A Night Of A Thousand Vampires’ is a recording of a one-off show in October 2019 from The Damned, in which the punk trailblazers performed tracks from throughout their four-decade career at London’s Palladium Theatre, in the company of The Hammer House Of Horror and the cast of ‘The Circus Of Horrors’. The show also marked the final performance of drummer Pinch, who had played with the band for more than twenty years.

The brilliance of this collection is that it combines the standard Brit-punk anthems by the Sex Pistols, the Damned, the Buzzcocks, and Stiff Little Fingers with other great songs that typify the variety and range of punk-era independent music from both sides of the Atlantic. The songs are so well chosen that the punk aesthetic is further revealed by the inclusion of songs that characterize pub rock, new wave, and other related genres. The usual punk suspects ("New Rose," "Anarchy in the UK") are all here, along with many other treasures: Dr. Feelgood's "Milk and Alcohol", Devo's "Mongoloid," Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner," Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer," and Television's "Marquee Moon." The less commonly anthologized punk selections are inspired, too: the Ruts' "Babylon Is Burning," Generation X's "Ready Steady Go," and X-Ray Spex's "Identity," along with the seminal "Sheena is a Punk Rocker." The conception of the genre is expanded further to include Elvis Costello, Iggy Pop, XTC, Joe Jackson, the Pretenders, the Tubes, and Blondie, and their presence overcomes the tendency for boring repetition on a very long collection.