The Misfits, a jail cell, and the birth of a punk anthem in 1979
You could be forgiven for thinking that any concert tour which ends with the band members in a foreign prison cell, penniless and alone, is about as disastrous as it can get. Within the abrasive realm of 1970s punk rock, though, it was all part and parcel of the touring experience, at least for a group like Misfits.
Harbingers of horror punk, the Misfits were something of an outlier within their native East Coast punk scene. With Glenn Danzig at the helm, the group adopted a dark, almost gothic look, coupled with a discography of songs that revolved around gruesome horror movie-inspired tales, worlds apart from the socially conscious punk performed by their contemporaries at New York’s CBGBs club.
Ultimately, though, Danzig’s outfit weren’t the only punks striving for something a little more macabre, which is how they came to be invited to the United Kingdom by British punk pioneers The Damned in 1979.
By the time 1979 rolled around, the peak of London’s punk scene had already subsided, replaced by the emergence of experimental post-punk, synthpop, and 2 Tone ska. The Damned, however, were still going strong and leaning further into their video nasty theming than ever before. A joint tour with the Misfits, therefore, seemed like an open goal, as well as a means of introducing the then-obscure American band to widespread audiences on the other side of the Atlantic. Expectedly, though, things didn’t quite pan out that way.
“We got invited by the Damned to tour with them,” guitarist Bobby Steele once recalled to Vice. “But I guess their management wasn’t too keen on the idea and they didn’t want to honour our agreements.” In other words, the Misfits weren’t going to get paid for any of their UK shows, and on top of that, the group began butting heads with their English counterparts.
“Rat [Scabies] and Captain [Sensible] were so obnoxious,” he shared. “On the second night of the tour, I punched Captain Sensible in the face.”
Drowning their sorrows in a local London boozer, waiting to see mod revival heroes The Jam, things began to take a turn for the worse, on account of Glenn Danzig becoming increasingly paranoid about a group of skinheads in the pub, who he believed wished the Misfits some harm.
“I got fed up and went to get some fish and chips,” Steele remembered. “As I was walking back, I saw Glenn crouched on the sidewalk outside the bar, scraping a piece of glass against the ground to sharpen it.” Expectedly, the frontman was soon tackled by bouncers from The Rainbow Theatre.
“I ran in and threw my bag of chips in one of the bouncers’ faces, and one of the others pinned me to the ground,” the guitarist continued. Eventually, Steele was able to talk himself out of an international incident, but Danzig was carted off to the knick, with all the band’s money in his pockets. Steele went down to the police station in an effort to retrieve some of that money, but a gothic punk rocker walking into a 1970s police station in London, demanding cash, went down about as well as could be expected.
Soon, though, the guitarist hatched a plan to get arrested himself, in the hopes of at least having a place to stay overnight with no money. “I figured the safest thing to do would be to go back to the police station and try to get myself arrested,” the mastermind guitarist remembered.
“My plan was to piss on the floor,” Steele shared, explaining his watertight plan. “Because they’d refused to let me use the bathroom earlier that night.” In an unexpected stroke of luck, though, the guitarist didn’t have to enact that plan, finding himself in cuffs after another brawl with bouncers at the Rainbow.
The band had had an eventful night in the English capital, whichever way you spin it, but all was not lost when it came to their fateful UK tour. They might not have made any money or any friends, but their experience in a jail cell spurred the creation of ‘London Dungeon’, a defining track of the Misfits’ golden period.
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