JULIET DE VALERO WILLS 2 Tone was a socialist idea, whereas the politics of Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League had been primarily motivated towards defeating the National Front at elections, but it was a platform to examine personal politics, not just within the audience, but also amongst the bands themselves. On the back of the first 2 Tone tour there was a sense of, ‘What do we do now? How’s it going to work?’ Jerry had managed to pull off this amazing deal at Chrysalis where he had a label and a budget to record ten singles a year. Who were they going to sign and on what terms? It was going to take a small army of admin people to sustain and run it, but 2 Tone wasn’t making that kind of money. None of it was cheap. But with everybody as directors; there’s a recipe for disaster straight away. And you couldn’t hope to get the fourteen people in the Specials and the Selecter physically around the same table ever because they were too busy.
RICK ROGERS When the Selecter said, after the double-sided release with the Specials, ‘We would like to continue working on 2 Tone,’ we said, ‘OK, then you’ll become part of the cooperative.’ Everything was what was said to each other and a handshake. We didn’t work under contracts.
JERRY DAMMERS 2 Tone was my concept but I can’t remember ever saying, ‘We’ll have fourteen directors,’ or even using the word ‘cooperative’; it just happened how it happened. Everybody in the Specials and the Selecter had a say but 2 Tone had no real structure. It was never even a company. There was nothing as formal as that. It was just an idea and a label that put out records through a major label once we moved to Chrysalis from Rough Trade.
RICK ROGERS There’s no question that Jerry was the leading force behind the whole thing: the ideas, the philosophy, everything that was there started somewhere in Jerry’s soul. I was an equal partner in the Specials and treated like the eighth member of the band. There was no management percentage: if they got paid £50 one week, I got paid £50. When record royalties came through they were divided equally. The way the business ran was as close to equal as we could possibly deal with. It was the way that everything was done. The songwriting credits were generous to a fault, even to the point there was a percentage of the publishing put into the pot to share equally amongst the band, whoever wrote the stuff. The whole spirit was based on principles of fairness and equality. 2 Tone was a mini socialist republic in itself but it exploded so fast it was insane.
LYNVAL GOLDING Fourteen directors was a wonderful idea but for a cooperative to work everyone’s got to be willing to work together. It was difficult to find the middle ground. Jerry was a very single-minded guy. He wanted things done that way. The Specials, from a business point of view, was a disaster. You can’t run a label and not have money coming in. Chrysalis gave us £1,000 to record each single but you needed more than that to run a business. We ended up giving half our merchandising away. Rick should have controlled that better.
FRANK MURRAY Rick was too soft on the band but he had issues he was coming to terms with. I would have called the band in and said, ‘Look, this is the way this thing works. I know you want it to work differently and we’ll try and get that happening.’ It’s great Jerry had the vision, but in a way that should have been monitored. In order to achieve the dream sometimes you need guidance. If you see trouble up ahead you’ve got to be able to come to the dreamer and say, ‘Look, wake up here for a moment, there’s an obstacle ahead and I’m going to help you avoid it.’ And that was never done.
RICK ROGERS I was only twenty-nine. I also hadn’t ‘come out’ and I came from a strictly evangelical Christian family so there was all sorts of shit going on. It wasn’t easy in a band gang-mentality culture; being gay in many ways was more difficult than being a woman. So I was partly to blame. But we are all to blame. Frank’s probably right, I was too soft. But I don’t think he’s in any way innocent of some of the dissatisfaction that was caused within the band.
JERRY DAMMERS What started off very idealistically ended up being completely impracticable. It was fairly obvious which bands should go on 2 Tone at first but then we probably should have just concentrated on the Selecter and the Specials. There was always this incredible pressure to find more bands. And everybody was on my case day and night to put out their record. There was an Oi! band called Criminal Class who more or less demanded it because they were from Coventry. I was sent literally hundreds and hundreds of cassettes. It was just crazy. Prefab Sprout was the only one that I was aware might have been worth signing.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS Straight after the 2 Tone tour the Specials went to America and the Selecter were in Europe. Communication was so limited; no mobiles, no internet, no faxes. You were relying on being able to get the odd phone call in to get a decision from Jerry. There were a lot of notes: so-and-so said this; they’re on a tour bus; in hotels; doing gigs. Transatlantic calls weren’t easy and then you had the time difference to deal with. Meanwhile, both of their careers were going nuts. The pressures on them were huge. ‘On My Radio’ was out and the Selecter needed to follow up with an album quickly and do their own tour. You can’t just suddenly stop and wait. All the bands came up against the hard realities of being in a commercial industry and the pressure to work in a certain time frame because of the momentum. My concern was that the Selecter would be seen as the Specials’ B-side.
NEVILLE STAPLE It was ridiculous and everybody thinks they’re it. Jerry used to go to Chrysalis and say, ‘I like this band.’ That’s how the Bodysnatchers came about. It wasn’t all of us.
NICKY SUMMERS I had wanted to be involved with music since I was about thirteen. I had studied piano but had no idea how to go about playing in a group. Girls rarely played electric guitars. I liked the bass and thought it would be easier. I was also listening to dub reggae, where you’d hear a lot of bass riffs and repeated lines. The music scene in London was changing and I was looking to put an all-girl group together. All girls was a new thing. I wanted to make a statement. I was looking for some sort of musical hybrid but it was quite difficult to get together. I placed four or five adverts in the music press and the Bodysnatchers came together as the 2 Tone tour gathered momentum.
RHODA DAKAR I’d gone to see a band called Sta-Prest at the Greyhound in Fulham. I was chatting with Shane MacGowan and he said, ‘My friend Nicky wants to have a word.’ She said, ‘Can you sing?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘D’you want to be in a band?’ ‘Yeah, all right.’ Oddly enough, I had seen the advert in the NME but by that time I’d answered so many dodgy ads I just thought, ‘Oh yeah, another one. I won’t bother.’
NICKY SUMMERS The band was in place as a six-piece when I met Rhoda. I was intrigued by her image and invited her to a rehearsal. I got on with her and found we had similar interests and outlook.
RHODA DAKAR I was doing a French class at Institut français in South Kensington and I had to rush from there to the rehearsal in a dank basement in Camden.
NICKY SUMMERS We were all largely beginners. Stella and Sarah Jane played a few chords. Penny had played piano as a child. The sax player, Miranda, hadn’t played a note. Jane assured me she had a drum kit but I never saw it for six months. We rehearsed in this dive for two or three hours from six or seven for seven weeks, three nights a week, on Royal College Street. When we played it came out to be a modern take on rocksteady.
RHODA DAKAR We were nearly called Pussy Galore which now would be funny. Then, it was fucking stupid. It was SJ’s idea: ‘Well, my mum just thinks it’s to do with James Bond.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I know. Where does your mum live, in a shed at the bottom of the garden? Fuck off. If you want to call this band Pussy Galore you do it without me.’ Bodysnatchers was the name that everyone hated the least.
NICKY SUMMERS People said, ‘You just need to do a gig.’ A friend of mine managed Shane’s band, the Nips, and said we could support them at the Windsor Castle on the Harrow Road as a try-out. Everyone turned up: the Selecter, Jerry Dammers, Richard Branson, Gaz Mayall, the Mo-dettes. We thought it was a laugh and were somewhat ramshackle. My hands froze for the first song. I was terrified and we kind of fell apart towards the end doing ‘Time Is Tight’. Gaz loved it. We did two Saturdays running and practised a lot between the first and second gig and we played it perfectly the second time; Gaz was disappointed and said he preferred it before. And we had already been mentioned in the Guardian by Terry Hall: ‘Seven-piece all-girl ska band’.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS I saw the Bodysnatchers at the Windsor Castle with Pauline. Straight away it was Rhoda. She looked fantastic and had such a great presence and strength about her. She was doing a girlie Sixties thing but it was empowered. Rhoda always looked taller because of her big beehive. She was very statuesque and composed. They had some good songs. An all-girl band was so rare.
PAULINE BLACK Rhoda was very much younger. I was twenty-six. She’d been into the New York Dolls and was extraordinary. She had a very commanding presence, a whole style completely of her own, but whether the Bodysnatchers were any good or not is an entirely different question. They held their own. But it’s hard to play instruments when it’s mostly men standing around and you’re thinking, ‘Oh God, I can’t play.’
RHODA DAKAR I’d done Shakespeare at the Old Vic, darling! So some crappy gig in Harrow Road didn’t impress me that much. Being in a band was so much easier than acting but not as demeaning as modelling. I used to dress in old Sixties clothes from Kensington Market and wear a white ribbon in my hair. At Chelsea College of Art they had this thing where you had to dress up like the Sixties and I won. I remember Gaz saying to me, ‘Oh, it looks like fashion’s catching up with you.’ His family had this big house on the Bayswater Road and loads of people would sit in the basement round this massive bed and he’d just play tunes. That’s where I first heard ska. I’d grown up hearing rocksteady and early reggae. Gaz said, ‘You’ve got to have an anthem,’ so I wrote ‘Ruder Than You’ and he played it on his piano. It sounded brilliant. When the Bodysnatchers did it I remember thinking, ‘It doesn’t sound as good as when I did it with Gaz.’
NICKY SUMMERS Jerry was in America but the message was, ‘It’s a two-single deal.’ So we recorded ‘Ruder Than You’ and ‘Let’s Do Rock Steady’ with Roger Lomas, to sound good on the radio. We did twenty-six takes and he kept saying, ‘Play faster.’ It wasn’t the point of punk to be a proficient musician. It was about getting your thoughts across or your attitude or energy or fury or whatever it was. That was a large feature of the Bodysnatchers.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS We were suddenly going, ‘Come on tour.’ They’d barely played two gigs. They didn’t have a clue about all that. And they needed an awful lot of help very quickly.
RHODA DAKAR The second 2 Tone tour was the Selecter, the Bodysnatchers and Holly and the Italians. And then they left, so it was the Swinging Cats. It was nine women and Juliet.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS Women had a civilizing influence on the tour, for sure. Rhoda was really funny, very dry, and great to hang out with. She was self-assured with clarity of purpose and thought. It was women being supportive and having a great time, women with views, women who didn’t have domestic ambitions, women with a strong work ethic. We weren’t being strident feminists particularly, but we were slightly on a mission to show the boys we could do it too. It was like the women were answering back, in a way, and getting some momentum with the 2 Tone idea.
FRANK MURRAY I came back from the American tour with the Specials and Rick suggested I should be the Bodysnatchers’ manager. I lasted two months. From the time you met them they were looking at you going, ‘I hope you’re not going to try and change us or tell us to do anything.’ They were very defensive, like a locked shop. I don’t know what they wanted from me. You can either help somebody or you can’t. They were like, ‘Come on, let’s see what you’ve got.’ And I was like, ‘Well, you ain’t getting what I’ve got.’ It was a mismatch.
NICKY SUMMERS ‘Let’s Do Rock Steady’ was going to come out to coincide with the second 2 Tone tour at the end of February 1980. It was all very fast. Within two weeks we had to make a decision who to sign with and find a lawyer. ‘Shit, I’m out of my depth here.’ We voted between EMI and 2 Tone. I didn’t vote for 2 Tone because it was the safe option and predictable.
FRANK MURRAY Nicky was a tough nut and was going to let everybody know she had her own opinions. They had that attitude, ‘It’s always men telling us what to do.’ I guess that was valid but I’m not sure whether it was clever. I never had a problem with taking instructions from a woman. But their physical sound was quite weak. They didn’t seem to play with strength or a thud in their sound. Not their arrangements, but how they actually played. But the funny thing was, none of the girls were telling me they’d just learnt their instruments. They were walking around as if they were queens of the castle and they seemed to think they knew an awful lot more than they actually did. There was this sense of non-cooperation and they were suspicious of everything.
NICKY SUMMERS As a band, we would vote on things. We had dilemmas like who to sign to: hands up. We didn’t really argue. We would talk and discuss stuff. The Bodysnatchers were a sum total of a few strong components.
RHODA DAKAR We were only a band for fourteen months. After Frank we never had a manager so that became a problem. If we had to go and see the lawyer we all went. If we had to go and see the record company we all went. And shouted until we got what we wanted. The Bodysnatchers’ problem was we didn’t have a leader. It was a democracy. If you get a group of boys together they fight until they know their pecking order but girls don’t do that.
NICKY SUMMERS Richard Branson offered us this album deal but the rest of the band wouldn’t meet him. There was a lady who represented him and she used to contact Rhoda. I went down to meet her in Notting Hill and she bought us pancakes in Asterix. Branson wanted to take us to Memphis where Aretha Franklin used to record. Fuck knows why we didn’t do that. Five people refused to play ball. How can you let that go? We didn’t need a manager for direction or content but we needed somebody who had links to business.
FRANK MURRAY I wasn’t managing them by then but they deserved that chance. 2 Tone was a record company that didn’t want to be seen as a record company because that would be seen as playing the man. You couldn’t go to Jerry and say, ‘Look, can I have an album contract for the girls so we can make a record and we can get an advance?’ Chrysalis ran 2 Tone for Jerry. I had to twist his arm to get him to produce the second Bodysnatchers single and all the time the girls were going, ‘When are we going in? Is Jerry doing it?’ He wasn’t a producer per se but he could get a sound in the same way Elvis Costello did on the Specials’ first record.
NICKY SUMMERS ‘Easy Life’ was produced by Jerry and suddenly it came across as an anthem with this very slick production. We were taken aback. The riff came forward and it had this catch-line. Rhoda wrote the lyrics. It was about not taking the easy option and girls doing something more challenging, more creative than going for the safe norm. I did modern languages at school and was told the best I was going to be was a bilingual secretary.
RHODA DAKAR I was twenty. You don’t know that much. I could stay at home, play houses / There’s a brain here. The good thing about young people is that their ideas are pure and unfettered. It’s like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s go to the moon.’ There’s no notion of having to build the rocket. Is it our natural fate? / Do we just have to procreate? The other misunderstanding is that I thought motherhood would drag you down but with the genius of hindsight I now know that it’s an empowering role. Once you have physically invested in the future you’re going to make damn sure there’s going to be one. Whereas ‘Too Much Too Young’ was all about why you should take the pill and try wearing a cap; ‘It’s all your fault.’ I don’t know at what age those lyrics were written but Jerry was at least five years older than me and old enough to know better.
NICKY SUMMERS I questioned the Specials lyrically. They were a bit misogynistic in places with slightly spiteful lyrics. Too much too young, but you should be having fun with me.
JERRY DAMMERS Misogyny means hating all women: ‘Too Much Too Young’ was written about one woman and I didn’t hate her at all – it was very rude, sarcastic and adolescent, punky and angry, ’cos those were the times. Politically it could be seen as a feminist anthem. It wasn’t saying, ‘It’s all your fault.’ It was saying, ‘Young women shouldn’t allow themselves to be used just for creating babies; they should take control of their own fertility and contraception. Don’t let men dictate what happens with regard to contraception; don’t let them decide when you should have children.’ In the seventies there was still pressure on people to settle down, get a steady job and a family by the age of twenty; some people spent their lives in unhappy marriages. But it was unexpected getting keep a generation gap – try wearing a cap to number one, and that brought in what is still the biggest problem facing the world today, population growth: Do you really want a programme of sterilization, but just persuasion: Take control of the population boom / It’s in your living room.
RHODA DAKAR The first song I wrote for the Bodysnatchers was ‘The Boiler’ – ‘old boiler’ was a phrase Nicky told me she’d hear men use to describe ugly women. They started playing the riff and I just started telling a story someone had told me about a rape. I’d been writing songs and plays since I was a kid so I was used to improvising. It was inexperience. When you don’t really know how to do things you do stuff that you’re not supposed to and break the rules.
NICKY SUMMERS ‘The Boiler’ was a Sixties’ keyboard riff we used to jam on and gradually this piece of music grew. The manager of the Nips used to refer to women as ‘boilers’. We used to play it quite fast towards the end of the set. Rhoda used to do it as a piece of method acting and there was generally stunned silence. The audience hardly even used to clap, but they were definitely transfixed. It was a powerful and challenging song.
RHODA DAKAR If you read Stanislavski there’s a technique called the ‘emotion memory’ where you take something that has made you terrified and you reuse that feeling using the words you’ve got to speak. That’s all it was. The rape recounted in the song didn’t happen to me. I was used to acting so therefore I was used to having an effect on the audience. I would have been more horrified had it just gone over their heads and they didn’t react to it.
PAULINE BLACK The audience were totally and utterly perplexed by ‘The Boiler’. ‘Mmm . . . yeah, well, she’s stopped now.’ And then it’d all be back to dancing. We’re talking unreconstructed male personages who might have been able to take on board the black–white thing, but expecting them to do anything else? No. Rhoda has my undying admiration for the song.
FRANK MURRAY Rhoda was a very strong young black woman with a great sense of social justice. She didn’t back away from tough subjects. To scream for the last minute on a song was revolutionary.
PHILL JUPITUS They did it when I saw the Bodysnatchers support Lene Lovich at the Lyceum. It was the most disturbing song I’ve ever heard. I think Peel played it on the radio once and there were complaints and he couldn’t play it again. I just remember the screaming bit at the end, ‘Oh my God, this is a rape.’ It was fucking unbelievable. It’s the most horrific and powerful record I own, without fucking question. Everything about it – the arrangement, the rhythm, the downbeat delivery of it in the first few verses: I went out walking last Saturday. And it got to number thirty-five in the charts!
LUCY WHITMAN Any female band was at risk of a lot of leering at best and aggression or patronization both in terms of audiences and music press. It was easy to be Bananarama but not easy to be writing songs about rape. It was very daring.
NEIL SPENCER The very fact that Rhoda was reclaiming the word ‘boiler’ was in itself a riposte to everyday sexism; never mind that she was talking about rape. It was terribly courageous and harrowing.
JUNE MILES-KINGSTON The Bodysnatchers was all so girly. Their stuff was quite fluffy and then you had this one song that really stuck out. It was on a par with Terry Hall’s song ‘Well Fancy That!’ about being him abused by his teacher on a school trip to France. It was a real performance art piece. You couldn’t dance to it and it wasn’t easy to listen to. There were two bands there.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS ‘The Boiler’ set the Bodysnatchers apart and sent out a signal: we are not just going to be 2 Tone fluff. It was challenging rock ’n’ roll male attitudes towards girls. Rhoda had total balls to do that. Most of the 2 Tone audiences were too young to have strong political views. If they were experiencing the urban issues being played out on the stage, I don’t think they were old enough to articulate it to each other, but they found common cause at those gigs. Politics was something that grey men in suits did. I think the fans thought they looked fantastic and the music made them want to dance. Once 2 Tone went beyond being just a great dance sound and a great image and tried to deliver on its mandate, the media started to pull back. They didn’t want to engage with the difficult substance.
