I’ve known Pinch for at least 10 years now, running in the same social circles. He graciously decided to come over to talk about his life and document many of the stories he’s told me in person at the many parties we’ve been to together. Pinch was a founding member of the English Dogs and played drums for the Damned for 20 years. He currently is playing with the all-star band, Spike & The Gimme Gimmes (formerly Me First & The Gimme Gimmes). This conversation happened on 7/21/25.
Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
In Part 3, Pinch talks about Gizz joining Prodigy, Janus Stark, getting completely hammered at parties for Kerrang! magazine, meeting Ozzy Osbourne (this recording was literally the day before Ozzy died), joining The Damned, rehearsing for The Damned, his first shows with The Damned, and opening for Rob Zombie. But first we start off with some interesting wisdom from Captain Sensible…
Audio in the YouTube link. Transcript below.
Ted: You said you had some Kerrang stories. Was that English Dogs or was that The Damned?
Pinch: That was actually… that was another band called Janus Stark.
Ted: Oh, was that in between?
Pinch: That was when English Dogs, I don’t know what… Part three, maybe? We’d got back together with Wakey for a couple of records. We’d signed to a German record label called Impact Records. This was in the ’90s and we did a couple okay records and you know, toured Europe a lot. I mean, you know, it was good enough that I gave up my carpet fitting job to go back on the road full time, which was… that was kind of cool. And the violence had gone from the gigs. But we hadn’t got any smarter. We were still, you know, smoking tons of dope and drinking like crazy and you thought we were still teenagers. It was this thing, you know… Captain Sensible told me one time: “You’ll never progress beyond the age you were when you joined your first band.” Bear in mind, I joined my first band, I started my first band at 15 years old. So unfortunately, in my head, I was a 15 year old that was a 25 year old going out on tour, thinking you’re indestructible and, you know, all of the usual cliches.
Ted: Was he right about that?
Pinch: No… I think it fades over time. I think you, once you get to my time in life, you do kind of grow out of a lot of that. It’s easy to say for somebody like me that keep a job outside of music, but you know, for somebody like him, like Sensible for example, he’s an eternal teenager. He’ll never not be a teenager because music is his life. And it’s all he’s ever done after he finished cleaning toilets in his very, very early formative years. But where were we? Oh, Janas Stark.
Ted: Yes.
Pinch: Kerrang stories. So we did this thing with, you know, the line up of English Dogs and it ended up whittling down to a three piece. Wakey left again. And it was me, Gizz, and a bass player called Shop. And we did a pretty adventurous kind of punk record that was along the lines of NOFX, speedy American punk style. Gizz was writing most of it. I still wrote most of the lyrics like I always did. But that was kind of fizzling out almost to nothing as well. It was okay. It was chugging along, you know?
And then he joined the Prodigy. One of our friends, Mallrat, who used to work for Kerrang, he recommended Gizz for the job. Because he would interview the Prodigy and when they decided to go with a full live band, they said, “Do you know any good guitar players who’d be good at it?” And Mallrat recommended Gizz as the guitar player. So Gizz goes from riding around in an old beat up van, sleeping on mattresses and squat floors to being in what was at the time, pretty much the biggest band on the planet. Like he joined them for “The Fat Of The Land” album cycle.
So that took how popular they were and really cemented… It was the time of “Firestarter” and “Smack My Bitch Up” and “Breathe”. And he was involved in all of that. So, you know, I was super, super proud of him and happy for him. And, you know, it seemed like he still wanted to do the English Dogs stuff, you know, when he wasn’t doing stuff with the Prodigy.
But he kind of entered a world where, as I was talking about earlier, he becomes babied and coddled and is surrounded by people blowing smoke up his ass. You know, really believes he’s, you know, the new coming of Jimi Hendrix or whatever, I don’t know. So I’m going to see him. Me and his wife were driving up from Peterborough to Glasgow to go and see him for the first time live. He’d been with him a little bit, but they were playing this big festival called Tea In The Park. They were headlining it. It was like “Oh, this is going to be fucking cool.” So I think I’m driving in my old carpet fitting van and we had the radio on. And in the UK, there was only like four radio stations, right? It’s not like you can scan the dial. Listen to some “rock radio”. No, you’re listening to One, Two, Three, or Four. So we’re listening to Radio One, which was the one for the kids.
And they’re like “All right. So we’re going to come right back after the news and we’re going to have an interview with Gizz Butt of the Prodigy about his new band, Janus Stark.” And I was like “AHHHH! What the fuck?” I’m like, “Tracy, did you know about this?” And I can’t actually remember what her response was, whether she copped to it. That she knew he was going to do it, or whether she’s like, “No, that’s a surprise to me as well.” So he basically decided because he was going to get interviewed for Radio One, that he would take that chance to launch… to rename the English Dogs as a new band called Janus Stark. We had been writing more kind of, you know, Foo Fighters-sey, but still with a spunky edge, that kind of thing. Because if nothing, Gizz definitely likes to wear his influences on his sleeve. So I was just shocked. A little bit devastated. A little bit insulted. Like, what the fuck thinks you can fucking take MY band and change the name of it? It’s still my fucking band! That’s basically like a… it’s a takeover. It’s a fucking like an aggressive takeover. A hostile takeover that you’ve done on live radio!
I think I get to see him at some point at that gig. And I kind of have it out with him a little bit. He’s like, “Mate. Mate! It’s gonna be great for our career. I’ve got us a record deal!” So… because he was in the Prodigy, and because he could, you know, get some column inches, and he was a charismatic fucking media cocksucker, he could… Earache Records, who were well known for extreme metal in Nottingham…
Ted: Napalm Death
Pinch: Yeah, for some reason, fucking signed this band. And I distinctly remember we pulled up at this parking lot to go and sign the record contract. And as we were getting out of the car, he said, “Don’t forget: it’s only because of me that we’ve got this fucking record deal. Alright?” I was like, huh, all right, well, good luck with your new fucking record deal. (laughs) And I walked off to a fucking local pub.
And I sat there having a drink, mulling over it. Steaming, of course. Like you fucking prick. Not only did you change the name of the band on a live radio interview without consulting any of the other members… now what, we’re supposed to fucking kiss your ass, because you got us a deal with this tiny fucking Nottingham record label? I don’t know whether they mean fuck on what, you know, I’ve no fucking clue.
Ted: It was all done behind your back. No research. No nothing.
Pinch: Yeah. So like 40 minutes later… there’s only like one pub near there, the Tap And Tumbler. They knew I’d be in there. They all come in, including the record label boys. With the contract. And we sit there and we mull it over and argue and shout each other for a while. And we actually negotiated a good deal. And I think it might have been because I was so fucking pissed off, that they saw that this might slip away from them. We negotiated a deal which paid us a wage every week, rather than a stupid advance that they would have just ended up spending on advertising and studio time. “Oh no you owe us loads of money.” Well, instead of that, we were on a living wage every week. Which meant that they could put us on tour. And I don’t know whether they gave us any tour support, but we did do, you know, a fair decent amount of stuff. And they licensed us to Interscope in America, which I didn’t know what the fuck Interscope was, but Interscope had like all sorts of big acts on them. Lenny Kravitz and Godsmack. And we would go out and do these gigs in America. We would do like press days at Interscope’s head offices in New York where it would just be journalists after journalists coming in interviewing us and we were on the cover of, you know, Associated Press Magazine. “the new British Invasion”. And of course, Gizz, living in his own fantasy world, “That’s it. We’re fucking cracking it. We’re cracking it guys!” And I was like, make the most of this because it ain’t gonna last. And if that record tanks over here, we’re just like we’re yesterday’s fucking newspaper, you know, in the gutter.
And surely enough, record got released. It didn’t do shit in America. Didn’t really pick up any airplay, even though Intascope placed some of our songs in like, you know, big movies. They had like a good sinking department. So we got in this movie about American football called Varsity Blues. There was a horror movie called The Faculty. There was another one called Disturbing Behavior. I think two of those movies got to number one at the box office. So it was the right stuff that we were doing. But ultimately, it went nowhere. You know, so I was like “Ah! See?! I fucking hope you had a good time on that tour across there, because we’re fucking done.” And that coincided with… so the record came out… Getting back to the Kerrang thing… We got nominated for, you know, “Best New Band”. So we’re in this category with… it was obvious who was going to win it. I can’t even remember who it was. But you know, it was like some real breakout band in the UK. They were obviously going to win it. And we were just along, you know, for the piss up. But Gizz was holding out some hope. So we we get to this Kerrang awards. Kerrang set this thing up where they wanted musicians to be really, really badly behaved by serving them copious amounts of alcohol. So that they were really badly behaved and then they could write about it in next week’s magazine. Of course!
Ted: They did that with Metallica, I think. A couple times.
Pinch: Oh, I’m sure. Yeah. So you get to this table and there’s like, you know, 10 people around each table. It’s at this posh ballroom, near Marble Arch or wherever. And there’s like an outer ring of, I don’t know, bottles of vodka. Inside of that, there’s a ring of bottles of I don’t know, Jägermeister. Inside of that bottles of tequila. And then in the center, like, you know, a big fancy bottle of God knows what that’s going to blow your mind even more. Absinthe or something. So it’s totally set up for everybody to get shitfaced and just do bad things. I’m kind of feeling a bit like a fish out of water at this thing. Because, you know, I’m there with like red spiky hair and we’re surrounded by like just rockers and rock dudes. I mean, at the table next to us was Ozzy Osbourne and Sharon sitting next to him. And I’m like, “Hey Ozzy, you look really fucking tired.” He’s like, “Oh, (mumbles)…” So I kind of siddle across to his table and I’ve got these like, like caffeine tablets, right? Trucker speed. And I’m like “Well if you want to take a few of these, it’ll fucking pep you up” And as he’s going to grab the packet, Sharon’s like, “What the fuck are you doing?” and just grabs them off me. “You ain’t giving him nothing!” Right. I was trying to help him wake up. “He doesn’t need any waking up! Let him be tired!”
(laughs)
Ted: That’s a awesome story.
Pinch: Yeah, well, so anyway, I’m drinking like crazy. The only other person there that I really associate with is Wattie from the Exploited, because he’s a right ligger, like, you know, he’s at every, every free bash going. So he’s there and we know each other from the early years and the punk years and stuff. And we ended up like really, really fucking pounding it. And if anybody knows Wattie from the Exploited, especially back in the day, and up until his recent series of heart attacks, he used to travel with an extremely large bag of extremely strong speed under his testicles. So, of course, out came the bag. We’re in the bathroom having a little toot. Which blows my mind because he’s just been to Colombia with the Exploited or somewhere where he comes back with this crazy shit. We walk out of this bathroom stall and he’s carrying a bottle of red wine at the time. Oh, yeah, it was probably wine that started on the outer circle, rather than vodka. That would be smart, right? Wattie’s carrying in this bottle of wine. We walk out into the bathroom, this guy’s taking a piss. And Wattie’s like, “You fuckers still owe me 20 grand, you cunt!” And smashes this bottle of red wine over this dude’s head who’s having a piss. He goes down into the urinal with like red wine, blood and piss all over the place. And I’m like, “AUGH! I just did like a massively strong line of speed! I’m freaking out!” Fucking Wattie walks out and I’m like “What the fuck?” He’s like “Ah he’s this fucking cunt who robbed us from this fucking record deal from fucking years ago. I ain’t seen him… I fucking said if I ever saw you again, I’ll fucking kill you.”
Ted: Almost did.
Pinch: I mean, we never saw the guy… but we’re back in there. And all I can remember is, as the night went on, I got more and more blotto to the point where I find myself waking up under a bush near Shepard’s Bush tube station in the early hours of the morning with… Oh, hang on, was that that one? I can’t remember… No, that wasn’t that one. That was another one. (laughter) This one, I woke up with my head on a mixing desk. As I’m kind of waking up, I’m like, am I in a recording studio? And I look and there’s like TV screens above it. I’m like, where the fuck am I? So I look around and it looks like I’m in like some big truck or something. And I go to the door, I open the door and dawn is breaking. And I’m outside of the Royal Albert Hall. What the fuck am I doing here? And then it kind of clicks. I’m like, Royal Albert Hall.. BBC outside broadcast unit broadcasts this thing called “Last Night At The Proms” every year. And somehow I’d managed to walk all the way across, I think it was Hyde Park or something? Yeah, it would have been Hyde Park, all the way across.. blackout drunk… to open this fucking door of this trailer and fall asleep with me head on this mixing desk. As I step out this security guy’s like, “What the fuck are you doing?” I’m like, “Mate, I have no clue. I just woke up with my head on that desk.” He goes “Did you break in?” “I don’t know. Check the door.” He’s like, oh, fuck, he was never locked. So I’m like, mate, all I can remember is I was at an award ceremony, and then I woke up in here. So anyway, he’s like, “Well, you can fucking get out of here.” I’m like, all right, so I walked to the closest tube station. I haven’t got a penny on me. So I literally have to jump the tube to get to Kings Cross station, jump the fucking train, stay in the toilet all the way back to Grantham, which is an hour or so on the train, get out…
Ted: stay there to avoid the ticket takers?
Pinch: Yep. Get out… Actually, I lived in Peterborough at the time. Got out of Peterborough, walk the three and a half miles home from the train station. I get in and all this time I’m poisoned by alcohol. And then I remember, oh, I was supposed to have a photo shoot with Janus Stark today. So I fucking have a shower and get in the car and drive down to Gizz’s house. And I knock on the door. Gizz comes to the door with fucking two black eyes and this big old mark on his nose. I’m like, we still got this photo shoot today? He’s like, “You have no idea what you did last night, have you?” I’m like, “ehh… eh…Not really.” He’s like, “Well, I ain’t playing in bands anymore with you. We’re done. See ya.” And shuts the door on me. It turns out, at some point during the night, I guess he got snarky with me again about the whole Janus Stark thing. You know, “You’re only here because of me.” And he went to take a sip out of a champagne glass and I fucking banged it into his nose and it broke and…
Ted: That must’ve been a hard bang.
Pinch: ummm… I didn’t punch him, at least, but that’s what gave him the black eyes. And yeah, so that that was pretty much the end of me and him. I don’t know whether it was the same Kerrang party or not. But I ended up drunk on the dance floor of some nightclub and ended up swinging around one of the Kerrang journalists by her legs. Like when you play as a kid and your parents are swinging you around on the beach. I did that. And then I literally rugby tackled the editor of Kerrang’s wife, because I was just out of control. And of course, I’m fired from the band. The next week, they’re fucking writing about me in the back page is… “what went off at last week’s party…Congratulations to fired drunk drummer Pinch who’s no longer got a band. Most drunk guy at the fucking awards festival…” blah, blah, blah… So I’m all like fucking alcohol poisoned and everything. And it’s the end of the world for me. I ain’t got my band. I fucking pissed everybody off. I’m fucking still alcohol poisoned. I actually wrote him a let an apology letter. “Dear Mr Alexander, I’m very sorry about rugby tackling your wife. I was very drunk at the time. I can’t really remember. I regret all my actions. I’ve lost my band. I don’t know what to do. Anyway, bye!” I met him years later, and we could fortunately have a good laugh about it. But yeah, that was that was pretty much the Kerrang story at the time.
Ted: After that, you joined the Damned.
Pinch: Well, it was a week later, I joined the Damned.
Ted: Oh, really? That quickly?!
Pinch: Yep. Yeah, I had a really good friend called Spike T Smith, who’s a fucking awesome drummer. He’s almost like the English Josh Freese. He gets a call from a band, “our drummer dropped out, we’re playing at the weekend really important festival.” He’s like, “Send me your set list.” Boom, fucking learns it on the train. Plays it. Killer. So his resume is just never ending. You should look him up at some point. So he opened for the Damned in one of the bands that he was playing for at this gig in London. And the Damned at the time had this really bad drummer called Gary Dreadful. Dreadful by name, dreadful by nature. People were literally throwing phone numbers of drummers on to stage for the Captain. They knew they had to get rid of him. But they were all kind of boozing at the time. It was before they kind of clean themselves up a bit. And so Captain watched Spike play. It was like, you want to play for us? Spike was like “Yeah…”, but at the same gig… I think his name was Alan Smith, who was Morrissey’s guitar player… saw him play as well and said, Oh, you know, Morrissey’s got this world tour coming up to promote this new record, would you be into doing the world tour? So Spike agreed to join the Damned. Did six gigs with them. And then the Morrissey offer came in. “Oh, it’s real. He really wants you. Come down. Audition.” He passed the audition. So it was obviously much more money. And it was a whole year’s worth… this fucking global… The first gig was this massive festival in Rome, where they were headlining. Second or third gig was like Coachella headlining or something crazy. So he took the Morrissey gig, let the Damned know, and said, “But don’t worry. I’ve got a guy. He can do it for you. He’s an experienced fucking punk rock drummer, great guy.”
So I got a phone call from Patricia Morrison on a Friday afternoon and said, “All right, Can you come down to London and audition with us on Monday?” And I said, “Yeah. What do you want me to learn?” She’s like, just the live set. I’m like, “Well, what is it?” “I’ll get it off Spike.” So she gives me this list. 21 songs. I’ve got two days to learn. I’ve never played a Damned song in my life. And I had my drum kit set up in the kitchen. I remember it was a baking hot weekend. Everybody’s out getting naked and sun and it didn’t happen very often in the UK. So I’m in the kitchen, annoying everybody with a full blast rendition of every song. And I learn 21 songs. And I’m making my… every drummer has to make cheat sheets. It’s the only way you can super fast learn stuff. Some drummers do it by drum notation. Some drummers use their own kind of signs and signals and that’s what I do. I write it out. So I’m like, Alright, Vanian sings this and then there’s ten bars of this, in this tempo, and… I wrote it all out like that. So I’ve got my cheat sheets, I roll down to London to the audition. Vanian doesn’t show up.
Ted: Oh, so you don’t have a cue?
Pinch: So I’m like, well, I’ve learned everything kind of based on… The Damned had kind of unusual arrangements quite a lot. They would stick an extra bar in for no other reason than just being weird and being clever, you know. It was kind of odd songwriting. Anyway, so Captain’s like, “All right, I’ll sing the first line of every verse and the first line of a chorus or whatever and try and keep you on track.” So we play three songs. Perfect. He like looks at me as like, Well anybody can learn three songs. Let’s do three more. Did three more. Perfect. Did three more. Perfect. He’s like, “All right, well, let’s just go through the whole set.” So we went through the whole set and they were like, “All right, I don’t think we need to look anywhere else. Thanks for learning it.” So we’ve got a six week US tour starting in… I don’t know when it was… three weeks or something. She’s like, “Send me your passport. You know, I’m going to get you a visa.” I don’t know how they managed to get a visa in three weeks, but they did. And so they were like, “Well, you’re kind of ‘in the scene’. Can you get us like a secret gig in London just so we get one under your belt?” So I go calling around these old little venues I used to know in London. I called one. I think it was called the Barfly. And it was maybe 150 cap, something like that. I’m like, Yeah, I just joined this new band and we’re looking to get a, you know, just get a low key secret gig. And says, you’ll do really well out of it. He’s like, “Who is it?” The Damned. He’s like, “Fuck off.” I’m like, Yeah, we don’t need anything other than like, you know, you just let us play on that stage. You can tell people, but you can’t advertise that it’s The Damned, but you can tell people who it is. So we ended up doing this gig. So I got a gig under my belt.
Actually, before that, the first gig I did was a biker festival in Brighton. And it was the first time that I met Vanian. It was a bike club or something. It was a festival that the Ace Cafe in Brixton held this biker festival in this field outside of Brighton on this aerodome or something. So as I’m walking to the stage, I meet Vanian for the first time. Of course, he didn’t show up for soundcheck. You know, I’m walking to the stage. He looks at me, he’s like, “Oh, you must be the drummer. Good luck.” (laughs)
So, yeah, I guess it must have been the next week that I got that other gig, just so we got a couple of gigs under our belt. And then we were off to America. And for the first two or three gigs, I gotta admit, I felt a bit sick, you know, just sick with nerves. Oh, I think the first gig was like that Ventura theater, which is, you know, fairly big room. Completely under rehearsed. Of course, never rehearsed again with the band.
Ted: Your audition that was the one…
Pinch: That was the rehearsal. And then we had the two gigs where things went pretty well. Yeah, you know, so now we’ve done two gigs. All right, well, we’ve got it, right? Well, then we go to America for six weeks. And like, yeah, first two or three gigs were pretty nerve wracking. But after that, I’m like, fuck it. You know, this is just what I do. And every gig you learn the stuff better, and you feel more comfortable with it. People were pretty forgiving, because they’d had Gary Dreadful before. (laughter) Then for me to come along, you know, kind of coming from a hardcore punk background, I just sped things up and made it sound faster and fresher. I had to get slapped down quite a lot from Sensible. “It’s too fast, too fucking fast!” In hindsight, it was. I was ruining some of the songs because it was too fast. But people were really getting into it. And they kind of credited me with giving The Damned this fresh kick up the ass that they needed. I ended up being heavily involved. Once Patricia Morrison got pregnant and kind of stepped back a lot from you know, managerial and kind of driver role in the band, I kind of stepped in along with one of my old mates in England. And we kind of drove the thing as best we could. But The Damned is an impossibly rudderless ship that likes to crash itself onto the rocks of sensibility on an almost daily level.
Ted: Really? So do you have a good example? Pick one or a couple of examples?
Pinch: Or just in general.
Ted: Like there’s a big gig coming up and they say, Oh, we don’t want to do it?
Pinch: They would employ people to take advice from them, then not listen to the advice, ultimately. There’s been a plethora of managers and tour managers and people that, although very well qualified and able to do what they do normally, it always seemed like the members of The Damned knew better and ultimately went against their advice. Much to their detriment.
Ted: Weren’t you kind of managing the band in a way?
Pinch: Yeah, I mean, kind of, yeah. But… There was a tour we did. An ill-fated tour opening for Rob Zombie when we were on Dexter Holland’s Nitro Records. Which was kind of the launch… It wasn’t long after I joined, I guess 2001 or something when we put that record out. And Rob Zombie was a huge Damned fan and asked us to go out on tour. And I was like, it could be good for the band. I’ve never seen Rob Zombie’s show before. I had no clue. Listened to his music. I’m like, that’s kind of cool about monsters and shit. And you guys have got like the dark gothic crossover. I’m imagining, you know, we could pick up quite a few new fans. Record label thought it was a good idea because it was an eight week tour around massive amphitheaters in the US. So we get to the first gig. And oh, by the way, Patricia was heavily pregnant at the time, couldn’t do the tour. So we had Warren Renfrow, a famous Southern California bass player with Cadillac Tramps, Manic Hispanic, you know, beautiful guy. And he was stepping in on bass duties. And the first gig was in Corpus Christi, Texas. I know where the fuck Corpus Christi is. You know, it’s where all the chemical plants are. And it smells really bad. And there’s like, I don’t know, 7,000 people there that all turned their back to us. With their fucking fingers up in the air chanting “Zombie. Zombie.”
And we’re like, wow, oh, this is going to be an interesting tour. It was in the very early days of the of the internet. So there were like, you know, chat rooms, and they were all… you could go on their chat rooms because they weren’t private. And they were like, people were like, “oh, yeah, you should take some shit to throw at The Damned. They fucking hate it.” “I don’t know what the fuck this punk band is doing on the bill. They’re fucking terrible.” Yeah, because the opening band, who bought onto the tour, I’m guessing, was I don’t know what they were even called, but they sounded kind of like Rob Zombie. So it was like, you know, the crowd would accept that kind of thing as they’re filling in, but we’re main support. They weren’t going to stand for that. They were all like cramming the front of the barricades, waiting, you know, getting pinned in because they wanted that spot for when Mr. Zombie came on. And it just got worse and worse and worse. And we got, we got back into California. And we’re like, all right, if it’s bad for us here, we know it’s going to get even worse once we head back into the Midwest. We played like Universal Amphitheater in somewhere in LA. And it was exactly the same. Just fucking hatred and vitriol. People were taking sharpened coins, throwing fucking shoes. I don’t know which gig it was, but Warren picked a knife up off the stage that had been thrown at us. And Sensible and Vanian were just freaking the fuck out. I spent the next day trying to persuade them to stay on the tour. And Rob Zombie bless him, said look I know this is fucking rough… and he would come on…
Ted: I was gonna say….
Pinch: Yeah he would come on before us and say “If it wasn’t for this band, you ungrateful motherfuckers wouldn’t be seeing me. This is a legendary band that has inspired so many musicians and bands so you need to fucking enjoy them because I chose them for this tour.” So God bless him for doing that.
Ted: Did that help?
Pinch: No. Not in the slightest.
Ted: Oh my God. Wow!
Pinch: Yeah. He said “Look. I’ll triple your money. You can put all your backline on and all your merch on my trucks. You can all come on one of my buses, so you won’t have any expense for your transport or anything.” He just gave the world to us. And we got to the next show in San Jose, I think it was, and it was exactly the same. It was just fucking brutal. Brutal! By the time I got up in the morning… we had a hotel room because I was driving. I was doing much driving, tour managing, and playing the drums on this tour. And I got up in the morning and Sensible and Vanian had gone to the airport and they caught a plane back to the UK. And I had to fucking call Rob Zombie and say “Dude I’m sorry man. They’re gone.” I was so fucking butthurt. He was like “Well fuck!” Because they six and a half weeks of this tour. I think we tried like I don’t know eight or nine gigs or something but it was just fucking ugly.
Ted: I kind of can see why he would do that. I mean but triple your money and helping you out left and right that’s kind of cool.
Pinch: We were on a pittence. It wasn’t optimal. They just didn’t want to be a target. Sensible and Vanian, they’re like something fucking really bad is going to happen if we continue on. Our next shows were going to be in you know the fucking Midwest, which probably would have been even rougher than Texas and New Mexico and wherever. So they just decided to bail. And yeah, I was bent, because it was you know Rob and his Mrs and the band members and the crew they were all lovely, lovely people. I felt like we let them down, but I also felt like obviously sympathetic to Vanian and Sensible because it was their fucking life that they were putting on the line.
Ted: Yeah, you’re behind a drum kit and behind them and they’re ahead of you so if someone throws a knife at them you’re probably not going to get hit.
Pinch: Yeah, exactly.
Ted: Oh man.
Pinch: Yeah.
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