My hunt for the Holy Grail: Damned drummer Rat Scabies interviewed

Most former punks end up touring the nostalgia circuit or cropping up at conventions. Not Christopher John Millar, aka Rat Scabies. When Scabies hit middle age, the legendary drummer with the Damned began to hunt for the Holy Grail. ‘We all started off criticising government and I’ve ended up looking for pixies,’ explains Scabies.

In 2005, the music journalist Christopher Dawes wrote a rollicking account of a trip he took with Scabies to the epicentre of it all, Rennes-le-Château, a tiny village atop a rock overlooking the River Aude in the Languedoc. Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail has taken its place as a minor gonzo classic. Dawes lived across the road from Scabies in Brentford and gradually got drawn into a world of odd theories and strange coincidences. ‘I knew he’d be hooked and anyway this kind of yarn made me sound interesting,’ Scabies tells me.

We are sitting in Scabies’s local pub and he’s still obsessed with that yarn and could be tempted back to look for treasure again – even though he didn’t find it last time.

‘Nobody has found anything yet. People suddenly say they’ve found it and “X marks the spot”, but they don’t do their research properly. It is still out there. Imagine a cave the size of a Tesco store full of gold and manuscripts and treasure. Full of history and knowledge. That’s what we are looking for.’

Scabies’s dad lit the spark with this tale of extraordinary riches hauled to France by Templars. The story takes in hidden Nazi treasure, the lost Kings of France, sacred geometry and, of course, François-Bérenger Saunière, who is key. 

Saunière was a local lad-turned-Catholic priest, who showed up in Rennes in 1885 and acquired an unexpected fortune, which some believe was part of the Holy Grail hoard, and many others claim was built up fraudulently.