The Damned / Anything (Extended Version) [Remastered] / 1986
Anything
manic, jittery, defiantly reckless
This is a restless, late-period Damned track built on a single desperate engine: the refrain that anything is better than the present moment. It's less a story than a mood-piece of boredom curdling into recklessness, sung by a narrator who defines himself only by what he's fleeing.
restlessness and escape self-destructive hedonism identity through negation boredom as crisis sexual bravado as distraction
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addressing an unnamed 'you' — possibly a lover, possibly the listener — who seems to expect something from him he refuses to supply. The voice is unreliable in the sense that its bravado reads as compensation for emptiness rather than genuine confidence.
What happens
The song doesn't develop so much as circle. It opens with an act of self-harm or self-abandonment, then insists on leaving town, then pivots to petty mischief and sexual conquest as placeholders for meaning, before collapsing back into the admission that he can't be what's wanted of him. The repetition of the title phrase functions as the only real throughline — everything else is incident thrown at the same wall.
How it's built
Verse-chorus structure that keeps mutating the chorus hook rather than fixing it, so 'anything' becomes a floating signifier attached to different clauses each time. The bridge-like middle section, built on the 'I could never be' lines, is the only moment of stillness and vulnerability before the song snaps back into its chorus loop, suggesting the admission gets buried rather than resolved.
Section by section
Opening verse
“tear into my clothes”
The image of self-inflicted destruction immediately sets a tone of agitation rather than seduction, framing the song's escapism as born from discomfort with one's own skin before any external cause is given.
First chorus
The hook establishes its logic by comparison rather than content — nothing specific is named as desirable, only that elsewhere, otherwise, anything is preferable to here. This vagueness is the point: the narrator isn't chasing a goal, just fleeing a feeling.
Wicked boy verse
The persona shifts into petty theft and provocation, framed almost as a dare to the listener. It reads as juvenile swagger, a performance of badness that's more about getting a reaction than any real desire.
Middle bridge
“I could never be”
The repeated admission of inadequacy breaks the song's bravado. For a moment the narrator stops posturing and names an inability to meet someone's expectations, which recontextualizes the chorus's restlessness as avoidance rather than appetite.
Love machine verse
Sexual conquest is folded into the same restless logic as everything else — framed as tricks and kicks rather than intimacy, it's another anything, interchangeable with theft or flight from town.
Final chorus and close
The song ends not on resolution but on the same loop, with the confession of inadequacy recurring right before the fade. The structure refuses catharsis, implying the cycle of escape and admission will simply repeat.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated 'anything anything anything' creates a chant-like momentum that mimics compulsive restlessness, turning a vague word into a rhythmic hook.
- negative self-definition
- The narrator repeatedly tells us what he isn't or can't be rather than what he is, making absence the song's real subject.
- persona/mask
- Lines casting the narrator as a 'wicked boy' construct a cartoonish bad-boy persona that feels performative, a shield against the vulnerability surfacing elsewhere.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a portrait of boredom and emptiness masquerading as rebellion — the narrator's manic insistence on 'anything' is less about desire than about avoiding an admission of insufficiency, voiced plainly in the bridge. An alternative reading takes the song more at face value as glam-punk bravado and hedonistic posturing, in which the bridge's vulnerability is just another pose, a seduction technique rather than genuine confession. The lyric supports both readings; the tension between them is arguably the song's engine.
Context
Released in 1986, this sits in The Damned's goth/glam-rock era under Dave Vanian's increasingly theatrical presence, after the band had moved well past their raw 1977 punk origins. I don't have reliable details on this specific single's recording or chart history, so I'm working primarily from the lyric and the band's general stylistic trajectory at the time.
Listen for
- how the 'anything' hook is reused with different grammatical partners each time it returns
- the tonal shift into the 'I could never be' bridge and whether the vocal delivery softens there
- whether the arrangement escalates or stays flat across repetitions, reinforcing the sense of a loop rather than a progression
- any vocal distortion or theatrical flourish that signals the 'wicked boy' persona as a put-on
About The Damned
The Damned are an English rock band formed in London in 1976 by lead vocalist Dave Vanian, guitarist Brian James, bassist Captain Sensible and drummer Rat Scabies. They were the first punk band from the United Kingdom to release a single, "New Rose" (1976), release a studio album, Damned Damned Damned (1977) and tour the United States.
1976 - present / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue