When I was twenty, I combined a couple of my favourite things, took a train to Paris and spent an afternoon or four in a cramped record store listening to the offered goods on trial. I do not remember how many records I ended up actually buying, but two of them still easily spring to mind to this day: Monsieur Dimitri from Paris’ debut album “Sacrebleu” and a collection of what were my favourite genres at the time: Two-tone; a fusion of Jamaican Ska with New Wave and Punk Rock elements and Rocksteady, the slower, more down-to earth successor of Ska and predecessor of what would become Reagge. Planète Ska went straight into my personal heavy rotation for the next decade or so.
My favourite song of the album was one I had never heard before and treasured all the more. When “Ghost Town” by The Specials featured prominently two years later in Guy Ritchie’s movie Snatch I got instant goose bumps in the cinema and would do so again in 2004 when Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright took the hallucinations of the main character from their short-lived but marvellous sitcom Spaced to the next level and used the song in Shaun of the Dead, the first movie in their Cornetto trilogy (which also features a brilliant use of Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now accompanying a Zombie-Hack-and-Slash scene, but I digress).
Jerry Dammers, keyboardist and band leader of The Specials – who had their breakthrough a few years earlier with their cover of Dandy Livingstones’ “A Message to You Rudy” – had somewhat alienated his fellow band members in the early eighties with his insistence on using elevator music elements in their œuvre and a long and tiring touring schedule. As a result, the song was really mostly about the imminent break-up of the band. But as Dammers did not want to be so blatant, he took up the hopelessness he felt about the split and projected it onto what happened on a political level in their domestic Coventry and other formerly thriving industrial cities at the time, which happened to be urban decay, racial discriminations and stop-and-search police tactics – and consequently civil unrest not seen in a generation. The song was recognised accordingly and went straight to Number One in the UK’s charts. It’s still considered one of the greatest pop records ever there – all the while remaining fairly obscure outside of Great Britain, where Two-tone was virtually unknown at the time.
However, Dammers’ feeling was correct and the success of the single would not halt the decline of the band. Three of the Specials’ members had enough and went on to found their own band, Fun Boy Three (who these days are best remembered for their cooperation with Bananarama on “It Ain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It),”). Among them was lead singer Terry Hall, who would later on found a couple of other bands and projects, but never really replicate the fame The Specials enjoyed.
Sadly, Hall, who was diagnosed with manic depression in 2004, died this Sunday at the age of 63. The cause of death has not been disclosed, apart for it being the result of a brief but serious illness.
Apparently 63 is the new 27.