NEIL SPENCER Like Aswad and Steel Pulse before, the 2 Tone movement stood for a new generation of black Britons, one whose identity was first and foremost British and secondly West Indian. A black and a white person being in a band together was not without precedent – the Equals’ ‘Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys’ was an early outrider – but 2 Tone was a first in modern popular music. The Specials and the Beat and the Selecter articulated a roar from the Midlands, as did UB40. It was almost like saying to London, ‘You invented punk rock but we’ve got this.’ You could never get music as uptempo as 2 Tone out of Jamaica. It was too hot.
CLARE SHORT After the first people came from the Caribbean you’ve got the next generation that had been to school together and were wearing similar clothes. 2 Tone was very important politically because it was an answer to the National Front.
NICKY SUMMERS Punk was dead. The Clash went to America. It became a no man’s land again. I was bored and looking to do my own thing. I needed direction and pointers. 2 Tone filled that gap.
JERRY DAMMERS I thought of the name ‘2 Tone’, which originally referred to the shimmery tonic material that skinheads used to wear, but I didn’t see it as a racial thing at first, but when people read that into it I had no problem. It may have been exaggerated or a media stereotype but the kids who dressed in the so-called skinhead style in the early seventies that were interviewed on the telly definitely were racists. History seems to have romanticized the idea that the original so-called skinheads were some kind of united working-class movement; if there was bashing of Asians or hippies there was just as much bashing of other skinheads, either at football or just of the gang three streets away.
ROBERT ELMS The original skinheads were the best-dressed people I had ever seen. It was sartorial brutalism but it was beautiful in the way that great brutalist architecture is beautiful. It was the Mies van der Rohe of style. It was Crombies with red hankies. It was really shined brogues or boots. It was Levi’s Sta-Prest. It was jeans with a precise half-inch turn-up, worn up. It’s one of the greatest looks ever invented by a bunch of fifteen-year-old herberts from council estates, and it was the first incarnation of multiculturalism in Britain because these are the first kids who had grown up with West Indian kids as their neighbours, where you’re gonna hear ska and reggae music coming from next door’s flat. Where you’re gonna see boys with pork-pie hats with trousers worn very high, with that sauntering style and skanking dance. And there were always black skinheads. I’m not saying it wasn’t racist. If it was racist it was against the Asian community, which was unforgivable, but it certainly wasn’t anti-black. If anything it was young white kids who were in awe of black kids. A decade later it was the bastard offspring. It was Oi! It was ugly. It was tattoos. I was very angry with that version of skinhead. It was an abomination. It was lumpenproletarian. It got hijacked very early on by the far right.
CHRIS BOLTON You have to understand in the discos the popular music from the early seventies had been reggae and ska so songs like Bob and Marcia’s ‘Young, Gifted And Black’ got to number one; the theme song from Chelsea Football Club was ‘Liquidator’. Soul influenced a lot of the early reggae. Original skinheads loved reggae.
DENNIS BOVELL From the time when Derrick Morgan had a hit with ‘Skinhead Moon Hop’ in 1969, I used to go to a club called the ‘A’ Train in Battersea Town Hall on a Wednesday and Sunday night. Sir Coxsone was the resident sound and there used to be hundreds of white kids in there. Those kids must have got older and had kids who they told, ‘This is the music we used to listen to.’ And then you get 2 Tone.
ROBERT HOWARD 2 Tone was one of the first things that looked back. It was a revival movement, a bit like the mod thing.
RED SAUNDERS London mods were the very beginnings of multiracialism. Down the clubs you were meeting black boys and girls. It was the beginning of it. And the rockers were all white and their traditions were the Teddy boys, who were of course the people who attacked the Caribbean community in Notting Hill Gate.
ROGER HUDDLE I was a young mod: mohair suits, very New York. I didn’t realize that until I saw Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. I thought, ‘Shit, that’s what I looked like.’ I was just copying Italian youth style. I was a working-class bloke working in a factory, going to clubs and weekends at Margate, and really getting into Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames and Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band. It was rhythm and blues, black American music, ska, Prince Buster, and then house parties in the estates where the black population lived within my community.
DAVID WIDGERY Black music was our catechism, not just something we listened to in our spare time. It was the culture which woke us up, had shaped us and kept us up all night, blocked in Wardour Street mod clubs. It was how we worked out our geography, learnt our sexuality, and taught ourselves history. And if white musicians were as good and as exciting we worshipped them too. Our experiences had taught us a golden political rule: how people find their pleasure, entertainment and celebration is also how they find their sexual identity, their political courage and their strength to change.34
CAROL GRIMES When I first started singing with bands it was all very organic. Some of the musicians were African, some mixed-race, some English, some Irish. I didn’t think twice about it. Mixed races have been in this country since the Windrush. But most of the bands were four white men.
DAVE RUFFY There was the Jimi Hendrix Experience with Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell. But to me, Jimi was neither black nor white. He was like a god who played this mad music. Then you had the soul thing which was huge. You’d go to parties and everyone had Tighten Up Volume 1 and 2 and This Is Soul. The Motown tours came over and they were amazing, and then the Stax Volt tour with Booker T and the MGs: two black and two white. And the Equals. They were called the fucking Equals.
DENNIS BOVELL The first racially mixed group in this country was the Equals: three black guys – Eddy Grant and Derv and Lincoln Gordon – and two white guys. Britain was the melting pot of everything: the Beatles singing Isley Brothers songs and going off to do their Indian stuff and playing with Billy Preston; the Small Faces singing ‘Sha-La-La-La-Lee’ written by Kenny Lynch, a black comedian.
FRANK MURRAY In 1969, John Lennon put on a show at the Lyceum with the Plastic Ono Band and the opening acts were all reggae: the Young Rascals, Desmond Dekker and the Aces, Jimmy Cliff, the Hot Chocolate Band.
TINY FENNIMORE I used to go to the California Ballroom in Dunstable, where there were quite a lot of black people. It was a bit like the Wigan Casino and they played loads of northern soul. They had black American bands coming over every week to play: James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Diana Ross, Detroit Spinners. It was a great place to cut your teeth. Music was evolving. Calypso and ska was coming together with white skinheads and white street culture and white youth: just ordinary people who didn’t like the National Front.
DOTUN ADEBAYO At Alexandra Palace there was the biggest youth roller disco ever; there were thousands of kids and they had DJs who were in tune with the underground stuff. That’s where we heard our ska tunes but also things like ‘Everything I Own’ by Ken Boothe way before it got into the charts.
NICKY SUMMERS We used to go to a disco around Highbury, and towards the end they would play Prince Buster. I was about twelve. There was one black kid in the whole hall and he did this form of dancing and somebody said to me, ‘That’s northern soul.’ When I was ten I was invited by a friend who was Jamaican to this house and they had a Dansette record player. They played Freda Payne’s ‘Band of Gold’. It was like, ‘What!’ I’d heard ‘My Boy Lollipop’ but black music hadn’t registered. I stared at this record. That was it. That was a change. That was one of those moments where you start to go on a path in life.
CHRIS BOLTON It would be impossible to live in Ladbroke Grove without coming under the influence of reggae, as it would be in Brixton or Shepherd’s Bush or any area where there was a large reggae community.
TIM WELLS We were all into reggae. Jamaica and England have always been in conversation. There’s a great story about King Tubby: he never left Jamaica but he could give directions around Dalston. Jamaica knows London.
NEVILLE STAPLE Our parents grew up with music from Jamaica: Desmond Dekker, the Skatalites, Derrick Harriott, Millie Small. My cousin used to have a sound system and play all of that stuff.
PAUL HEATON I was going to Beanos in Croydon nicking loads of bluebeat and ska records. And at the Greyhound they’d be playing people like Dillinger and Steel Pulse. John Peel was playing Handsworth Revolution and I-Roy and U-Roy. My first band, Tools Down: every song had an offbeat.
DAVE WAKELING My first listen to ska was on the football terraces; at Wolves and West Brom they’d play ‘Liquidator’. It always struck me as deeply ironic that the skinheads were dancing to ska but the football grounds were also the place where the right worked really hard at recruiting.
PAULINE BLACK Black had been assimilated into the workplace because of the motor industry. You’d got Peugeot and Triumph and people had settled in from the Caribbean by way of Gloucester or Oxford or Luton. After Coventry was bombed in the war they built the ring road around the city and stuck everyone outside it so there wasn’t so much a city centre. And people got mixed up: in the workplace; schools weren’t ghettoized; there was more freedom of exchange. You listened to each other’s records. There were places that were black areas, like Hillfields, but it was so tiny.
HORACE PANTER Coventry was a multicultural city before the phrase was invented. In the street where Neol Davies – who would later form the Selecter – grew up, there were Greeks, Poles, Italians, Irish and Jamaicans who all went to school together. I’d been brought up in Kettering in Northamptonshire, which is a little sleepy market town, so Coventry was the big city as far as I was concerned. It was quite multicultural musically as well. You got the gig not because you were black but because you were a good guitar player. I was at Lanchester Poly, which is where I met Jerry Dammers, and the chap in charge of the halls said, ‘Be careful when you go out at night. People get murdered.’
LYNVAL GOLDING Coventry was voted one of the most violent cities in England. I’ve got the scars on my neck to prove it. When I was about eighteen, nineteen, I was walking in Foleshill Park and these two guys got their little brother to beat this Indian kid up. He was crying and I said, ‘Leave him alone.’ These two guys said, ‘That’s my brother you’re talking to.’ I said, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ It was blood everywhere. Another time there was about nine of us blacks in the Forty Thieves nightclub dancing with all these girls and these white guys at the bar got jealous and a big fight broke out: hitting with bottles and all sorts of things. A friend of ours was glassed right across the face and ended up in hospital. I was chased down the road. There were two fences. I jumped over the first fence and a white taxi driver saw what was about to happen and swung open the door and said, ‘Jump in. Where do you want to go?’ I said, ‘Anywhere.’
NEVILLE STAPLE I got attacked on Holyhead Road where the Specials used to rehearse. I was walking up the road and I was jumped by four National Front guys. I grabbed the leader and held him by his throat and walked him about 200 yards up to the youth club. His mates were following him and I was squeezing harder and harder. Once I got to the door I let go and bolted inside shouting, ‘Any of your friends come looking for me, I’ll kill ’em.’
WAYNE MINTER I was doing Fine Art at Lanchester and Jerry Dammers was the year below me. He was a very good illustrator. He was in the design studio making animated videos of Rocky Marciano boxing fights. Horace Panter was in my year and used to paint removal vans. He was doing things like Steely Dan covers in the college band Breaker; they were bloody good. Coventry was a strange place: half of it had the heart bombed out of it. It was a hard town but there was a really good music scene.
JERRY DAMMERS Coventry was quite a violent and divided city with a lot of racism against black and Asian. And the sectarian tensions with the Irish and Scottish didn’t help either. I don’t actually remember a huge amount of white musicians playing with black musicians; Neol Davies was one of the few. I played with him and Sixties soul singer Ray King, doing Three Degrees and Hot Chocolate covers with a little bit of commercial Bob Marley thrown in, in a band called Nite Trane. Ray did a lot for the community and encouraging young black musicians, and a lot of his protégés ended up in the 2 Tone bands. Neol and I tried to persuade him to be a bit less cabaret and more funky, but it was hopeless and Ray walked out. It was as much frustration with the Coventry music scene that drove me to form the Specials. I made a conscious effort to form a multiracial punk reggae band and make an anti-racist statement. I loved reggae music and to combine that with rock music, it seemed obvious.
PAULINE BLACK Music wasn’t worth doing if you weren’t dissenting about something. You didn’t waste your time doing loads of love songs and crap like that. If you were going to write a song you made it about something.
NEOL DAVIES Jerry and I had a very close friendship. He’d come round to my flat and we recorded a couple of his tracks on my four-track. We’d talk a lot about clothes and music and I was in the original bunch of musicians that he was rehearsing to form the Specials. One day there was a rehearsal which I wasn’t told about but I went along anyway and found Lynval Golding there instead: ‘I understand, see ya.’
JERRY DAMMERS The first line-up of the Specials I put together was Horace Panter on bass, Neol Davies on guitar, a black drummer called Silverton Hutchinson and a singer called Tim Strickland. I soon replaced Neol, one of my best friends at the time, with Lynval Golding. I felt horrible but the music came first. I liked Lynval’s authentic trebly reggae Telecaster and I wanted a more multiracial band. Lynval promptly left the band! I had to beg him to come back. Then I brought in Terry Hall on vocals and Roddy Byers on guitar as the punk elements.
HORACE PANTER The first black person I met in my life was Lynval Golding. Most of us in the Specials were in our mid-twenties – so we all knew how to play soul or funk or some kind of live dance music – and a generation older than the punks.
JERRY DAMMERS I told Terry the Clash and the Sex Pistols were about my age, actually, and that pogoing and wearing a leather jacket didn’t make him a real punk. I said, ‘We should try and do something truly original like they had; that would be real punk spirit. It’s about creating fashion, not following it.’
NEVILLE STAPLE I used to hear this reggaeish sound coming from the next room in the Holyhead Youth Club where I had the Jah Baddis sound system. I was intrigued. I popped my head round and said to Jerry, after a few times, ‘Can I come along? I’ll tidy up the wires for you.’ So I used to travel around in the back of the transit van on top of the speakers. This was when we were going out as the Coventry Automatics. They were doing a soundcheck at a gig in Leeds and I was on the talkback mic at the mixing desk, DJ’ing over them, playing the Toots and the Maytals classic ‘Monkey Man’. They didn’t know where it was coming from until the lights came round so Jerry called me onstage.
JERRY DAMMERS My original idea was for Neville to mix us. I built a little mixer with switches and I wanted the whole band to go through it and Neville to switch instruments in and out while we played, to get live dub effects. And then we got a tour supporting the Clash and Bernie Rhodes persuaded him to jump on stage and get on with it.
HORACE PANTER We wanted to fuse the energy of punk and the sinewy rhythms of reggae and come back to ska combining white and black music. Later, I remember Dave Wakeling saying that some journalist came up to him and said, ‘2 Tone is a fantastic socio-political stand you’re making here with black and white musicians.’ And Dave was like, ‘We got Everett [who was black] because he was a good drummer.’
JERRY DAMMERS The idea of 2 Tone was to try and promote anti-racism hand in hand with and as an integral part of working-class unity in general. I did drawings of how I hoped it might all look and what I might be able to persuade people to wear. Lynval and Horace especially were a bit older and started off looking very old-wave. I knew it was really important that we were identified with punk and the new wave and I had to persuade them to dress differently. And part of the plan was that we should keep changing and adapting, staying creative and ahead of the times.
NEOL DAVIES Jerry had a specific idea of taming what he saw as potential fights between National-Front-leaning people and black people. It was social insight more than political. He was a passionate believer and I bought into the 2 Tone idea completely. It was a real simple statement of, ‘Whatever difficulties different people have, you’ve got to work it out, and why not with music?’
HORACE PANTER I remember going round to Jerry’s flat in Albany Road with notepads: ‘OK, what are we going to call our record label?’ ‘2 Tone’ was a cool name for a label. It came with its Sixties thing. We wanted to do what Stax or Tamla Motown did in America for British music. You would hear the first drum roll and you’d know that it was a Tamla tune.
JERRY DAMMERS I had decided I was going to have a band when I saw the Who on Top of the Pops singing ‘My Generation’. I was ten and a ‘mini’ mod, so the 2 Tone logo was generally a Sixties pop art thing. The black-and-white-check idea came from the sticky tape I used to decorate my bike with back then.
DAVE WAKELING I liked the way 2 Tone used the black-and-white chequerboard and stole it back from the police. It was taking icons back from the opposition.
LINTON KWESI JOHNSON The Specials were British white kids being influenced by Jamaican culture and music: a coming together of the youth through music . . . the power of music, full stop, to bring people of different races and cultures together. It was part of the cultural melting pot that was taking place.
LYNVAL GOLDING Me and Neville come from rural Jamaica where we’d only wear shoes on Sundays when we went to church; we didn’t have TVs or radios or running water or a fridge or anything like that. Roddy, the guitar player, came from a coal-mining village. Terry and Brad were born in Coventry. Jerry was born in India. Early on people didn’t understand what we were trying to do because we tried to merge a different culture and rhythm together. It’s like that song: What we need is a great big melting pot.
TRACEY THORN It’s interesting because the Specials were after punk and they were different to punk but it seemed what they did couldn’t have been done without punk. And there was something about them being so mixed that looked right; they seemed representative of young people. And Terry Hall was this wonderfully gloomy frontman who was a brilliant foil for it all with a slightly sour take on Britain. In their best songs there was always that slightly queasy contrast between the party atmosphere and a stark awareness of what was going on.
JERRY DAMMERS The French surrealist André Breton said, ‘Revolutionary art has to be revolutionary in its form.’ There’s a lot of truth in that and finding new ways of doing something to excite people and get them interested. Hopefully music can bring people together and put a message across and inspire the way people think. Punk rock and white rock music in general was always limited in what it could achieve politically because it wasn’t that inclusive. It alienated as many people as it involved. I wanted to create a more mixed atmosphere.
PAULINE BLACK 2 Tone was never sold as an idea. It was demonstrated. ‘Here we are, black people and white people in the same bands – isn’t that amazing? – getting along and fusing rock with reggae and ska.’ Young white people were intrigued because reggae was very different. And they were not that far removed from our beginnings; we were just placing their lives in some kind of perspective and setting it to music, so they could relate to it.
RHODA DAKAR I read 2 Tone as everyone in it together: a community of like-minded spirits. It was mostly anti-racism and a bit of anti-sexism. It was fun and edgy and a bit aggressive.
NEOL DAVIES People could see with 2 Tone there was a chance of something really British but intrinsically black being created. At that point I thought reggae had lost its way and lost its sense of invention and humour and sexiness. I didn’t want to hear about Rastafari any more than I wanted to hear about God or Jesus.
JERRY DAMMERS Rasta, if only as a feeling, had a huge amount in common with 2 Tone. Politically, it had always been a revolutionary call for justice and equality, and not to, at least, respect that would make no sense to me. 2 Tone wanted to celebrate Caribbean culture and values and I was made up when black kids got into it.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS It was like for the first time the black and the white youth had found a language they could talk to each other in. And to see young black and white guys on the stage together was like a little microcosm of what was starting to happen in society. Punk had been very white. And even though the punks latterly started getting into reggae and embracing black music, there was still ‘punk bands’ and ‘reggae bands’. 2 Tone was trying to make a statement about literally mixing black and white cultures and making music out of the two. And if you do that, can you therefore break through deeply rooted cultural racism? And can you also empower a generation who had no future? It sounds quite grand but in Jerry’s mind I think that’s what he wanted. All the bands totally believed in that. It was about them thinking, ‘If we do this we’re helping ourselves, too.’
