The Doctors of Madness are the great outsiders of rock history. They are the missing link between Prog-rock and Punk Rock. In the words of Def Leppard’s frontman Joe Elliot, they were “Mosntrously brilliant”.
The band had been together for three and a half years and had a loyal, committed following when they decided to call it a day. They were finally floored by the killer punch of punk rock, which, like a raw, swaggering, bare-knuckle fighter, saw off many established bands in the period between 1976 and 1978. The fact that the Doctors of Madness were one of the few British bands who could credibly have claimed to have been ‘proto-punk’, with their frantic delivery, their preoccupation with urban neurosis and systems of control, their appetite for fast drugs and their exotic stage names, was not enough to earn them a reprieve. Nor was the fact that their fans included The Damned, The Skids, The Adverts, Simple Minds, Julian Cope and Spiritualized. Even the fact that they gave The Sex Pistols their first out-of-London gig didn’t save them from the punk juggernaut, which flattened everything in its path.