Captain Sensible
By:
April 24, 2010
When punk came along in the second half of the ’70s, it puked on Peter Gabriel’s flower costume, booted over Rick Wakeman’s towering staircase of keyboards and set fire to Robert Fripp’s rustic waistcoat. “Piss off, prog!” spat this aggro crowd of upstarts. The Damned were part of the revolution, certainly. But it was the loopy firebrand with the beret and the sunglasses, CAPTAIN SENSIBLE (Raymond Burns, born 1954), who lifted them above the ruckus. The Captain took the prog that punk hated so, wrapped it up in punk and waited in the wings, chuckling, to see if anybody would notice. Only parts one and two of the song “Smash It Up” made it into the final cut of The Damned’s 1979 masterpiece, Machine Gun Etiquette, but if you listen to all four parts in succession, you will be treated to a wonderful micro-epic of progressive punk. Add to that the noodly version of MC5’s “Looking At You,” the trippy samples that start and finish several of the other songs, and the Emersonian organ that ebbs and flows throughout the album, and you can see why this politically charged nutter later went on to form a band called Punk Floyd. Never mind what many people remember him for — the joke-that-became-hit-single “Happy Talk” — Captain Sensible, rebelling against everyone, even the rebels, should be hallowed for defining his own oxymoronic genre of music.
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On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: George Oppen.
READ MORE about men and women born on the cusp between the Blank (1944–1953) Generation and the Original Generation X (1954–1963).