Today, a very happy 60th birthday to perhaps my crush of all-time crushes, the inimitable Dave Vanian of The Damned. As the frontman of the band with what’s widely-accepted as the first punk single to come screaming out of the U.K. (“New Rose” on Stiff Records, released this month in 1976), he emerged barely a kid of 20, but with macabre sartorial sensibilities fully formed. While I can’t trace my affection for all things vampiric back to The Damned (I bought, aged 10 or so, a terrific book called The Vampire Encyclopedia) Vanian’s look from the band’s early days is far and away my most beloved culmination of goth aesthetics: tight black T-shirt, razor-sharp widow’s peak, pallid complexion, and—best of all—leather jacket collar turned up to resemble Dracula’s cape. Watch the promotional video the band shot for “New Rose” with their original lineup and you’ll find Vanian, a onetime gravedigger, hair slicked back, and single skeleton earring jangling; undead in appearance, yet so, so alive. While his look would shift mightily over the years—see the shock of white hair in a mane of black and frilled shirts circa “Eloise” in the ’80s, and later stylistic nods to steampunk and even silent film stars—his flair for aesthetics has never waned. “Even though the reality was I was as far from the Gothic towers of romantic fiction as I was to the moon,” he once said, “I saw no reason why you couldn’t aspire to a life less ordinary.” Why not, indeed? Happy birthday, Dave!  

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