Rip It Up and Start Again

by Simon Reynolds

  Huge monoliths of planning diarrhea stretch mercilessly to the blue sky above like they own the very souls of the few beings that totter out from their concrete cocoons, faceless and drained….[The Specials’ own neighborhood] is dissected with subways that seem to throb with an invisible tension and deserted “play spaces,” swings and trickling streams that poke fun at the surrounding slabs of gloom.

  No one would have described Coventry as pretty. Indeed, guidebooks to England usually struggle to summon up anything to entice tourists to visit the town. But it was a vibrant place until the late seventies. The West Midlands was the success story of the postwar British economy, thanks to pent-up consumer demand for cars. Like that other motor city, Detroit, the compensation for living somewhere so harsh was plentiful jobs and good pay. But upheavals in the world market for cars in the early seventies began to affect the West Midlands, causing unemployment rates, which for most of the postwar period were half the national average, to rise steadily. When Thatcher’s monetarist policies mauled British industry at the end of the seventies, the boomtowns of Coventry and Birmingham became ghost towns almost overnight.

  In the fifties and sixties, Caribbean immigrants moved to the West Midlands for jobs. As a result, there was a long-established local tradition of black and white musicians intermingling. Before punk, most of the Specials’ five white and two black members had apprenticed in soul bands of one kind or another. Jerry Dammers—the Specials’ founder, chief songwriter, and keyboard player—tried to persuade the groups he used to play in, such as the Cissy Stone Soul Band, to play his own songs. “Before the New Wave happened it was just unthinkable to do original songs,” he recalled. “It wasn’t until the Sex Pistols came along that you realized that you could get away with doing your own songs.” Terry Hall was equally galvanized by the Pistols, especially Johnny Rotten. “It was just the way he stood onstage and gazed for half an hour,” he recalled. “I’d never seen anything like it. His stance was like an extension of standing still.” Hall developed his own “meaningful glare,” an unblinking scowl accented by his heavy eyebrows.

  The Specials were as mixed socially as they were racially. The rebellious son of a clergyman, Dammers had been a very young mod in the sixties, then a hippie, and then—in a bizarre shift—a skinhead. Not all British skinheads were neo-Nazis, as the stereotype has it. They had a complicated relationship with the U.K.’s new postimperial multiculturalism. Skins generally got on well with the Caribbean population. The second generation of immigrants were the skins’ contemporaries at school and lived in the same working-class neighborhoods. Skins admired and emulated Jamaican style (that’s where their cropped hair came from), while ska and rocksteady were their preferred forms of dance music. At the same time, skinheads had a frictional interaction with the more recent immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, who in the 1970s had not assimilated. Hence, the “folk devil” reputation of skinheads as thugs into “Paki bashing” (and hippie bashing, too) and the subsequent identification of the skinhead subculture in its entirety with the National Front, British Movement, and other neofascist parties. For many, though, being a skin was just about having a cool look and belonging to a youth tribe.

  After school, Dammers studied art at Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry, where he specialized in animated films and met fellow art student Horace Panter, who became the Specials’ bassist. Another former mod, drummer John Bradbury was also a fine-arts graduate. Guitarist Roddy Radiation had paintbrush experience of a different sort as a decorator for the local council. Second guitarist Lynval Golding supported his wife and daughter working as an engineer. Singer Terry Hall had a skilled working-class job as a clerk at a coin dealer. He was the perfect mouthpiece for Dammers’s lyrics, lending them an authenticity they might otherwise not have had. Hall knew proletarian life from inside but, like Mark E. Smith and John Lydon, was too piercingly intelligent not to see right through its treadmills and traps.

  Neville Staple—the seventh Special and, alongside Golding, its second Caribbean member—was the group’s resident rude boy. In 1960s Jamaica, the rude boys had been ska’s hard-core following. Unemployed youths who dressed slick and got into trouble with the law, the rude boys resembled the preconscious Malcolm X when he was just a zoot-suited street hoodlum. They were “rude” because they had insubordinate spirit and a raw sense of injustice, but they hadn’t yet acquired the ideological discipline of militants such as the Nation of Islam or the spiritual focus of Rastafarianism. “Compared to the rest of the band, I came from a rough-and-tumble part of the world,” Staple says. His crime sheet included burglary and disturbing the peace. He’d participated in a revenge attack on some National Front skinheads, and he used to steal timber to build the speakers for a sound system he helped operate. It was through his knowledge of sound equipment that Staple ended up working as a roadie for the Specials. At gigs he would hang out by the mixing board. During the group’s support stint on the Clash’s 1978 Out On Parole Tour, Staple grabbed the mic and started “toasting” over the music. He’d grown up around blues dances and sound systems, absorbing the “DJ talkover” chatting of Big Youth, U-Roy, and Prince Jazzbo. In the Specials, Staple’s gruff patois and rowdy yet baleful presence made for a superb contrast with Hall’s utterly English, alternately wry and sour intonation.

  Initially, Dammers’s concept for the Specials was “punky reggae.” But for a long while the group struggled to integrate the two styles, even to the limited extent the Clash had managed on “White Man in Hammersmith Palais.” “We had songs where part of the songs were reggae, then they’d go into a rock section, then perhaps into reggae,” Dammers recalled, “and it would throw people off.” Eventually the Specials turned to ska as the solution: They would wind pop history back to a time when Jamaican music and the early forms of midsixties British rock (basically sped-up R&B) were much closer. Dammers also felt that contemporary roots reggae was “religious music. When we’ve played with some black bands, these dreads have come up to me and said we should leave Jah-Jah music alone. So we do leave Jah-Jah music alone and go back to when reggae was more just straight dance music.”

  Ska began at the end of the fifties as a Jamaican twist on black American dance music from New Orleans, “upside-down R&B,” as guitarist Ernest Ranglin put it. The term “ska” is most likely derived from the characteristic ska-ska-ska-ska attack of the rhythm guitar stressing the “afterbeat,” which intensifies the music’s choppy, chugging feel. The Specials took the staccato pulse of sixties ska and amped it up with punk’s frenetic energy. The difference is most audible when comparing one of the Specials’ many cover versions to the ska original. The sixties source invariably sounds sluggish in comparison, less aggressive, but also simpler in arrangement compared to the remake.

  The man generally credited with inventing the “afterbeat,” singer/producer Prince Buster, was even bigger in Britain than in Jamaica. He released more than six hundred singles in the U.K. between 1962 and 1967 and toured there frequently, often escorted between gigs by a phalanx of scooter-riding mods. The Specials upheld the mod tradition of worshipping Buster. “Gangsters” is loosely based on his “Al Capone,” replacing the original lyrics with new words about the record business’s sharks and shysters, but “sampling” the skidding car chase sounds from the original record. “Stupid Marriage” steals its courtroom trial scenario—Staple as Judge Roughneck meting out harsh sentences to rude boys—from Buster’s 1967 hit “Judge Dread.”

  Love of Prince Buster’s music united the U.K. ska revivalists, but Madness outdid everyone with their debut single, their sole release for 2-Tone. On one side, a version of Buster’s “Madness Is Gladness” made for an instant manifesto. On the other side, “The Prince” paid luminous tribute, dropping references to Buster’s “Ghost Dance” (itself an homage to the sound system operators of his youth) and to Orange Street, the Kingston boulevard that doubles as Buster’s birthplace and the center of Jamaica’s music biz. “The Prince”
sounds joyous, but lines like “Although I’ll keep on running/I’ll never get to Orange Street” capture the poignant pathos of the mod dream of escaping England through an obsessive identification with black music and black style.

  When the ska revival bands appeared in 1979, they initially seemed like just one element of a larger mod revival, partly triggered by the release of Quadrophenia, the movie based on the Who’s 1973 concept album, and partly by the Jam, who emerged at the same time as the class of 1977 punk bands but who always seemed more like a sixties throwback. The original 1960s mod scene was based in the British working-class passion for up-tempo black music, sharp clothes, short hair, and amphetamines. “Looking good’s the answer/And living by night,” sang Ian Page of Secret Affair, the most successful of the nouveau mod bands that swarmed forth in 1979. The couplet crystallizes the mod “solution” to the impasses of British society with its class structures and crushing mundanity: style, soul, and speed (not just the drug, but whizzing around town on sleek, streamlined Vespa scooters). The Jam’s singer, Paul Weller, also caught mod’s essence when he talked about being into “clean culture” while loathing rock ’n’ roll’s scuzzy decadence, dirty hippies, and so forth.

  The British mod resurgence of 1979 effectively tried to regress to 1966, arresting pop history at that point just before Sgt. Pepper’s and the ensuing boom of album-oriented, nondanceable progressive music. In the late sixties, those original mods who didn’t go the psychedelic/progressive route instead turned into ska-loving skinheads or Motown-fetishizing Northern soul fans. “We’re just continuing the line…from the mods and the skinheads,” Jerry Dammers declared. In one 1975 feature on Northern soul, a fan scorns “progressive” as nonsense noise for stoned weirdos: “You talk to someone who likes progressive music and they’ll say they listen to it just to listen toit…. I like music to dance to, not to listen to.” You can imagine the 2-Tone fans and neomods of 1979 having the same baffled and derisive response to PiL or Cabaret Voltaire. Postpunk was dub-spacious, heard at its best on twelve-inch records (hence Metal Box and the Cabs’ 2X45 album) and hi-fi stereos. In contrast, the 2-Tone bands and the new mod groups made seven-inch music. Brisk, punchy, near mono, and designed for transistor radios, it flashed back to the midsixties golden age of the single.

  One thing the mod resurgence—including 2-Tone—did share with the postpunk bands, though, was a snobbish attitude toward rock as passé and undignified. Screeching, self-indulgent guitars were replaced by taut, punchy horns as the lead instrument, a lone trombone or trumpet in 2-Tone’s case, but full-blown brass sections with sixties-soul-inspired bands such as Dexys Midnight Runners. “Kids are starting to get interested in playing brass rather than wanting to be a guitar hero,” noted Dexys’ member JB approvingly. Keyboards came next in the hierarchy, not synthesizers but electric organs such as the Hammond, which could supply a choppy, rhythmic pulse or be played in a pianistic style for rollicking, rinky-dink embellishments. With a few exceptions (notably the Jam itself), guitar was restricted to a rhythmic role, a scratchy presence low in the mix, and rarely allowed to emit anything that resembled a solo.

  Along with an aversion to guitar heroics, the main thing the new mods and the ska revivalists had in common was a love of dressing sharp. “The clothes are almost as important as the music as far as I’m concerned,” Terry Hall declared. The 2-Tone look jumbled up elements from all phases of mod and skin fashion: Fred Perry and Ben Sherman sport shirts, mohair suits, black slip-on loafers, Sta-Prest trousers, porkpie hats, white socks, suspenders. Like the music, the fashion was adapted from black style. “It was a thing young black kids did for years,” says Staple. “Go to tailors and get measured up for tonic suits, mohairs, Prince of Wales, and pay money down on the suits every week in installments. That was how they used to do it in Jamaica, too, white shirt and slim pencil ties, a nice slick look.”

  The 2-Tone label’s defining stylistic motif was what Staple calls “the check,” the alternation of black and white, which not only looked great but symbolized the movement’s ideals of racial harmony and musical hybridity. This imagery, along with the mixed-race lineup of the leading 2-Tone bands and interview comments such as Dammers’s description of racism as “like some kind of mental illness, like fear of spiders,” probably did more for the antiracism cause than a thousand Anti Nazi League speeches.

  The thoroughly modern multicultural resonance of its black-and-white music and clothes gave 2-Tone an edge over the empty nostalgia of straightforwardly mod revivalist bands such as Secret Affair. By the fall of 1979, 2-Tone mania ruled Britain. On November 8, Madness, the Specials, and the Selecter appeared on the same edition of Top of the Pops playing their Top 20 hits. Later that month, the Beat’s debut single, a remake of Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a Clown,” was the 2-Tone label’s fifth single, and its fifth hit. Dammers’s dream of 2-Tone as a modern Motown—an invincible hit factory with a diverse roster united by a common sound—seemed to be coming true.

  When “Gangsters”—originally released independently, with Rough Trade’s support—started to take off, the Specials had been chased by every record company in London. But Dammers held out for a label deal, for 2-Tone as an entity, and got one from Chrysalis. The alliance between the major label and the Coventry independent required Chrysalis to fund the recording of fifteen 2-Tone singles a year and release at least ten. After the chart success of “Tears of a Clown,” though, the Beat jumped ship and started their own label, Go Feet, which formed a 2-Tone–like alliance with Arista. Madness also bolted from 2-Tone after just one single and signed to Stiff Records. Neither group wanted to be subsumed within Dammers’s “new Motown” vision.

  The Beat—who were forced to call themselves the English Beat in America, because a domestic group had dibs on the name—originally came from Handsworth, a racially mixed area in Birmingham immortalized by the U.K. reggae band Steel Pulse with their Handsworth Revolution album. Like the Specials, the Beat were poster boys for integration and the Caribbean contribution to British pop life. The group’s front line was an almost too perfect blend of male beauty and political correctness, as blond singer Dave Wakeling’s dulcet croon meshed with the patois chat of Jamaican pretty boy Ranking Roger. In addition to toasting on sound systems and at Birmingham’s famous nightclub Barbarella’s, Roger had been the orange-haired drummer in a punk band, the Dum Dum Boys. As for the rest of the Beat, the scrawny, pasty-faced figures of bassist David Steele and guitarist Andy Cox contrasted with the black bulk of Saxa, a sixtysomething saxophonist recruited after the group found him playing jazz in a Handsworth pub.

  Like the Specials, the Beat’s concept was punk meets reggae, “high energy with fluid movement,” as Wakeling put it. But in the Beat’s hands, the results were more like fast skank than ska. On songs such as “Hands Off, She’s Mine” (the group’s second Top 10 hit in early 1980), bubbling bass braids itself around rimshot drums and shimmering rhythm guitar. “Too Nice to Talk To” adds Chic-style bass and African-flavored guitar to the speedskank, resulting in an iridescent chittering sound that suggested Soweto township disco. “Mirror in the Bathroom,” their biggest hit, was even more original sounding. Weirdly, its jittery guitars and sinuous bass recall nothing so much as Joy Division’s “Transmission,” although maybe “She’s Lost Control” is more apt, as “Mirror” is a glimpse into the mind of someone cracking up. Tension and paranoia were the Beat’s prime terrain, as heard on songs like “Twist and Crawl” and “All Out to Get You.”

  When they shifted from the personal to the political, the Beat weren’t quite so effective. The only dud in their fabulous sequence of 1980 U.K. hits was the anti-Thatcher anthem “Stand Down Margaret.” Still, all the group’s royalties from the single went to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The Beat also contributed to the antinuke benefit album Life in the European Theatre. Dave Wakeling confessed, “It is embarrassing to think that we could destroy ourselves…. You just feel a prat, for being part of a system tha
t can’t do any better than that.” For all their brilliance—light seemed to literally dance off the surfaces of their sound—there was something just slightly too earnest about the Beat at times.

  That could never be said about Madness. Initially, the North London seven-piece seemed like pure comic relief next to the somber Specials. The keyboards romped and capered, the wheezy-cheesy blare of the sax evoked a vaudevillian vulgarity, the farce of baggy trousers sliding to the ground. “The heavy heavy monster sound,” Madness called it. “Our music sounds like fairgrounds and organs,” said guitarist Chris Foreman. “It just sounds nutty.” Both onstage and in their peerless, groundbreaking videos, Madness lived up to the music’s antic spirit with dance moves and zany accoutrements that recalled the slapstick music hall routines of their parents’ era. Their equivalent to Ranking Roger and Neville Staple was an Irish-Cockney skinhead called Chas Smash, whose job was to shout the band’s wacky catchphrases and perform “odd robotic dances,” as critic Dick Hebdige put it, “the top half of his body…stiffas a board, all the movement taking place below the knees.”

  Behind the clowning, though, was an intelligence and sadness that gradually came to the fore. What attracted singer Suggs McPherson to the song-and-dance comedians of the British music hall tradition wasn’t just the laughs, he recalled, but the hint of darkness “amongst the rosy cheeks [and] smiling face.” Alongside early jolly-ups such as “One Step Beyond” and “Night Boat to Cairo” were singles such as the exquisitely rueful and confused “My Girl” (about a young man who can’t seem to make his girlfriend happy or get her to understand that he sometimes needs a bit of space), or the hangdog “Embarrassment” (about a boy who’s disgraced his family). The video for “Baggy Trousers” was uproarious, but the song’s nostalgia for school days came alloyed with ambivalence and regret. By their third album, 7, Madness’ humor was shadowed with the pathos and bathos of English life. “Cardiac Arrest” is a deceptively jaunty ditty about an office worker who’s late for work and suffers a coronary in midcommute. “Grey Day” is as harrowing as anything on the Specials’ debut, as the music itself takes a turn to the tragicomic, with bells tolling for all those condemned to a living death of meaningless routine. “The sky outside is wet and gray/So begins another weary day,” Suggs intones mournfully, “I wish I could sink without a trace.” Amazingly, this portrait of terminal despondency, underpinned by an ominous dubsway of reggae rimshots and heavy bass, was a massive U.K. hit in the spring of 1981.