh about it afterwards before delivering a talk about conspiracies and French priests.
