SHERYL GARRATT 2 Tone went from being a small underground idea of Jerry Dammers and the Specials playing at the Birmingham Rock Against Racism Club to exploding in the national consciousness in a matter of weeks. ‘Gangsters’ and ‘The Selecter’ charted in the top ten and within weeks Madness were also rapidly climbing the charts. And then suddenly all three of the 2 Tone bands appeared on the same edition of Top of the Pops.
JERRY DAMMERS I first met Madness when we played at the Hope and Anchor in Islington at an RAR gig around the time of the ’79 election. Some of them and their mates were dressed a bit like us and after the gig they told me they had a band too and they did a bit of ska. I went to see them and they were really basic, just like a school band; they did a bit of Prince Buster and rock ’n’ roll, mainly covers, but some of their own songs. Suggs, their singer, gave me a cassette and that was extremely basic as well. For the first year Lee Thompson played everything a semitone wrong because he’d stuck the mouthpiece on his sax on too far. I seriously don’t think anyone would have signed them at that stage, but there was ‘My Girl’ and I could see they could write a real song, so I offered them a chance to put something out on 2 Tone. They recorded ‘The Prince’ and a cover of ‘Madness’. It was amazing how quickly they improved; they had no choice really, they’d been thrown in at the deep end.
RICK ROGERS The 2 Tone tour in October ’79 was the beginning of what the 2 Tone movement was meant to be. It was like, ‘Let’s go on tour together – Madness, Selecter, the Specials – like a Motown Revue.’ There was nothing more natural. This was more than just going to see your favourite band. It was the idea of celebration and doing something that was worthwhile.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS Organizing the 2 Tone tour was crazy. There was going to be forty-odd people out on the road. I had drafted in my sister Sarah to help out and we stayed up until 2 a.m. stapling and assembling tour itineraries by hand. There were stacks of paper and we had to use the copying shop down the road. This was the night before because the arrangements had been changing constantly and the bands weren’t exactly organized or easy to pin down. So as we were launching off up the motorway I was completely exhausted, and then seeing everybody not giving a shit about the itineraries and tearing off the bottoms to make roaches with, I was like, ‘Great. Thanks. Cheers.’ But for them it was like a load of kids going out on a school outing, all really excited. There was a lot of laughing and joking and a lot of energy. They’d all come from nowhere not long before: shitty jobs, living in shitty bedsits, no money, trying to get things off the ground. There was a fabulous sense of unity and starting an adventure. The whole 2 Tone ideal was about to be lived and borne out in these dance halls across the country. I had just a flash of that moment before I went back to being tired and worried.
NEOL DAVIES It was a really old-fashioned fifty-five-seater coach, cheap as chips. It didn’t have headrests, just really basic. It was the first proper tour that any of us had done: three seven-piece bands; back-to-back about fifty dates. It was exhilarating. The Specials had put out their second single, ‘A Message to You Rudy’, we had ‘On My Radio’, and Madness had ‘The Prince’: three chart bands touring together; it was an immense feeling. Within the first few days it was complete madness. Ridiculous stuff was going on. We filmed the video for ‘Missing Words’ on the first or second afternoon. We were challenging a lot of the way the music business worked because we had done it all ourselves. We’d created a label in a little provincial city and gained national success. We felt very empowered.
RICK ROGERS Coventry City Football Club had just got a new bus, so we got their old one and it actually had things like seats with tables in it. Several times the coach would have to stop while I made calls from a roadside phone box to find out what venue we were in, in case it had been put up a size. Initially, it was £2.50 for a ticket, the same price it would have been to see a single band. It was a bit less than half of what it would cost you to buy an album, rather than five times more which is what it’s like now. And what kept us going was selling T-shirts and ties. As soon as the doors opened I had to jump across the table and start helping because just a swarm of people wanted to get this stuff.
NEOL DAVIES We desperately needed someone to manage us so I said to the band, ‘Let’s invite Juliet,’ which we did in the dressing room in Brighton on the first night of the tour. It was an obvious thing to do because she’d been involved right from the beginning. She was really clued-up, very young, very competent and a very attractive blonde girl who was really fired up managing a black band with a white guy in it. We didn’t have a standard record company acceptably suited manager type, quite the opposite, and I’m proud of that. And Pauline was very comfortable that she had another woman on the road.
PAULINE BLACK Juliet was very important to us. She was fun and bubbly and seemed very capable. She was doing PR stuff and getting us interviews and it went from there. It was unusual to have a female manager. The tour was like a school outing. It was an old bus that as schoolkids you might have gone to the swimming baths in; you just had a bit more luggage with you and instead of getting in the pool you got on stage and did your thing.
FRANK MURRAY Pauline was the only women on the 2 Tone tour with a busload of testosterone-fuelled men. She used to read a bit and was into radical left-wing politics. She was a very strong presence and could handle herself.
NEVILLE STAPLE Me, Trevor and Rex were the black boys off the street and I think we were a bit rough cut for the rest of ’em. Pauline, being a girl, we would have been a bit rough for her: ‘Bloodclaat . . .’ We were in people’s face.
PAULINE BLACK It was generally accepted that you didn’t get in an argument with me because you were likely not to come off the best. I was good with words. Neville always used to say, ‘Oh God, here comes Pauline. She’s swallowed a dictionary again.’ But I never ever felt I was any less on stage.
LYNVAL GOLDING Pauline wasn’t make-up and all girly stuff. She was like one of the lads. It had to be tough on her. There were so many hooligan guys but she stood her ground.
RHODA DAKAR The first time I saw the Selecter was on Top of the Pops doing ‘On My Radio’. Pauline dressed like a boy but sounded like a girl. It was like, ‘Yeah, I can go with that.’
PAULINE BLACK A lot of people thought that I was a boy because I wore a pork-pie hat, jacket and trousers. The first time we were reviewed for Sounds Giovanni Dadomo likened me to Jimmy Clitheroe, a white northerner who wore school shorts. I would never deny that I was a woman but I would deny having to be trapped in a straitjacket of conventional dress for womanhood. Wearing dresses made me feel unpowerful. To go on stage I had to feel powerful. I wasn’t the backing singer or one of Bob Marley’s I Threes. I made a very conscious decision that I did not want to be like that. I still had full slap on. But a bit of androgyny never hurt. Look at Mick Jagger. But usually women are afraid that everyone’s going to call them a dyke. It was the age of feminism and it was also the age of black politics coming into fruition. I thought naively, ‘Hey, here I am fully formed.’ Dave Wakeling thought I was a boy when he first saw me.
DAVE WAKELING I had gone to a Selecter concert with a friend of mine, and Pauline jumped on stage with a suit and a hat on, and he goes, ‘That’s the kind of bloke I like.’ About two songs in she took her hat off and I go, ‘Ha, ha.’
SHERYL GARRATT Here was this girl that had taken this whole Jamaican style and made it her own. She was androgynous but not in a male way. She looked bloody gorgeous. The clothes she wore and the way she moved. It was obvious she was a girl and she was very powerful-looking. I immediately went out and bought a suit.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS Punk had produced some really strong front-women but it was still very much boys in bands. Pauline was analytical and outspoken about the politics of society and economics. And the music journalists liked that initially. But beyond that a lot of people in mainstream media were frightened off. For a long time, our relationship was important and we gave each other a huge amount of moral support. We were the only two women on the bus who weren’t girlfriends or wives or one-night stands. It was very male and macho. 2 Tone was about black and white but there were contradictions throughout. It wasn’t about sexism. You can espouse or truly believe in political ideals but everybody struggles to actually live them every day.
FRANK MURRAY I was the tour manager on the 2 Tone tour and I remember ringing Stiff Records and saying, ‘Tell me about Madness.’ Dave Robinson said, ‘OK, there’s six guys and a dancer.’ I said, ‘A what? What do you mean, a fucking dancer?’ He says, ‘You’ll see it.’ Cathal turned out to be the dancer – he explained that kids in Camden couldn’t pronounce Cathal so they called him Carl. He gave Madness an excitement to their music. He used to start their set by shouting, Hey you, don’t watch that, watch this. This is the heavy, heavy monster sound . . . ‘One Step Beyond’.
PAULINE BLACK Madness were just out of school. We would probably have been their teachers because we were all a bit older than them. With age I’ve probably mellowed in what I thought about them then. There was this camaraderie and rivalry of being on tour with two other bands and this tremendously idealistic ethos: ‘We’re going to rotate the bill.’ ‘Oh wow!’ ‘We’re all on Top of the Pops this week!’ ‘We’ll do it and come back by car!’ ‘Ah, but we’re coming back by helicopter!’
RICK ROGERS The only really annoying part of it was trying to get that many people on a coach in the morning. Sometimes we’d be sitting there for two hours before we got everyone on, but the atmosphere at the gigs was amazing. This was a plan coming together. It was new. It was happening.
FRANK MURRAY You give it a title, the ‘2 Tone tour’, and it will become a movement. It was like an old-style revue with three chart-topping acts, so everybody came to see them. It was an event. All three bands seemed to have this unreal energy that went through them twenty-four hours a day, I mean really. The Specials used to start with ‘Dawning Of A New Era’. I loved the excitement. It just seemed like constant motion. Lynval and Neville were always moving, and Jerry pumping away at the keyboards. Terry was a solitary individual and wouldn’t say a lot. He’d join in the banter and crack a few jokes but when you saw him walk on stage he just looked so fucking tense. Then he did that first jump and started to sing and the whole night you could see it coming out of him. He was very good at making sarky comments to the audience that would cut you in half.
RICK ROGERS It wasn’t so much what individuals were offering. It was the collective energy and spirit and how that engaged an audience in a joyful way. It was a whirlwind. I’d never ever seen that before. You couldn’t take your eyes off them, and with this grumpy, solitary character in the middle there was a huge juxtaposition going on that just made things work. The natural barrier between performer and audience wasn’t there because there wasn’t a single person controlling that. It felt more like you were having a party that was being led by these characters. Later on when people from the audience started coming on stage and joining in at the end; that’s what it made you want to do. It was absolutely extraordinary. I had never been blown away like that.
NEOL DAVIES The Specials were mind-blowingly good and just hit it. It was very competitive. We were explosive on stage. Nobody had seen a black band play or behave like that before. It was way ahead of its time. People didn’t quite know how to take us. If you ever saw the Selecter play live you’d never forget it as long as you lived.
NICKY SUMMERS I saw the tour at the Lyceum. I remember seeing Pauline and thinking she had a great voice. People were just dancing. I’d met Mark from Madness a few times and used to chat to him about getting my own band together. He was really supportive, so I was also quite analytical, ‘What are they doing?’ ‘Oh, they use that amp.’
JUNE MILES-KINGSTON The Specials were gods. They were doing everything I’d ever wanted to do. They were amazing musicians and really worked as a band.
FRANK MURRAY And the Specials having Rico Rodriguez’s imprimatur on it was like the icing on the cake. He had played trombone on so many original ska records: ‘I’ve worked with all the legends and now I’m working with these guys.’ That was so important.
CATHAL SMYTH Rico used to leave the tour and go and score grass and then sell it. I’d join him. It was exciting.
TRACEY THORN 2 Tone was joyous musically. It was lighter than punk, with a political message of positivity and harmony coming off the stage. And yet they attracted this horrible violent contingent. I’d be at gigs where bottles would be thrown, fighting would break out, and the gig would be stopped. You came to almost expect that. I went to three or four gigs to see Madness, the Specials, the Selecter and it ended badly.
DOUG MORRIS I wasn’t allowed to go to see the Specials because my mum had read in the Daily Express about stabbings. Going to see the Specials or Madness felt like you were taking your life in your hands.
RHODA DAKAR I was at the Hatfield Poly gig midway through the 2 Tone tour – I remember the Specials marching in, all carrying their suits like the Beatles getting into a cab in A Hard Day’s Night – where it was invaded by a group of knife-wielding thugs and people got cut. There was a palpable sense of fear in the place.
NEOL DAVIES I remember walking around the town before the gig and being quite scared. There were lots of rumours and scuffles and some unpleasant-looking characters. It felt like something was going to happen.
JERRY DAMMERS The Hatfield gig quickly became the stuff of schoolyard myth and it’s really hard to work out exactly what happened and the extent of it. The perception was out there that a section of people who turned up at Madness gigs at that time were National Front or British Movement supporters; hardly surprising when some of them insisted on doing Nazi salutes. A group burst in through the fire doors, presumably to try and teach whoever that Nazi behaviour was not acceptable.
TRACEY THORN The vast majority of the people in the crowd were just there at a gig not really wanting it to be World War III.
JERRY DAMMERS Some accounts claim the group had a banner saying ‘Hatfield Mafia’, which wasn’t exactly a great name for an anti-fascist group. There were also rumours that some of the Cockney Reds were involved, who were London-based Man. United supporters, some of whom got involved in anti-fascism; but who knows? There didn’t seem to be that much in the way of fighting back, although there was some, mainly in the bar, I think. A glass door got smashed and there may have been some injuries from broken glasses.
RHODA DAKAR It was stupid and unpleasant and violent and aggressive. Whether it was bully boys from the right or left, it didn’t legitimize the action. I can just as well understand it being the Trots: ‘We’ll sort it out after the revolution.’ ‘Yeah, course you will.’
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS It was reported eleven people were arrested, ten people were hospitalized and there was £1,000 worth of damage.
JERRY DAMMERS I think the anti-fascists were a slightly older generation and possibly still assumed all skinhead-looking kids were racists, which I don’t think was true in the 2 Tone era at all. What is known is that the real NF and BM were extremely violent, inciting racist hatred, and a lot of people were actually getting killed in racist attacks on the street. The police and government seemed to be doing next to nothing to counteract these organizations, so some people were tempted to take the law into their own hands. If I’d have known they were coming, though, I wish I could have talked to them first and tried to explain that we were trying to achieve similar anti-racist and anti-fascist goals, but by using music – and that we seemed to be getting somewhere. Most of the kids in the audience were still quite young. It was a horrible and very sobering night that took some of the euphoria out of the 2 Tone tour.
PAULINE BLACK We had to be smuggled out of there. I remember being in a car park, freezing cold, and being very worried because it looked as though we were going to get a battering. The police were called and then of course it got in the papers. There was some confusion that we were right-wing bands that attracted this element. But the audience was mainly tribal: mods, punks, skinheads and people with longer hair who hadn’t quite given up the Seventies. Far-right groups were targeting 2 Tone bands and often at gigs there would be a faction who would start Sieg-Heiling and it would kick off. As the frontperson you felt obliged to say something: ‘Could you please stop doing that?’ And then you’d start up again and if it persisted you’d say, ‘Right, if all these people here are doing this and the rest of you are having fun, what’s your feeling about that?’ You’d try and shame them publicly. Sometimes it would be enough if they put the lights up; then perpetrators could be identified and the bouncers would throw out the ringleaders.
NEOL DAVIES It was isolated pockets that wanted to cause trouble. It was mainly the London racist skinheads that didn’t like black people but liked reggae music. It was a very small minority but they had a large voice. Most skinheads weren’t like that but there was a confused core that loved ska but hated the guys who made it.
FRANK MURRAY When you see somebody getting kicked your stomach tends to tighten up. At Hatfield I went backstage and the bands were despondent. Nobody wants to be tainted with violence. For some reason everybody seemed to come to the conclusion it was Madness’s fans who might be responsible so they played a shorter than normal set to get the Specials on.
NEVILLE STAPLE Madness’s fans were all skinheads.
RANKING ROGER You heard rumours about Madness because they were all-white but Jerry would never have had them on 2 Tone if he thought they were a racist band.
MYKAELL RILEY The complication around Madness was, ‘Who is your audience? Are you supporting the fascist movement or not, because the majority of your audience does and you play to them?’ Their political stance wasn’t initially explained or resolved. It was just floating, so you only needed a few agitators on occasions to galvanize the audience in a particular way. Retrospectively, Madness were on the ‘right side’ but at the time it didn’t feel like that. It was like, ‘We don’t want to take sides in this; it’s better to say nothing.’
JERRY DAMMERS I hope any Madness fans that needed to learn something did learn something from being involved in the 2 Tone movement generally, and I know Madness themselves soon came to realize you can’t just sit on the fence when it comes to racism.
DENNIS BOVELL Madness didn’t want to jeopardize the paying crowd; they didn’t care who came to listen as long as they paid.
RICK ROGERS Madness were the only all-white band in this multiracial line-up and as kids might have had some dodgy connections. It’s context. In the areas they grew up, they would have been exposed to anti-black ideas and some of them had flirted or hung around with people like that. Once they saw what 2 Tone was about and were part of it they were 100 per cent signed up to the agenda. There’s no question about that.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS Suggs said, ‘If we were fascists what would we be doing playing ska and bluebeat? If we’d wanted to talk about politics we’d have formed a debating society, not a fucking band.’ But by the time Madness realized what they had embraced it was too late. They were part of that Camden soft skinhead look: DMs, braces, cropped hair. That was what was so brilliant because they brought in that really important element. People think they didn’t challenge it enough. I think they were too young to think it through. Any understanding of socio-economic politics, sexism or racism that existed was a blunt instrument at that time; there was nothing refined about any of it.
FRANK MURRAY I had big issues with skinheads because I’d been around at their first incarnation when I was a hippy and if they caught you they’d cut your hair. The look was quite brutal. The term ‘aggro’ came out of that: ‘You want some aggro?’ There was talk that a couple of the guys pre-Madness had had a brush with the National Front but had since disowned it. When the press were looking to point the finger they went at Madness because they were all-white, but it was like growing up in Belfast and saying you knew somebody in the IRA; of course you would. You do things by example: if I was a racist and I didn’t like black people I wouldn’t go on tour with them, d’you know what I mean?
CATHAL SMYTH The seventies had been a time of racist TV, of racist attitudes, of ignorance, of violence, of social deprivation, of fear; and this had a phenomenal and tangible effect on culture. There were a lot of conflicting energies. There were punks and skins and Teds and rockabillies, but then suddenly you get the agitators in the audience. It was frightening. Deanne Pearson wrote an article about Madness in NME called ‘NICE BAND, SHAME ABOUT THE FANS’ where I was quoted as saying, ‘We don’t care if the crowd are in the NF, or BM or whatever, so long as they’re behaving themselves, having a good time, and not fighting. They’re just kids.’
SHERYL GARRATT 2 Tone was never contrived to make a political statement with the multicultural bands, and as it was obvious to them they weren’t racists, they felt it should be obvious to everyone else. But it clearly wasn’t. It must have been bloody terrifying for Madness but we couldn’t understand why they didn’t speak out and make a statement.
CATHAL SMYTH I was young and not very eloquent and the NME misunderstood me. Our guitarist, Chris, thought I was a fucking idiot because his girlfriend was black; her family hated me and thought I was racist. I felt absolutely fucking insulted. I was trying to say, ‘We didn’t want to be in politics. You have to communicate with idiots to change their minds. You have to let them in.’ I was trying to say, ‘How can you have change through distance? You have to have proximity. It’s a fucking disease. You can’t cure a patient from 100 yards away; you’ve got to be in the room with him. You have to recognize the disease, locate it and lance it. Not shout at it. You can’t help a person if they don’t feel comfortable with you. You’ve got to be an agent of change, not punishment.’ People were confused. Travelling abroad gave me the realization that every country seems to have a fuckin’ scapegoat and it’s usually an ethnic minority. For me the frightening people were the ones in the shadows. In the end we issued a statement:
1) Madness do not support any political group which has racial politics. 2) The career of Madness has been inspired by many people. Their first-ever hit, ‘The Prince’, was dedicated to a Jamaican, Prince Buster, who is the godfather of ska and reggae. This record was released on a label belonging to the Specials who have both black and white members. It is consequently very upsetting to Madness that it could be assumed by anyone that Madness could support any racist group. 3) At the concerts at Hammersmith Odeon when the National Front and the British Movement were outside selling literature all possible efforts were made by Madness and the promoters of the concert to stop such literature being sold. 4) Finally, Madness will make it absolutely clear that they did not support any racist policies and hope that their fans of all ages and all nationalities do likewise.
TIM WELLS I’d listened to ‘Embarrassment’; Madness spoke out in the music.
NEIL SPENCER A lot of the Nazis embraced 2 Tone. There was a huge contradiction. Why were all those skinheads dancing to black music? I don’t know how to explain that away.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS You hear a lot about the violence and the aggression and things kicking off in the crowd, and that happened too, but there was an incredible atmosphere with a lot of people who had come together just so excited by what was happening and to be part of this thing that had not quite been defined yet. It was only later when factions started to form behind the bands. It was always the odd thing between the songs – people sieg-heiling – and then the audience going nuts during the songs and skanking. We just couldn’t fathom it. You’d try to look at it logically and say, ‘The mods and skins are natural enemies and they instinctively want to fight,’ yet they had an absolute shared love of black music. But the skins felt they had some sort of proprietorial right over ska. When it bubbled over the skinheads were getting challenged heavily by the bands from the stage; actively naming and shaming all the time.
JERRY DAMMERS Despite all the hugely exaggerated stories I can only remember it happening to the Specials three or four times, involving a maximum of three or four people, and we would always stop playing immediately because those incidents really upset me. There was one guy in Brighton who I invited on stage and asked him to explain to the audience why he was doing it, and when he started speaking I pushed him off, to a huge cheer from the rest of the audience. And after an incident at Brunel University I led the band off the stage and we chased them out. Roddy was waving his guitar above his head and they fled in terror long before we reached them. Imagine that, Top of the Pops coming to life and running towards you!
LYNVAL GOLDING It was a fashion trend. There would be about ten racists who would Sieg-Heil amongst 2,000 people but they would get the frontpage news. The Specials never looked at anyone and said, ‘You can’t come into our gig.’ Everyone was welcome. I was in Portsmouth once after a gig talking to these people with a racist attitude. One said, ‘You’re the first black guy I’ve ever talked to. I get it now.’ Skinheads began to see everyone merging together and say, ‘I want to be everyone.’
BILLY BRAGG I’d just had my hair cut really short for a bet and they wouldn’t let me in at the Hammersmith gig. There was this whole line of skinheads sat on a wall across the road and the guy said, ‘Sorry, son, if I let you in I’ve got to let all that lot in too.’ I eventually saw the tour in Lewisham. Apparently, promoters made certain skinheads remove the laces out of steel-capped boots so they couldn’t be used as weapons.
JERRY DAMMERS Any violence was too much violence for me. I hated it. But it does have to be seen in the context of literally hundreds of gigs which were completely joyful celebrations with no trouble at all.
RICK ROGERS Gigs being disrupted and violence at gigs was a minor part of what happened. When it was recognized it was swiftly dealt with from the stage and not tolerated. If you’re doing something powerful and you’re putting a powerful political message out that is challenging a racist agenda, then the racists are going to try and infiltrate and protest. If you’re extreme, then the extreme will try to screw you up. On top of that, some of the clothes were taken from what had originally been associated with right-wing culture, so it starts to reappropriate signs and symbols; so some people got confused.
HORACE PANTER Ejecting fascist skinheads from the auditorium wasn’t what I’d signed up to do. I just wanted to jump around with the bass and impress girls. Most of the stage invasions were to do with alcohol and football: ‘It’s Saturday night, let’s get really pissed.’ It had nothing to do with the bands particularly. It’s the British working-class predilection for drinking too much and fighting. You pay to come and see a pop group to disrupt the concert? I never got that. Lynval talking to that guy with the BM sign shaved into the back of his head. That would be the photo: conquering England one fan at a time.
•
JERRY DAMMERS The stage invasions at Specials gigs started in Liverpool at Eric’s when some lads came up from Coventry. There were bad vibes from some of the Scousers and they came onstage partly to feel safer, I think. They said, ‘This is our band. We’ve got as much right to be on the stage as you because you’re representing us.’ That then became a statement of solidarity between the band and audience. The previous punk statement had been gobbing on the band, which we caught the end of. It wasn’t pleasant but it was stating that the band weren’t superior to the audience by putting them in their place. To make it clear I put the line Nobody is special in the ‘Skinhead Symphony’ medley. For us it was saying, ‘We’re all in this together.’ Having the audience on the stage with us was great and at first it was restricted to the end of the set or the encore, but then it got to be disruptive when kids wanted to get on stage in the third number.
RICK ROGERS It was very much Jerry’s agenda of nobody is special. ‘Just because we’re pop stars and we’re in a band, that doesn’t make us any more special than you.’ And in every little way that that could be addressed it was addressed. Getting on stage was a natural thing because it was completely inclusive. And it was a political statement. The fact there were black kids and white kids and that there was performer and audience and you were all made to feel the same. It was extraordinary. Never seen before and never seen again. But things progressed and as the band got bigger that inclusivity went to people being able to get on the coach, to coming back to the hotel, to being put up in people’s rooms, and obviously, from a keeping-it-together point of view, that made my job more difficult at times.
HORACE PANTER Fans coming onto the stage started off as spontaneous joy but in the end it was like, ‘Please be careful, you’re going to fall over the drum kit.’ We had these lighting towers at the back of the stage and how none of them tumbled onto people is an absolute miracle. That’s why we had a second tier of risers, so we had something to go back to when the lip of the stage had 200 fans on it. The PA crews didn’t like it because they invariably got stands bent and lost a few microphones. Jerry would express it to me politically: ‘The music belongs to everybody; to be part of it.’ I really struggled with it. But Jerry was, ‘No, let them do it.’ You’d have to stop the show for five minutes: ‘Can you get off, please.’
FRANK MURRAY There was a lot of unruliness and the audience would be dancing up there and knocking over microphones. The bouncers were told to stay away and the fans were totally exhilarated, dancing their arses off. Jerry loved all of that breaking down the barriers. I just saw it as fucking hassle, letting all these clowns on the stage. It was a nightmare for me because you can’t control those kinds of kids. And if they start getting lippy some band member will always stand up and defend them when you’re trying to keep a little bit of order in the chaos.
JERRY DAMMERS I was actually more worried about the safety aspect than people probably realized, but it seemed like once the stage invasions had become established, trying to stop them would have been even more dangerous than letting them carry on. And I was proved right. When we did have to try to stop one in Dublin for safety reasons, it caused a near riot.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS One of the most important reasons why 2 Tone worked was because of the dancing. At the end of the Specials’ set all the other bands would pile on. And then Jerry would invite the audience on as well. I would spend a lot of the time by the mixing desk skanking away and teaching kids and various record-label execs how to do it. It became like the dance hall thing where being able to dance well and being part of the audience was as important as being up there. You were contributing. Jerry said, ‘It was the first time white males danced.’ The atmosphere at those gigs was the most exciting thing you could ever experience. Three bands one after the other. It was non-stop. The crowd were going fucking nuts. The shows were like a steam train; they were almost impossible to stop because the crowd would become this one mass of energy.
JERRY DAMMERS The energy at the gigs was absolutely unbelievable: the steam rising off the crowd, and the whole place jumping up and down. You could feel the building shaking. In Hastings we were on the pier and it only had wooden slats and between the cracks you could see the waves crashing on the rocks beneath. I really thought the audience might go through. And in fact in Southend they did. The PA stack was swaying and from the stage you could see huge holes appearing in the dance floor and kids falling into the cellar ten feet below because they were stomping so much. It was bonkers. That was the injection of African rhythm in the music. Ska is very energetic and it really lifts off and is relentless.
LYNVAL GOLDING We’d get to a venue and jump on the stage to make sure it would hold. In Bristol the stage just collapsed. It was really important, the fans coming on the stage, because the audience was part of the band. And people travelled with us on the coach. In Belfast, I had to sleep on the floor because my bed was taken by other people. It was crazy. We’d give out our passes every night; backstage was full of people that weren’t in the band. We broke down a lot of black and white barriers.
HORACE PANTER ‘Horace, can you put up these five skinheads from Catford?’ It was like, ‘Can’t I get some sleep?’ It was taking it too far. I resented that imposition. ‘Yeah, but I’ve got six skinheads staying on my floor.’
JERRY DAMMERS We weren’t just a student band preaching to the converted; we took the message right out into the lion’s den, so to speak, of the so called skinhead revival and I was always aware that strategy had risks and dangers and might not work 100 per cent, but I do think overall, along with other campaigns like Rock Against Racism, that 2 Tone did ultimately help make the kind of general racism I grew up with unacceptable in this country.
