King

Unwanted by Lu or Jon Moss in The Edge post The Damned break up, Captain Sensible first off dallied with Dutch band The Softies and played on their single Jet Boy Jet Girl originally by Elton Motello (originally in Bastard with Brian James). King in fact lasted all of two months from June 1978 to August 1978, played at most 5 gigs and featured as its personnel:

Dave Berk  – Drums (borrowed from the Moped’s)
Kym Bradshaw – Bass (ex Saints & Lurkers)
Henry Badowski – Vocals & Keyboards (ex Chelsea)
Captain Sensible – Guitar & Vocals

The band however did record a John Peel Session broadcast on 20.7.78 featuring Antipope (revived for The Damned), Jet Boy  Jet Girl, My Baby Don’t Care and Baby Sign Here With Me.

The complete session recorded by King on 11 July 1978 for the John Peel show on BBC Radio 1 and broadcast on the 20th of that month. Tracklist: 1. Antipope (0:07) 2. Jet Boy Jet Girl (3:57) 3. My Baby Don’t Care (7:54) 4. Baby Sign Here With Me (11:18)

The session shows the two sides of Captain Sensible and Henry Badowski from the full on forthcoming reformed Damned punkiness of Anti Pope to the whimsical psyechdelia of Baby Sign Here With Me

This is what I was up to during the Damned’s 1978 break-up – a band called ‘King’… with pop genius Henry Badowski on sax & vox, Kim Bradshaw on bass, stick twiddler Dave Berk and lil ol’ me on guitar & vox – and also piano and celeste on this recording for Top Gear. Peel remarked, after playing the song “the man’s turning into a multi-instrumentalist… a dangerous trend”

Unfortunately King only got round to doing a weeks gigs at Paris’s Top Hat / Bataclan club – and the aforementioned John Peel session. Nobody will ever know how far the band could’ve gone as it imploded pretty quickly, partly due to the D***ed getting back together without former leader BJ – but with the full on catchiness of the songs me and Henry were writing, and the wackiness of King’s band members I suspect we could’ve had a fair few hit records in our time.

Captain Sensible, Facebook

By September 1978 The Damned were back together and King were no more. Henry Badowski would feature Baby Sign Here with Me on his Deptford Fun City Single Making Love With My Wife in 1979.



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