JULIET DE VALERO WILLS The 2 Tone bands had all formed under the fag end of an ailing Labour government. They were a generation coming of age into a Britain at war with itself, culminating in the Winter of Discontent of 1978–9. But it took the brittle policies of Margaret Thatcher’s government to make the social message of their songs resonate so strongly with working-class youth. And black youth, in particular, not only suffered the crushing effects of ideological austerity, they were ruthlessly victimized by a police force that was ‘institutionally racist’ and largely unaccountable.
LINTON KWESI JOHNSON It was a period of intense class-struggle. Thatcher had arrived on the scene and the philosophy of the Tory Party was, ‘We have to claw back the gains that the working class had made in the post-Second World War settlement: the welfare state and all of that, to gradually strengthen the hand of capital and weaken the hand of labour.’
ANGELA EAGLE The 2 Tone bands were very important because they were more politically developed than punk bands. They were anti-racist and by definition they commented on some of the segregation. I didn’t dress in sharp suits and wear a pork-pie hat but I understood the political importance of being in that space. Those bands very much accorded with the anger and the hopelessness that people felt about what was happening in places like Coventry and Liverpool and the mass unemployment.
ROBERT ELMS If you want the voice of angry but beautiful black Britain, if you want to understand the riots of ’81, Linton Kwesi Johnson is that.
LINTON KWESI JOHNSON I was writing poems of resistance articulating how the youth of my generation felt about what we were experiencing from the police and in the courts and in educational institutions, even in the place of work. I was expressing what I felt were the prevailing sentiments based on my own experiences as a part of the black communities. I was coming from a black power background. Our slogan was, Black Power People’s Power. We weren’t about setting up an independent black nation but we knew that the question of race was of paramount importance and couldn’t be covered up under the carpet of class. We weren’t anti white people. We were anti the white ruling class. Black people were on the margins of British society. We didn’t have a middle class. We didn’t have Members of Parliament. We didn’t have councillors.
KATE WEBB There was a sixteenth birthday party on 17 January 1981 at a house in New Cross and a fire swept through and killed thirteen young black kids. It was believed to be arson but much to the community’s outrage the police inquiry concluded that the fire had started in the house. Two months after, there was a largely peaceful march from Deptford to Hyde Park. The Sun headline the next day was, ‘DAY THE BLACKS RAN RIOT IN LONDON’.
LINTON KWESI JOHNSON The Black People’s Day of Action was the first significant watershed in those struggles because it made the state cognizant of the fact that we had some power; that we could put 20,000 people on the street; that we could shut down the centre of London. The New Cross fire had happened in London but the mobilization was national: Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol, Derby, Leicester. And culture and music played a part because a lot of the mobilization was done through sound systems and local radio stations. The march culminated in Hyde Park and then we sent a delegation to No. 10 Downing Street. I was one of the stewards trying to keep the youth from running too many shops. It was a turning point.
PAULINE BLACK There was a benefit at the Hammersmith Palais for the National Council for One Parent Families with the Selecter, the Specials and Linton. The way he used words and the authority that he had on stage, he was like a young Malcolm X. That was quite a potent image when everyone was going round being a dread at the time.
BRINSLEY FORDE Linton took the political mantle and spoke like a politician. He was a life politician. Listening to his albums would be like listening to News at Ten but the proper version, particularly ‘Sonny’s Lettah’.
RANKING ROGER Sonny got caught up in an accident trying to save his brother and killed a police officer. It was a fantastic story. Linton got through to a lot of people, raising their knowledge and awareness.
LINTON KWESI JOHNSON ‘Sonny’s Lettah’ was written as a contribution to a campaign that was being waged in our communities against the infamous sus law – a Vagrancy Act from 1824 which had been dormant for many years and was reinvoked – in which a significant number of black youth were criminalized by racist police officers. A policeman could just simply say that he had reasonable suspicion that you were thinking about putting your hand into somebody’s handbag or pocket. It was as vague as that. The black communities were up in arms about it. Even parents who believed very much in law and order began to side with the youth because they realized that it was almost like a systematic process of criminalization. I had been arrested by the police and brutalized and assaulted and charged with assault and GBH, so ‘Sonny’s Lettah’ drew on that experience plus the experience of many other people I knew who had been unjustly persecuted by the police.
LORNA GAYLE I used to listen to ‘Sonny’s Lettah’ over and over again. Linton was my voice and world. He was a man coming from where I was coming from. I was an inner-city kid and got myself in trouble with the establishment for stupid, petty crime. I was quite unruly. I knew a lot of people who had that kind of lifestyle and ended up in prison. The sus laws were like an excuse to arrest us and keep us down. It didn’t make much sense. I saw a lot of innocent people wrongly accused and beaten by the police and a lot of retaliating because it made you angry. Like when you were stopped: ‘What are you doin’?’ And you’re like, ‘What? What?’ ‘Say one more word.’ ‘What?’ ‘Get in the van. Shut your mouth.’ If someone’s talking to you like that your back’s just gonna get up and it starts something. The police had a way. They knew how to click you off, especially if you had a bad temper anyway. And it would always turn into a disaster unless you were strong enough to say, ‘Sorry, officer. I’m just walking minding my own business. Thank you, officer. Have a nice day, officer.’ I didn’t have that in me.
JUNIOR GISCOMBE There were curfews on the street, and if there were more than two people together you’d get stopped or you’d have the white van guys who would jump out and beat you up. The emphasis was on ‘Colour, coming to ruin the country.’
JOHN NEWBEGIN There was rampant racism in the Metropolitan Police and Brixton was on the front line of that. The sus law gave the police enormous power to stop and search people without apparent reasonable cause and they targeted young black people. The SPG were very macho and brutal in the way they treated people in the community. We had transit vans racing up and down the street with the back doors open and police hanging out waving their truncheons and shouting, ‘Come out and fight, you fucking monkeys.’ It was pretty extraordinary.
PAULINE BLACK We’d been to America during the riots in Miami in May 1980 triggered by a black Marine Corps veteran being viciously beaten to death by the police – it was only a month after the St Pauls riot in Bristol triggered by a police raid on the Black and White Café. The sense of unease and continued lack of black people’s empowerment in society was international. Racism was rife. You’d got all these things that were decimating working-class people. Thatcher was in power. The country was in turmoil and recession. It was racism on two different continents. And you coupled that with what was going on in South Africa; pretty much wherever there was a black person there was some degree of turmoil.
JOHN NEWBEGIN Tension was rising and in April 1981 it just blew and there was a huge riot; a lot of property was destroyed and vehicles burnt. The police were completely taken by surprise at the intensity and ferocity of what happened and it took them a long time to regroup. I had a friend who was a community copper in Brixton and there was this joke in the station, ‘Why are the SPG like bananas? Because they’re bent, they’re yellow, and they go about in bunches.’ Thatcher was attempting to turn the police into a nationally organized force for class oppression and chief constables resisted that very forcibly, as we now know from the evidence that has come out.
DENNIS BOVELL The SPG went around unscrupulously stopping and searching black people going about their business to clean up Brixton. It was a move to agitate communities and crack down on whatever they thought was wrong within the community. Admittedly, there was ganja on sale quite openly and gambling was quite commonplace, but one street in Brixton hardly deserved the attention of the whole of the British police force. Brixton was a mixed community – like Ladbroke Grove, like Toxteth, like Handsworth – so when ordinary working-class people were beginning to feel the same pressure as the minorities, they suddenly realized there was a common thread. Then all you need is a few people to go, ‘Perhaps they need to hear our voice? Yeah, let’s have some disorder.’ Linton captured it in ‘Di Great Insohreckshan’: It woz in April nineteen eighty wan / Doun inna di ghetto af Brixtan / Dat di babylan dem cauz such a frickshan / Dat it bring about a great insohreckshan / An it spread all owevah di naeshan / It woz truly an histarical occayshan.
LINTON KWESI JOHNSON It was after the Black People’s Day of Action and then the summer riots that government racial-equality policies slowly began to emerge. This idea of parliamentary democracy was not relevant. The reason why we had so many people at the march was the groundswell of anger and bitterness, combined with horror.
CLARE SHORT I had been the director of AFFOR [All Faiths For One Race] in the late seventies and we had published a report called Talking Blues which was a collection of verbatim commentaries of young black people from Handsworth talking about how the police behaved. All sorts of stories came out about kids getting messed up by the police. It was outrageous. It had been there for a long time. I went down on the streets of Handsworth the day after the riots in July ’81 and it was desolate and cars were turned over. The spark was a big rise in unemployment which had shot up very fast and then it was young black youth angry with the police. But it spread beyond the inner city and others joined. It was an explosion of justified anger that was speaking about social conditions.
LYNVAL GOLDING The Specials did a Peaceful Protest Against Racism at the Butts Athletic Stadium in Coventry after the teenager Satnam Singh Gill had been murdered in a racial attack in the city centre in broad daylight. It clouded over everything. It was a horrible experience. I was playing and I couldn’t feel anything.
JERRY DAMMERS The concert was to show solidarity and to take a stand against racism in general. You had to do something. It was a really terrible time in Coventry. Dr Amal Dharri was stabbed to death by racists in the chip shop twenty yards away from where I lived, apparently for a £10 bet. It was absolutely horrific. In the lead-up to the concert there had been rumours of a National Front march so a lot of people were scared to come – but that never materialized beyond about twenty people. A white guy had been beaten up by some Asian kids in a low-level retaliation and he came on stage and made a little speech saying how he completely understood why they’d done it, which was really touching.
HORACE PANTER Three other Asians were attacked with knives and bottles in the same week. It was like, ‘We need to do something here.’ We lost an absolute fortune and it was quite overcast but the atmosphere was great. I was thrilled we’d been able to do it. And then on 4 July we did the final Rock Against Racism gig in Potternewton Park in Leeds.
JERRY DAMMERS As we drove into Leeds we saw this big National Front march which looked like a giant red, white and blue slug creeping through the town. It was very sinister with lots of Union Jacks. The impression I got was it was mostly older normal-looking blokes. There was really quite a strong atmosphere in the town.
RHODA DAKAR We were driving in Neville’s car through the march and there were hundreds of people and flags. We were low down so people seemed taller. It was all a bit scary. We ended up at this field in Chapeltown and I sat down by this woman in the audience and said, ‘Are you listening to the tennis?’ She said, ‘I know it’s a bourgeois construct but I can’t help it.’
JOOLZ DENBY There were Rude Boys and skins and proto-punk goths. You just felt, ‘This is what revolution is like.’
DOUG MORRIS I went to the Carnival wearing my Harrington, Fred Perry and a pair of jeans. And it was interesting the Au Pairs were on. They were quite confrontational in their attitude: a strong, confident band. It was a new era of gender and social politics.
LESLEY WOODS I remember being in the dressing room with members of Misty and they were passing round the spliff and they wouldn’t pass it to the women. They passed it to me because I transcended being a woman because I was a musician. I passed it to the other women. They didn’t object. I objected.
RHODA DAKAR Misty went off on one about how Rico shouldn’t work with the Specials. ‘They’re not Rastas. You shouldn’t be working with them.’ It was a load of bollocks. They were all, ‘Nah, dread.’ They never spoke to us at all. I thought, ‘What’s that all about? We’re here trying to get everyone together and you’re busy trying to split them up.’ That really pissed me off. Rico refused to play the solo on ‘Ghost Town’ because they got to him.
CHRIS BOLTON That’s bollocks. How ridiculous with the history of Misty and the bands we’ve helped out. We never put down another band at a Rock Against Racism show. No fucking way. We were always very respectful to Rico for the contribution he made to music, way before we arrived. Rico had never been intimidated in his life not to play. He would have decided himself. He was his own man.
RICK ROGERS I wasn’t party to the conversation but one of the band came into the dressing room and said, ‘Misty are accusing of us of stealing their music.’ It was really hurtful and horrible. I was having to deal with the difficulty of keeping it all together; maybe I got myself so drunk because it was difficult.
HORACE PANTER Misty were very down on Rico because he was ‘playing with Babylon’. But the gig was shit. Our sound engineer didn’t know it was in the afternoon and he didn’t arrive until after we’d finished. It was one of our last ever gigs in England. We hated one another. We went on stage and didn’t care. There was no cohesion. It wasn’t a band at all. We just went through the motions.
JERRY DAMMERS I think the crowd thought it was a fantastic gig, apart from one fight which was a mystery what that was about. The atmosphere was amazing and the message came across loud and clear. I don’t think anyone in the crowd would have known there were any serious problems in the band. I didn’t even know myself at that stage. ‘Ghost Town’ was racing up the charts and we played it as the big climax to this massive concert. It came to the solo and Rico didn’t play. He said, ‘Jerry, me nah feel fe play.’ I thought it was funny. I don’t know if anyone from Misty, or possibly with one of the other reggae bands, had said anything to him. It wouldn’t have been right but I could sort of understand, I mean, a lot of them were better singers and players than us and struggling, while we were having chart hits. I think Rico had just been having a few spliffs with whoever and he was just a bit moody and missing playing with the brethren in a real reggae band. To me, Misty were fantastic singers and massive supporters of RAR from the start to the finish.
DOUG MORRIS There was lots of fighting down the front towards the end of the Specials’ set and their singer, Terry, shouted at them.
SYD SHELTON There was a hell of a lot of Rude Boys and Rhoda did that incredible rape song ‘The Boiler’ with the Specials where she’s screaming. It was daunting: just silence.
JOOLZ DENBY I was thinking, ‘Good on you. Do it. Go on, tell ’em.’ Rhoda was brave, because there were people around me going, ‘For fuck’s sake.’
LYNVAL GOLDING ‘The Boiler’ tackled such an emotional subject in a direct way; and seeing the expression on people’s faces, ‘This is heavy shit.’ But the day was like a big party. The audience and the togetherness; you could feel it. In Leeds we always had more blacks at our gigs than we ever had anywhere else. Neville said, ‘It’s like a zebra crossing, black and white, black and white as far as you can see.’
HORACE PANTER Everybody came offstage and went off into their own little worlds. The band was falling apart and I felt really ashamed. I went back to Coventry and watched the riots in Toxteth on television. But in Thatcher’s Britain I was a pop star. I was aware of people having a hard time, yes, but personally I had a blast. I toured America. I went to Europe. I actually had disposable income and I owned a car for the first time. I wasn’t affected by what government was in power. Jerry was a lot more politically savvy. I remember him saying that when we played in Glasgow he saw all these people selling their crockery and cutlery in the street.
RICK ROGERS Jerry was able to see things that not all of us were able to see and was able to respond and write about it. I feel quite ashamed of myself but I was completely sheltered from it all. I do remember having this wonderful conversation with Jerry while driving him to a mixing session where we were talking about the state of the country, and after I thought, ‘I’ve got to bring myself back down to earth a bit.’ That’s quite a painful thing to say. I wasn’t aware of some of the things I should have been aware of and the Specials’ bubble protected me from really knowing what else was going on in the country under Thatcher. You don’t notice a recession when every six months you get more royalties than you got six months previously. I was thinking about the moment.
LYNVAL GOLDING We saw the cutbacks and how working-class people were affected. We were all feeling it. Jerry had the idea to do ‘Maggie’s Farm’ which was a Bob Dylan song.
HORACE PANTER I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more: that was, if you like, the anti-Thatcher tune. And then Jerry wrote ‘Ghost Town’, which became the soundtrack to the riots. It was the only time that social realism got to the top of the charts, while Toxteth and Brixton and Handsworth all kicked off. Poor old Peter Powell on Top of the Pops, ‘Now, it’s good-time music from Coventry.’
ROBERT HOWARD ‘Ghost Town’ made perfect sense, with that spooky clarinet line and Terry Hall’s delivery without vibrato. It was the sound of what was really going on. I remember walking down Acre Lane in Brixton and I got chased into a basement just near the crypt and a policeman came right up to my face with his baton and shield and went, ‘Aaarrggghh’ and then ran off. I’d only been back in the UK for about three weeks. I was thinking, ‘What the fuck is this, man?’
RANKING ROGER ‘Ghost Town’ was profound. We were on tour in Manchester and Toxteth had gone up. I thought, ‘That’s amazing, the answer is at the top of the charts.’
TOM WATSON Every kid in the Midlands lived in a ghost town. There were kids I knew who literally didn’t get work for five years. It was a direct result of the 1981 budget which Peter Tapsell, the Tory grandee, said was ‘the most illiterate budget in history’. It wiped out a third of the West Midlands manufacturing base in two or three years. We hated the government and we hated Thatcher. It added to our sense of powerlessness as teenagers, but songs brought people together. When you’ve listened to the music and you’ve danced to the music and the posters are on your wall and you’ve read everything about the band, then you start to think about the lyrics and the politics start to develop.
KEITH HARRIS I took ‘One In Ten’ and ‘Ghost Town’ back to America and played them to Stevie Wonder to explain what was going on.
MYKAELL RILEY ‘Ghost Town’ is really important because the Specials mastered reggae as oppose to ska. It was one of their most experimental records in terms of a production.
JERRY DAMMERS I got the title ‘Ghost Town’ from a Nips song which was Shane McGowan’s band before the Pogues. And the wailing ay ay ays in my mind conjured up the idea of the Third World rising up. I was trying to link my personal feelings to the political situation and I wanted an atmosphere of decay. I had been overwhelmed on tour seeing how unemployment had hit in places like Liverpool, where all the shops had cast-iron shutters, and Glasgow, where there were old ladies on the street selling household goods and cups and saucers. The boom town was Coventry.
NEVILLE STAPLE I didn’t find any problems with Thatcher. I wasn’t really a political guy. I knew it was doom and gloom but what could I do about it? I didn’t go out and preach. I could sing about it. This town is comin’ like a ghost town / All the clubs have been closed down. And then people getting angry.
JERRY DAMMERS At first I felt guilty writing in patois because I don’t think many white people had ever done that at the time. But it’s a very strong poetic and rebellious language and I was writing for Neville to sing, so why not.
RICK ROGERS ‘Ghost Town’ is the best track the Specials ever recorded. It’s an absolute masterpiece; a most beautiful piece of music. I said at the time it was going to be their ‘Vienna’; terribly embarrassing.
LYNVAL GOLDING We had the biggest record; three weeks at number one. And then me, Neville and Terry walked away from the band. By that time we were so out of touch with each other. When we did ‘Ghost Town’ on Top of the Pops we knew this was it. It was a relief. The weight and negativity was too heavy. And Roddy was always pissed off. Anybody in authority he hates. And he had all these gripes with Jerry and would disagree just for the sake of disagreeing.
RICK ROGERS It was the Specials’ second number one but it wasn’t celebrated in terms of everybody being together, no. Everybody lived in different places and the mentality that was there at the beginning had dissipated.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS By the time ‘Ghost Town’ became the soundtrack of the riots and everything was going up in flames, 2 Tone was crumbling.
LYNVAL GOLDING The Specials broke up because we couldn’t work together, but on stage we were preaching harmony and unity. Recording the second album had been painful. It wasn’t like a band together.
RICK ROGERS People definitely turned against Jerry because of outside influences who wanted to control the band and saw it as a huge moneymaking machine. The agenda was challenged when it had always been driven by Jerry. It was people not understanding his complete push to move forward and push boundaries. It’s the difference between Specials and More Specials. But some of them hated doing the second album. The Specials would never have got to ‘Ghost Town’ without that creative push and that never being satisfied and always taking risks and never mind the consequences. I remember Jerry saying, ‘Why don’t we just put out singles for the next year?’ I’d love that idea now but I argued against it. And there was talk about bringing in Rhoda as a permanent part of the line-up.
RHODA DAKAR The decision to include me in their touring band was not the Specials’ decision; it was Jerry’s. I think that was a problem. I was possibly the buffer, so in the end it meant that everything could be my fault. I don’t know if it was intentional. But the audience didn’t want the music to change. I admired Jerry because he wanted to move it forward.
JERRY DAMMERS I thought it would be good having a woman involved and Rhoda’s backing vocals added another element to the second album, but I don’t think I ever expected her to fully join the band. If it had been a majority decision Rhoda would probably have been sent away. I stuck up for her mainly because I thought ‘The Boiler’ was important and we could play it to people because the Bodysnatchers had split up. It did get a bit silly at times: she was on Top of the Pops for ‘Ghost Town’ and didn’t even sing on the record.
RANKING ROGER More Specials was one of the first ever ambient albums but lots of fans were disappointed. You had to be chameleon. It’s why the Clash survived so long because they were willing to experiment.
NEVILLE STAPLE The reason why More Specials wasn’t like the first album was because Jerry was thinking further ahead than everyone else. He was the one with the brains and told them what to play. While we were getting together and tighter we were crumbling away. That’s fame. Because everybody thinks they’re better than one person. ‘I need to say something now.’ ‘I need to do this.’ ‘I need to do that.’
JERRY DAMMERS Certain people were either not seeing or not interested in the big picture, which was that the Specials and 2 Tone was an amazing thing: the gigs had an incredible energy, solidarity and unity; plus we were protesting against Thatcher, who was closing down huge swathes of British manufacturing industry despite literally millions of workers making a living and good stuff being produced.
FRANK MURRAY What I saw as the main problem around the Specials was they became successful quite quickly and all of a sudden crowds were going mad for them every night. Jerry tried to keep things in hand but he didn’t seem to like the fame and the popularity. He was an anti-star. But in the music business you have to go for broke. You can’t be going on a scale of one to ten, ‘Just let me be popular number three.’
JERRY DAMMERS I came up through the era of Rod Stewart. It was a big deal when he appeared on TV with Britt Ekland buying ludicrous art deco lamps and being really flash; a lot of us fans were very disappointed. And then with punk we all thought, ‘At last, this is going to be something different.’ But when we supported the Clash, they were staying in what seemed to me like really overly flash hotels. I was really disappointed. I loved the Clash but I didn’t want to put more kids through that sort of disillusionment I had felt.
RICK ROGERS As soon as we got to America the PR person would feed cocaine to those that wanted it. And you didn’t need to have money in your pocket to buy drinks, they were bought for you, so we drank more. All these weird pressures started attacking the little bubble we were in and causing internal problems. And people very close to the core circle started talking in ears and jealousies started to arise: ‘Why d’you do everything Jerry tells you to do?’ And although, like me, Jerry was a drinker at the time, he started recognizing that things were going off kilter. I didn’t. With my relative inexperience and naivety I did not recognize the rot that was setting in.
FRANK MURRAY When we were in America a limousine was sent to pick us up but Jerry had an issue with that. Why not travel in comfort? I’d travelled in limousines lots of times and I never mistook them for personal wealth; people would look at you and go, ‘Wow!’ but I wouldn’t have a penny in my pocket. It doesn’t change you as a person. Fans have never given a shit about how an artist travels around. Just because you’re a middle-class kid it doesn’t mean you don’t know what a working-class kid is about, or they won’t like your music.
JERRY DAMMERS I love Frank, he used to make me laugh: ‘Don’t fight fame, Jerry!’ He’d spent too long with Thin Lizzy. He missed the point, I didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of the Sixties’ bands: I knew promoters and record companies would send bands a limo, stick them in a flash hotel, make sure they got a ton of drugs and hope they wouldn’t notice the company were keeping most of their profits. And if the artist died so much the better; sell more records. I’m not saying our record company were that bad, of course, but I was generally hoping not to fall for all that old rock ’n’roll nonsense. Limos have one purpose, which is to say, ‘Look at me. I’m rich. I’m powerful. I’m more important than you.’ The whole thing was bullshit. I worked that out at a very early age.
RHODA DAKAR It appeared from the outside that the Specials were a democracy. The Specials were not a democracy. I got who Jerry was. I’d met his sister and his brother and I’d gone to church schools. I was in a class with this one girl and I used to go to her house and saw the value system of an Anglican vicar’s family. And that’s where Jerry came from. It makes for conflicted people: ‘We don’t care about money because money’s not important.’ But actually we don’t have any.
JERRY DAMMERS I’ve always known money is very important, which is why I didn’t like wasting it on the road. It’s just that money is not the reason I do things creatively. You can always tell if music has been made for that purpose. That was part of the original mod thing, ‘Why would you want to listen to the sound of someone relieving you of your money?’ To me, music is supposed to be inspirational more than aspirational; or if there is aspiration it is hopefully part of some kind of collective aspiration, not just for the band but for the audience and society in general.
CATHAL SMYTH Jerry’s dad was a libertarian theologist. I read his book Lifestyle: A Parable of Sharing and suddenly understood why Jerry wouldn’t go in the five-star hotels in America or why he gave his seat up for a fan on the coach even when he was tired. Small is beautiful because of its effect.
HORACE PANTER I wasn’t aware of Jerry’s dad until I saw the obituary in the Telegraph in 2004. It was like, ‘Now I understand where Jerry was coming from.’ He hated the fact that money would be spent on champagne or expensive hotels. That’s why he encouraged us to buy second-hand suits.
JERRY DAMMERS I think of myself as a socialist; leftist politics in general, anti-racism, and some ideas from the non-superstitious side of Christianity, Marxism, liberalism and environmentalism were all in the background somewhere. And my general ideas of justice and fairness and not wasting resources must have been influenced by my upbringing to some extent, but most of it was just common sense and hopefully some sort of intelligence of my own. But at that time it was mostly anarchy, hell-raising, partying and being contrary in general. Most of all, I was influenced by music through the sixties, through black music and rock music which had a lot of political counterculture messages. There was also a very sound financial reason for being reasonably sensible, which was ultimately the band have to pay for everything because it’s taken out of your royalties. I was just trying to make sure we kept as much of our earnings as possible.
LYNVAL GOLDING Me, Neville and Terry went to see Jerry and said, ‘We can’t cope with this anymore. We’re done with it.’ Obviously he was upset but then he said, ‘You’re not allowed to leave. You have to stay.’ We said, ‘There you go, Jerry, that’s why we’re leaving. You’re not listening to us.’ It was like you were never allowed to express an idea or be yourself. You’ve got to be what Jerry wants you to be. It worked up to a certain stage but after that individuals are going to want to just throw some ideas in.
JERRY DAMMERS I don’t think I would have said, ‘You’re not allowed to leave,’ except possibly as a joke, which might have been over Lynval’s head. He had missed the point so completely by that time, that even me wanting them in the band would have been seen as evidence of me telling them what to do. It was crazy. I encouraged everyone to go off after the American tour and write songs and put their ideas in, and then we would reconvene for the next album. Terry, Neville and Lynval thought the first thing they came up with, ‘The Lunatics (Have Taken Over the Asylum)’, was so fantastic that they didn’t need the rest of us anymore and they probably thought they could make more money without us. It’s as simple as that.
RHODA DAKAR I didn’t know Terry, Neville, and Lynval were leaving but when I look at it now it’s completely obvious. I went on the Specials’ last American tour and in the airport Terry played me ‘The Lunatics’ on a Walkman. I was like, ‘This is absolutely brilliant.’
JERRY DAMMERS I couldn’t believe that they could be so destructive and disloyal as to leave when we were doing such great stuff. We were at the top of our game: universal critical acclaim; commercial success; one of the top bands in the country on the verge of really establishing ourselves internationally.
LYNVAL GOLDING The last three Specials songs were ‘Ghost Town’, ‘Why?’ and ‘Friday Night, Saturday Morning’; from those songs you can see the faces of the Specials; two blacks and one white. I was thinking, ‘Wow! We’ve broken down barriers there.’ ‘The Lunatics’ was a natural follow-up, I see a clinic full of cynics who want to twist the people’s wrist. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were the lunatics: Go nuclear, the cowboy told us. The world was becoming very dangerous.
NEVILLE STAPLE I was stupid leaving to do the Fun Boy Three with Lynval and Terry.
RICK ROGERS I don’t think any of the colour, class or education differences caused the problems that happened internally within the Specials. It was fame, pressure and money. Jerry saw that and wanted to bring it back down to earth a little bit. When anybody becomes hugely famous in a very short period of time you get surrounded by people telling you what is the right thing to do.
CATHAL SMYTH Madness was a very democratic process and that’s why we lasted and the Specials only lasted two years; because they weren’t friendly. They had no mutual respect. There was jealousy, anger, frustration, a lack of fucking gratitude for each other’s existence. We went into a room with them to record a piece of music and the fuckers couldn’t stop arguing. We were like, ‘Oh my God!’ It was sad.
JERRY DAMMERS I started the Specials initially to do my songs and everyone knew I was bandleader, but later I was trying to share the load and responsibility and it’s actually that which only lasted about five minutes. Of course we discussed things in the Specials and I always tried to incorporate the best of everyone’s ideas. It’s often actually the idea that bands should be completely democratic which has probably destroyed more bands. There are no rules in music and everyone is not equally good at it or has equally good ideas; democracy and music are not necessarily related concepts. Democracy requires commitment, responsibility and loyalty. But sadly, it’s true: there was very little loyalty in the Specials compared with Madness.
DAVE WAKELING Socialism assumes that everybody is going to do their best, and sadly as human beings the only thing we’ve got in common is that we fuck up and we often do our worst and don’t even know why until it’s too late. We set up all these great plans with altruism and deep conviction, but then, put in a corner, everybody would eat their mother’s face. That sums up a lot of the differences between my dad, Eric Clapton and Enoch Powell, and Jerry Dammers, me and Red Saunders. Everybody starts off with the best of intentions, but we’re terrified creatures and we’re very reactive so we often do rotten things. So I understand why the French say that ‘If you’re not a socialist under the age of forty you have no heart and if you remain a socialist past the age of forty you have no brain.’
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HORACE PANTER 2 Tone was Jerry’s. But if you ask the seven people in the Specials any one same question you will invariably get seven different answers. History is written by the people that write the books.
TINY FENNIMORE 2 Tone had a really important part to play in the early years of the Thatcher government. Just because all those bands existed was political. It was white and black coming together. It’s to do with the social and the political and the musical all coming together at the same time to make a special moment.
JERRY DAMMERS It’s very hard to quantify what 2 Tone achieved. It helped alongside Rock Against Racism and a whole lot of other campaigns in making everyday racism unacceptable. Before that it was really common to use language like ‘nigger’ and ‘wogs’. I hope 2 Tone contributed to making that situation better. It was part of an ongoing struggle; racism didn’t go away.
DOTUN ADEBAYO That whole period of multicultural music is Rock Against Racism’s lasting legacy. Would there have been 2 Tone without it? My friends who grew up in Coventry always say there was a mixture of black and white and the reggae gigs had as many whites as blacks, but that’s not the same thing. The Beat were two-thirds white; the Selecter were mostly black, one white; and the Specials mostly white with two black guys: pretty multiracial. Are they black or are they white?
RICK ROGERS 2 Tone spoke directly to a young, disaffected generation. It was massively political. The power of the message in the songs, in the artwork, visually; just the fact that there were young black and white kids together in a band making music: that the audience could relate to and understand and share. It had an enormous effect.
DAVE WAKELING Political music has a negligible effect at the time because you’re mostly speaking to the choir. But if it resonates it puts a mark in history that affects things generationally, but for a certain generation marks were made to do with diversity and compassion. I have two black American children now and it’s fascinating watching them grow up with kids from Iran and India and Russia and not describe each other by their skin colour. My parents’ generation only spoke about people of different colour in order to give you a warning to stay away from them.
ROBERT ELMS 2 Tone in its very existence was important. It didn’t have to be explicit. It was just there on stage: it’s black and white guys singing on stage together; it’s Pauline Black singing with a band of black guys. That was more important than anything Rock Against Racism did with slogans.
NICKY SUMMERS 2 Tone did a lot for racial integration but I think it largely appealed to a white audience. Right at the end we had some young black girls come to our gigs and they were talking to us. I thought we’d really done something there. I knew I couldn’t replicate black music. I don’t think anyone can replicate music, but you can do your contemporary take with your input and your life added into it. 2 Tone bands had this tremendous lift of energy and everybody worked very hard onstage. And the audience danced. Its most basic reduction was that it was dance music.
PAULINE BLACK It was a two-year blip that occupied that space between punk and those hideous New Romantics that turned up in ’81 and ’82. 2 Tone let the genie out of the bottle. It would be another twenty years before anybody came up with the concept of institutional racism and certainly that long again before anyone came up with the word multicultural.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS There was a lot of walking wounded at the end. Then suddenly we were competing for attention at Chrysalis with bands like Spandau Ballet and Ultravox. These were the people we were being measured against. You thought, ‘What happened? Was 2 Tone just a fashion?’ That same generation who were actively supporting quite overtly radical influences and music, to move to superficial clothes and hairstyles? Politics was so unfashionable immediately. 2 Tone came out of nowhere, burnt unbelievably bright, and burnt itself out just as quickly. The bands were trying so hard to wrestle with what it was going to be and what it could achieve, it killed it. What did it achieve? We don’t really know because we were in the eye of the storm. It was such a force of nature. Musically and culturally we would be a lot poorer if 2 Tone hadn’t happened. It may not have changed attitudes but it started something. There was no way of going back.
