Rat Scabies

If you’ve been a member of a top touring band for several decades, scaling down to a solo career may not be an option.

That’s the case with former Damned drummer Rat Scabies, who has expanded The Sinclairs – the side project he began in 2019 with guitarist Billy Shinbone – into something rather bigger.

The pair came together in 2019 when Shinbone – of psychedelic pop band Flipron as well as guitarist for former Specials Nevile Staple – approached Scabies about making an instrumental album.

The two soon had a set of recordings which became an album of psychedelic, gurgly, electronic soundtracks released as 2020 debut album ‘Sparkle’.

Since then Scabies got together on a celebratory reunion tour with his former Damned bandmates. However, with that mission accomplished he was able to return to his other loves – building cigarbox guitars and hunting for the Holy Grail(both of these, sadly, for another time), and of course, The Sinclairs.

Sophomore long-player ‘The Long Slow Death Of A Cigarette’ sees the pair expand their horizons, adding guest vocalists to this latest collection of skittery garage rock, arctic ambience, fuzzy orchestral pop, the odd dusty torch song plus an undulating Latin funeral coda.

If the first album “made easy listening more difficult” then this new album is “technicolor noir.”

“We decided that we wanted some actual songs on this record,” Scabies says, “and we hit gold with our guest artists”.

These include Zumi Rosow of Black Lips, Kid Congo Powers of The Cramps /Gun Club / The
Bad Seeds, Roger Chapman of iconic ’60s band Family, and members of Japanese garage punk treasures The 5,6,7,8’s.

The album’s first single ‘Ultra Splendid’ is as good a place to star in this eclectic mix – a ripping surf-rock-esque instrumental which the band declares, “crams masses of splendidness into a super short package of energy. All the good stuff in less than two minutes flat!”

And its video is likewise a “cheerful revenge on the drunken, self-absorbed arseholes who crash the stages in pubs and clubs across the land” and guest stars Kevin Eldon as the continually thwarted vocalist.

“We wanted each track to be like a deep, smokey draw that burns off the one that comes before it,”Scabies muses.

“Sometimes smouldering, sometimes incandescent, and what you’re left with at the end
is a funeral.”

However, the new album is, if anything, more of a rebirth, and is out now.

‘The Long Slow Death Of A Cigarette’ is out now on vinyl and digital.

This article originally appeared in the Portsmouth News.