RIP Terry Hall

The Specials reissues

Uncut, May 2002

"This ain't a track, it's a movement," proclaim The Streets on their recent 2-step-meets-2-Tone tune 'Let's Push Things Forward'. There are songs so potently and provocatively original they do seem to demand the formation of a subculture around them. But 'Gangsters', the Specials' 1979 debut, has got to be one of the very few cases where this literally happened: seemingly overnight and out of nowhere, an entire scene of ska bands assembled itself in response.

That may not have been Jerry Dammers' masterplan, but he was consciously attempting to create a brand new sound. Having already tried to merge punk with contemporary roots reggae and come a cropper owing to the hard-to-bridge difference in tempo and feel, Dammers decided to wind back the clock to reggae's precursors, ska and rocksteady; their speedy pace and jerky rhythm guitar chops were more compatible with new wave angularity. 2-Tone arrived at just the right moment: the arty vanguard of post-punk (PiL, The Pop Group etc) was preoccupied with dub's spacey sound and apocalyptic dread, leaving a gap in the market for an uptempo and upful punky-reggae sound. Defined by trebly, 7-inch brevity rather than bass-heavy 12-inch expanse (a la Metal Box), 2-Tone was populist and radio-friendly, yet its black-white hybridity and mixed-race bands were a perfect fit with the progressive RAR politics of the day.

For all its outward appearance of fun and energy, though, what's striking about The Specials is how grim the music's world view mostly is — a stance of sullen disaffection embodied in singer Terry Hall's unblinking eyes and perpetual scowl. Songs like 'Too Much Too Young' (a venomous diatribe addressed to an ex-girlfriend who's lost her youth to early motherhood) and 'Concrete Jungle' (a snapshot of '79 street life, a boom year for racial attacks and random violence) recall the desolate monochrome vistas and dosed-off options depicted in Sixties social realist films like Saturday Night And Sunday Morning and Kes.

Grey was always simultaneously The Specials' forte and fault — those lugubrious trombones! From its colour cover (featuring some band members actually smiling!) to its new sonic flavours (Dammers had become infatuated with muzak). More Specials was a bid to move forward and leave behind the legion of clones. Elvis Costello's sparse, near-mono production on the debut aimed to capture the band's legendarily electric live performances; now Dammers had fallen in love with the studio, an ultimately ruinous passion.

It's easy to see why the pork pie massive were puzzled and pissed off by the sudden depletion of energy on More Specials, but Dammers' new penchant for arrangement and production pays off with brilliant songs, like 'Stereotypes' (all Dr Zhivago-like balalaikas) and 'International Jet Set' (Casio-rhumba riddims and whirling Wurlitzer that stage the EZ listening revival 15 years ahead of schedule).

A Heaven's Gate-style financial calamity, 1984's In The Studio feels fatally sapped by its protracted gestation (three years, hence the album's wry title). Although Hall's only writing credit on the first two albums was More Specials' nuclear armageddon-themed 'Man At C&A', a crucial proportion of the band's spirit — its bleak, black humour — seems to have disappeared when he left for Fun Boy Three along with Neville Staple and Lynval Golding. Apart from the sinuous-melodied, mischievous 'What I Like Most About You Is Your Girlfriend', the dominant mood is sanctimonious, especially the GLC-friendly protest-pop singles 'Racist Friend' and 'War Crimes'. In The Studio sounds literally studious, a series of meticulous and joy-drained genre exercises, sedate and sedative. 

                                                            "I'm the man in grey... and I don't have a say"

                                                                                     The wounds of class

                                                                "Nothing ever change..."

For the longest while, 2-Tone seemed like a sealed-off pocket in Britpop time: it vaporised as abruptly as it arrived, leaving little legacy apart from America's ill-advised ska-revival revival. But echoes pop up in the oddest places. Samples from 'Monkey Man' and 'Friday Night, Saturday Morning' graced underground rave anthems by Bodysnatch and 4 Hero. Tricky is a huge admirer of Terry Hall, and had him guest on the Nearly God album. Dammers' film score-steeped, sepia-toned sound circa More Specials and 'Ghost Town' is an unacknowledged precursor to Portishead circa 'Sour Times'. And there's a definite ska feel that crops up repeatedly in 2-step garage, from Doolally's 'Straight From The Heart' in 1998 to this year's 'Too Much Brandy' and 'Push Things Forward' by The Streets. 2-Tone's mood-blend of jaunty and glum — a dancefloor hemmed in by desperation on all sides — has perennial appeal and resonance.

4 Hero sampling "Friday Night, Saturday Morning"

                                                                   Tired Eyes remix!

Snippet from the start of "Monkey Man" goading alla the bouncer man appears in this Bodysnatch oddity "Revenge of the Punter" 

A whole post on hardcore continuum / 2 Tone intersections.

This tune from the Specials comeback album is rather good 

Tougher than Tough (Island box set, 1995)

REGGAE

Spin column, 1995

    So much of the fabric of modern pop originates in reggae.  Dub's ganga-delic echo-effects anticipated the remix-mania of today's club music, while the slurred gibberish of "DJ talkover" is one of the sources of rap.  Right now, dancehall's ragga chants and fidgety production is influencing emergent British genres like Apache Indian's "bhangramuffin" and "jungle" (a manic offshoot of techno). And I have a farfetched theory that the yodelling falsetto of Morrissey (who once declared "reggae is vile") has secret links with the milky chirruping of Junior Byles and Barrington Levy.

    "Tougher Than Tough: The Story Of Jamaican Music" (Mango/Island) traces the evolution of reggae from 1958 to the present. It starts with the 78 rpm proto-ska of the Folkes Brothers' "Oh Carolina" and ends - four discs and 95 tracks later - with Shaggy's 1993 ragga- remake of the same song.  Reggae's roots lie in American soul and R&B, but as with most pop breakthroughs, mimicry led to mutation, as Black American dance was subtly warped in synch with the Caribbean vibe. Ska's jerky pulse and rocksteady's chugging grooves both have the same monochrome sound and upful aura as Wilson Pickett or Booker T & The MG's, but Jamaican musicians shifted emphasis from the downbeat to the 'afterbeat', and thus created a New Thing.

     As rocksteady evolved into roots reggae and dub, the Jamaican elements became more defined: the bass became more pronounced and melodic, while producers like King Tubby and Lee Perry used reverb to heighten the music's spatiality.  In the '80's, reggae went digital, just like US black pop from swingbeat to rap. But dancehall, argues Linton Kwesi Johnson in the box set's hefty booklet, is at oncefuturistic and primal: a cyber-pagan resurrection of the ritual beats favoured by African cults like Etu and Kumina.  What Johnson and other commentators shy away from is the role of drugs.  Most crucial shifts in pop history have occurred when drugs interface with technology to make possible new forms of listening.  Just as psychedelia coincided with the arrival of LSD and stereo/24 track sound, similarly 70's dub had everything to do with marijuana's heightening of sonic dimension and depth.  In the Eighties, Jamaica became a stop-over in the cocaine trade routes; this probably has a lot to do with ragga's jittery beats, apopletic vocals and gangsta vibe.  Throughout its history, reggae has oscillated between two extremes, symbolised by the "rude boy" and the "natty dread": between macho swagger and mellow spirituality, ghetto survivalism and Rasta dreams of escaping to a halcyon homeland (Zion).

    Crammed with great songs, Disc 4 agitates against the notion that reggae declined musically in the Eighties as the fire of militant spirituality faded.  Nonetheless, Disc 3 surpasses the rest, covering reggae's commercial and aesthetic zenith from 1975-81, and ranging from the luscious pop of Gregory Isaacs and Sugar Minott to the apocalyptic dread of Willie Williams' "Armagideon Time" and Max Romeo's "War In A Babylon". While the bubbling rhythms of Black Uhuru and Junior Delgado are dub-inflected, there's not enough pure dub here for me. Why no Augustus Pablo, Prince Far I, King Tubby or Mad Professor?  Then again, as Island supremo Chris Blackwell points out, Jamaica has the highest per capita rate of musical output in the world. Inevitably, as massive as it is, this compilation could only scratch the surface.  Which it does quite superbly