You're Wondering Now E-Book

Paul Williams

• Herausgeber: Cherry Red Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The Specials turned the world of pop music on it's head in the late 1970's, fusing their multi cultural and West Indian tinged rhythms with a punk aesthetic which has endured to this day. One of the key bands of any time and place, their legacy endures, as evidenced by the popularity of their recent reformation. "You're Wondering Now", written by a ska insider and associate of the band, tells their story from it's origins to the present day, and has received warm praise from music fans the world over.

Leseprobe

DEDICATION

For Ruth Lilico -

My beautiful personal Editor-in-Chief and a wonderful lady,

Who lights up my life. She made it all possible.

Her enthusiasm and support knows no bounds.

I am so indebted to her. This is for you babe.

WITH THANKS

I would like to thank the following:

Roddy Byers, Terry Hall, Lynval Golding, Horace Panter, Neville Staple, John Bradbury, Jerry Dammers, Phill Jupitus, Steve Blackwell and Michelle Golding. Mike Cornwell and Stu Rennie the dynamic duo who have helped me above and beyond the call of duty. Aaron, Zoey and Terry for being my fantastic kids. Miggy Sinclair, Nick Welsh, Rhoda Dakar, Chris Foreman, June Golding, Pete Chambers, Nick Davies, Jason Weir, Michael Sanderson, Hazza and The Rough Kutz, Miles Woodroffe, Sean Flynn, Sam ‘Skabilly’ Smith, Seamus Flynn, Nikolaj Torp, Dave Wakeling, Chalkie Davies & Carole Starr, Coventry Evening Telegraph, Special Brew, Marc Wasserman, Linda Lee and the Ska-cumentary team New York, George Marshall, Andy Clayden and Bob Heatlie. Also, little Alice for her patience while letting me dominate the computer for so long. So many more people I could mention, all greatly appreciated. I would like to express my gratitude to the many publications (such as Sounds, Record Mirror, NME, MelodyMaker, Smash Hits, plus various tabloids and broadsheets) for their unintentional help via my vast collection of cuttings. Thank you and goodnight. In memory of Nana, MikeWilliams and Callum ‘Benny’ Caird – sorely missed. With respect to Dave Jordan.

CONTENTS

Title Page

DEDICATION

WITH THANKS

FOREWORD – By Phill Jupitus

From JA to UK – THE ORIGINS OF SKA

Part One – THE DAWNING OF A NEW ERA

The Specials’ story from conception to split

Part Two – MORE SPECIALS

The story from split to present day

The Fun Boy Three

The Special AKA

Jerry Dammers

Terry Hall

Roddy Byers

John Bradbury

Horace Panter

Neville Staple

Lynval Golding

EXTRA SPECIALS

Rico Rodriguez

Dick Cuthell

Rick Rogers

Dave Jordan

THE ROAD TO REUNION

How the 2009 reunion came about

A TESTAMENT OF YOUTH

Testimonies from fans and stars

THE COMPLETE DISCOGRAPHY

RARITIES & BOOTLEGS

COMPREHENSIVE GIG GUIDE

USEFUL LINKS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Copyright

YOU’RE WONDERING NOW

FOREWORD

it’s difficult to tell the story of my love of music without devoting a large portion of it to the Specials. Let me give you some context. At the time of writing (winter 2008) I am a 46 year old survivor of Glam, Prog, Punk, New Wave, Power Pop, Acid House, Baggy, Big Beat, Britpop and any number of those less enduring musical genres and movements. Each of them usually came into my life in the same fashion. I’d hear the music on the radio, usually on the John Peel show, and then I’d read about them in inkies such as Sounds, Melody Maker or the New Musical Express. And then, depending on their success or hipness, I’d get to see them in action for the very first time on either Top Of the Pops or the Old Grey Whistle Test. Living in the hinterlands of Essex on a limited income, my own gig going didn’t really take off until I got my first job in the wines and spirits department of Tesco’s in Basildon at Christmas in 1980. Early shows I took in were by Blondie, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Members and the Clash. The last two bands were my own favourites because of their integration of the downbeat grooves of reggae in amongst the power of their electric guitars. I vividly recall moonstomping my way through the Members’ ‘Offshore Banking Business’ or the Clash roaring through a spirited version of Junior Murvin’s ‘Police And Thieves’. The co-ordination required to make the downshift from the chaos of pogo-ing to the loopy grace of the skank remains of my favourite memories of the whole gig going experience.

Towards the end of the Seventies, I was blagging my way through Sixth Form College. I remained academically incompetent while having the time of my life socially. Unruly teenage mobs of us armed with our meagre Saturday job earnings would get the train into Fenchurch Street and then on to venues such as Hammersmith Palais, the Music Machine, the Rainbow, Hammersmith Odeon, the Marquee, the Lyceum and many others to spend a scant couple of hours feeling like young lions with the world at our feet. The Ship in Wardour Street, the Marquis of Granby in Covent Garden, the George Robey in Finsbury Park, we would always go and get pissed before the show in nearby pubs, our adrenalin battling with the alcohol for dominance of our robust teenage constitutions. No matter how much we tried to time our arrival at the venue to a tardy, cool perfection, we always somehow arrived just as the support band was finishing up their set. Those of us who had saved up enough would invest in some badges or a tee shirt, those who were thirsty enough would pay the exorbitant venue price for watery lager. Then we’d slowly but surely edge our way towards the front of the stage. Each venue had its own pitfalls. At the Palais, you had to edge in from the sides, at the Music Machine you’d just barge your way forward through the frantic mob and at the Marquee, it was every man for himself in the sweaty melee. For my contemporaries, the ritual of the whole gig going experience was rooted in the familiar, the journey, the pub, the banter, the queue. The gig itself started to become just the excuse for a boozy night out, and often we were so drunk that we could barely remember the shows we had seen. Then one night at the Palais for me that all changed.

The Specials were already firm favourites on my turntable at home. The debut album was a lesson in dance floor economy, brilliant track after brilliant track would burst out of my speakers with all the bounce and energy of a live gig. They cemented their reputation with the Number 1 ‘Too Much Too Young’ EP, seven essential inches of vinyl that perfectly captured a great live band at their frenetic best. By this point in time most of my cash was being spent on a then girlfriend who was at a university some miles away. The result of this was that I didn’t get to see the Specials until they toured their second album.

The London shows for the More Specials tour took place at Hammersmith Palais, and our tickets were picked up from a branch of Keith Prowse in the City. The month spent waiting for the date to come dragged by incredibly slowly. But once I was inside the sprung floor splendour of the legendary venue, my heart began to race. Earlier that year I’d seen the Clash, who were quite extraordinary. I was not expecting that experience to be bettered but it was.

Many critics and fans had not taken to Jerry Dammers’ lounge psychedelia dub vision of the Specials. The second album had taken a sharp left turn from the upbeat precision of their debut. Swirling organs, mariachi trumpets and electronic rhythm boxes underpinned the bleakness of the lyrics. Tales of sexual infection, despondency, misery and drunkenness never sounded so good. The chaotic rhumba of ‘Stereotype’ giving way to the savage mosh of ‘Gangsters’ is to this day the finest transition between two songs I’ve ever seen at a gig. Our journey homewards on the X1 bus on the A13 was a muted affair. Usually we’d be bubbling with tales of how close we got to the front, chatting up girls by the bar or how we nearly got dragged into somebody else’s ruck. But that night we were quiet and reflective, through a mixture of exhaustion and wonder. The meaning of Dammers’ lyrics started to seep into our consciousness, the maturity of the arrangements sent me hunting for ever more eclectic sounds in my own record collection, the sheer energy of their live show made us all feel we’d made erroneous career decisions. It was in short a life-changing gig.

For me they remain a life-changing band. A few months ago, I stood in the pouring rain, six miles from the place of my birth on the Isle Of Wight and watched open mouthed as six of those life-changing individuals took to a stage once more. I recalled that the last time I saw them I was in exactly the same position in the front row, pressed up against the barrier at the Rainbow. It was as if I’d shut my eyes in 1981 and opened them again in 2008 and everything was as it had been.

When I talk to other fans about the Specials, they get quite enthusiastic; it seems I’m not the only one who was affected so deeply by their work. So was Paul, who wrote this book, and I bet you were too…

Phill Jupitus

December 2008

From JA to UKTHE ORIGINS OF SKA

tO UNDERSTAND the ‘Dawning of a New Era’ in the late Seventies, when ska became a household word in Britain through the explosion of 2Tone, you may want to know a little history…

‘Ska’ is a strange but exciting looking word, fittingly suited for the music it depicts. But ska isn’t something that just exploded one day into an unwitting world. The origins of this hypnotic, up-tempo music we call ska essentially began life way back in African culture and tradition. The source of all Caribbean music can ultimately be traced back to the slave trade. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, white European slave masters enslaved thousands of Africans and sent them to work in various parts of the British Empire, a large influx finding themselves on the islands of the West Indies. These slaves were sold off to land owners and in the process tribes and familes were split up. The result of this abhorrent practice was that, because of the mix of numbers of Africans from so many different and places and cultures, a fusion of traditional African musical styles developed. When the differing styles merged into one the music still heavily relied on rhythm. Later these fusions would draw in some European influences from the slave owners.

Moving forward to the late 19th century and early 20th century the sound of the Caribbean was calypso, which originated on the island of Trinidad. Calypso-style songs of the time were often risqué (a trend exploited by the Jamaican ska scene some decades later), topical to the islanders and sung in an African/French patois. The main topical verse was sung in an African language, whilst the chorus was made up of a local patois. Calypso, coming from the African word ‘Ka’iso’ was used by slaves to ridicule their owners without fear of reprimand, reprisals or worse. This form of musical insult was in the tradition of the African ‘Griot’ or ‘Jali.’ The Griot was a poet or wandering musician who collected and memorised a repository of oral traditions. These were important to the African tribes and therefore to the slaves who had no form of written history. The Griot chronicled their collective of histories, ancestry and genealogy. He would know many traditional songs off by heart, but also used his vocal talents to improvise and ad-lib on current events, incidents and the scenes he beheld. Griots had devastating wit and entertained through history, gossip, satire, and political comment. This is reflected in black music today through ‘Toasting’, as demonstrated by Neville Staple of the Specials, and is present in rap and hip-hop.

While calypso became Trinidad’s main genre of music, in Jamaica, originally an island home to the Arawak Indians, a style of music was emerging from ‘Kumina’. Kumina was introduced through the slave trade and it is believed its roots lie in the Congo. It is an amalgam of religion, music and dance and is the most African of Jamaican cults. During a Kumina ceremony, the exponents call on their ancestral spirits to guide them through events such as births, deaths and thanksgivings. The ceremonies consist of a dance ritual, similar to the polka, set to Kumina music. Kumina music has a heavy bass-line, which was originally played through the branch of the ‘trumpet tree.’ The music includes two types of drums, which provide a rich and highly charged musical background for the dancers, and helps to invoke the spirits of the ancestors. The larger and lower-pitched drum plays a steady 4/4 rhythm with accent on the first and third beats. This is significant to ska music as it could be seen to be the forerunner of the offbeat rhythm, which is unique to the Jamaican sound. Other instruments used are ‘scrapers’, (usually made of a simple kitchen grater which produces a scratching sound when another metal object is pulled across its surface), ‘shakas’ (gourd or tin-can rattles), and ‘katta sticks’ (two pieces of sticks used to play a steady rhythm on the back of the drum). Sometimes an empty rum bottle tapped with a spoon was used as an impromptu instrument. This style of music was most prevalent in the parish of St Thomas and is still played today.

After World War 2, the island’s music began to transform. By the end of the Forties calypso was still prevalent in Jamaica but the country was quietly developing its own musical identity and mento was becoming the more popular sound. Mento is a laid-back, acoustic style of music with a distinctive rural or folk flavour. It was originally described as ‘country music’ by those who played it on the island. Mento draws on the musical traditions brought over by the slaves. The tradition of the Griot is reflected in the lyrics, which deal with aspects of everyday life in a light-hearted, humorous way and comment on political topics such as poverty, poor housing and other social issues. The lyrics also include thinly veiled sexual references and innuendos (often said to be the precursor of ‘slackness’ in dancehall music). Also reflected are aspects of the Kumina with its makeshift instruments cunningly crafted from what was available. Mento uses a huge range of more traditional and hand-crafted instruments including the saxophone, flute, banjo, bamboo fifes, PVC pipes, acoustic guitar, katta (or rhythm) sticks, shakas and the rhumba box. The rhumba box is a large ‘thumb piano’ made from wood. A number of tuned metal tines are stretched over a circular hole in the box; they are plucked to produce bass notes. The music of this period in mento, distinguished by its many instruments, was a prototype of what is known today as the reggae chop.

The influence of European music on mento is also strong. In the days of slavery, slaves who could play musical instruments were often required to play music for their masters. The Masters were enthusiastic about the ballroom, or set, dances of the courts of Europe such as the quadrille, and the lancer. After slavery ended the harmonies and melodies of these dances and accompanying music continued to contribute to the mento sound. Mento is also sometimes known as ‘Jamaican Rumba’ after the Australian born pianist Arthur Benjamin. Benjamin reproduced the mento form in his ‘Jamaican Rumba’ composition, which was published as sheet music in 1938. The music, akin to what was later known in the UK as ‘Skiffle’, brought him popular acclaim in the UK and made him a household name. The Jamaican government gave him a free barrel of rum every year for his contribution to making the country known.

In the Fifties mento had many popular stars but its best known exponents were the Jolly Boys, Lord Flea, Lord Fly, Lord Power, Lord Kitchener, Harold Richardson and the Ticklers and Count Sticky. The mento genre was given exposure by early Bob Marley and the Wailers recordings before he moved on to ska and ultimately Reggae, the area in which Marley went on to achieve global acclaim. Joseph Gordon, better known as Lord Tanamo, despite being known as one of Jamaica’s top ska performers, was in fact an established mento star before he later turned his hand to R&B and then on to his court on the ska and reggae scene. When Jamaica became a huge favourite of tourists in this decade, mento bands performed at the docks, and by the pools, beaches and hotels up and down the island. Laurel Aitken, renowned worldwide as the ‘Godfather of Ska’, began his career performing his blend of mento and calypso for the Jamaican Tourist Board to entertain visitors alighting at Kingston Harbour.

It had been during World War 2 that the stationing of American Military forces on the islands first allowed Jamaican youths to listen to military broadcasts of American music, predominantly Big Band music and Jazz. During the Fifties the prominent radio stations on the island were ‘Radio Jamaica Rediffusion’ and the ‘Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation’, who were mainly responsible for churning out the contemporary pop sounds of North America. The youth of Jamaica, however, were simply outgrowing this mainstream fare and were ready to expand their musical tastes. They turned their attention to radio transmissions from the Southern United States which, weather permitting, the islanders could receive. The majority of these broadcasts came from stations in New Orleans and Miami, and for the first time they heard full-blooded R&B played by the likes of Count Basie, Fats Domino, Louis Jordan and Professor Longhair. These sounds lit up the Island’s youth and it wasn’t long before musicians incorporated the style into their own forms; by the mid Fifties the musical tide was turning in Jamaica. There is a theory that the delay effects (an important ingredient in the ska/reggae sound) may have originally been inspired by the oscillations in the radio signals from these faraway stations! With renewed energy and vigour, Jamaican bands and musicians began covering the US R&B hits they heard and interpreting them in their own style, which by now included jazz as an essential component.

Also at that time, smaller musical groups were superseding the Big Bands in America with a more Bop/R&B sound. This influence was brought back to Jamaica by Islanders who had travelled to the States. In the mid Fifties that sound combined with jazz and mento created yet another new form called shuffle. In the earliest days of shuffle, songs were all instrumental but the style was extremely derivative of North American artists. It was around this time that artists began to record their music for the first time. The shuffle sound gained ground as a favourite through the works of artists like Neville Esson, Owen Grey and the Matador Allstars. Many of the acts used studio musicians and so the mantle ‘Allstars’ was added to credit the back-up bands on records. By now, recording studios and like-minded companies began surfacing to hone new-found talent. The Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, once cast as a somewhat generic station, brought their shows up-to-date with the developing popular sounds of the Island. This, in turn, stimulated young musicians into delving deeply into their respective genres.

Perhaps motivated by a desire to have recordings of local music to sell in his namesake department store, Stanley Motta was the very first producer to recognise the mento style and issue a few 78rpm records on his fledgling MRS (Motta’s Recording Studio) label. In 1951, Motta built a small studio at 93 Hanover Street in Kingston, just around the corner from his department store. The studio itself was hardly a studio at all. Situated in the back room of a woodwork factory, it consisted of a 12 to 14 foot square space with insulated ceiling boards. The bands, musicians and their equipment were all crammed into the same small space. Recordings were captured through one microphone and the cutting machine only had one volume knob. Motta also utilised the one recording desk at the Rediffusion Radio Station. Stanley Motta is known as one of the first Jamaicans to produce records and would later set up a licensing deal with Emil Shallit’s ‘Melodisc’ label for mento tracks to be released in the UK. Musical matters shifted again when the Sound Systems came into vogue and R&B dominated. This new form had a pulsating, raw, and heavy beat, a sound welcomed across the generations, both young and old succumbing to its infectious rhythms.

Sound System owners travelled to the States to buy the latest records, or employed agents to ship over the sought-after discs. Competition between the systems was fierce and the battle was to get the newest, freshest sounds for your system. Popular songs were repeated throughout the night as the systems brought in the crowds. Two sound systems well and truly above the others were located in Kingston, with Duke Reid formulating his legendary Trojan Sound System, and the celebrated Clement Dodd developing his famous Sir Coxsone Downbeat. These two icons of Jamaican music competed for over ten years and their eagerness to outdo each other meant they became major channels for the growth of the Jamaican music industry. Originally, the systems had no choice but to play American records, until Stanley Motta changed things when he built his recording studio. In the ghettos of Kingston, the DJs would set their system up by packing a truck with a generator, turntables, and huge speakers and then set up street parties that would rage for hours. Eventually, in order to move on from playing nothing but records from the States, the two sound system legends turned their keen eyes to record production. Initially, they produced only singles for their own sound systems, which came to be known as ‘Exclusives’. The Jamaican producers introduced to their work some of the original elements of the indigenous Jamaican sound, rhythm guitars strumming the offbeat and a snare-drum emphasis on the third beat.

This new musical form became more popular and both Dodd and Reid moved more seriously into music production. Coxsone’s production studio became the world famous Studio One‘, later dubbed the Motown of Jamaica. It soon became home to artists such as Theophilius Beckford, The Skatalites, Don Drummond, Bob Marley and Lee Perry, to name but a few. Meantime, Duke Reid would go on to found another JA giant, ‘Treasure Isle’, named after the family store he ran after being a police officer for ten years. He recorded the likes of Justin Hinds, U-Roy and Dennis Al Capone and would later specialise in Rastafarian roots music. All this recording activity meant that ska was burgeoning on the horizon.

There are various schools of thought about the development and naming of this new exciting genre. Guitarist Ernest Ranglin laid claim to the naming the sound with the term he coined as the ‘skat! skat! skat!’ scratching guitar strum. Double-bassist Cluett Johnson claimed that he had instructed Ranglin to ‘play like ska, ska, ska’ during a recording session, although Ranglin denied this, stating that Johnson could never tell him how to play! Another theory is that it derived from Johnson’s word ‘Skavoovie’, the phrase he was known to greet his friends with. Founding Skatalites member Jackie Mittoo insisted that the musicians themselves called the rhythm ‘Staya Staya’ and that it was Byron Lee who eventually shortened this term to ‘ska’. The last theory about the origin of ska is that the genre’s biggest export and worldwide star, Prince Buster (born Cecil Bustamente Campbell) had created it during the inaugural recording sessions for his own new record label, Wild Bells. The session was financed by Duke Reid, who was supposed to get half of the songs to release. However, he only ever received one, which was a track by trombonist Rico Rodriguez, another talented musician who would go on to be an integral part of the Specials in 1979. It was during these sessions that Prince Buster told guitarist Jah Jerry to ‘change gear, man, change gear.’ The guitar began to emphasize the second and fourth beats in the bar, creating a completely new sound, which he complimented with a traditional Jamaican marching beat drum. In essence, to generate the ska beat, Prince Buster had essentially flipped the R&B shuffle beat to emphasize the offbeat with the assistance of the rhythm guitar. There will always be debate over who was the founder of ska, but we are all happy about its ultimate creation!

Early ska had few vocals and relied heavily on instrumentals. There was also an emphasis on horns and saxophones, which came as no surprise as the majority of ska artists were primarily experienced jazz musicians. The first ever ska records were created on Coxsone’s Studio One and WIRL (West Indies Recording Limited) Records in Kingston, Jamaica with the chief producers being Coxsone, Reid, Prince Buster, and Edward Seaga, the owner of WIRL who dramatically went on to become the Prime Minister of Jamaica in 1980. The early records were about the Jamaican ‘Rude Boy’, or local gangster, who became staple subject matter for ska artists. The ska sound coincided with the celebratory feelings surrounding Jamaica’s independence from the UK in 1962, and the event was commemorated by songs such as Derrick Morgan’s ‘Forward March’, The Skatalites’ ‘Freedom Sound’ and Lord Kitchener’s ‘Jamaica Woman’. Byron Lee and the Dragonaires performed ska with Prince Buster, Eric ‘Monty’ Morris, and Jimmy Cliff at the 1964 New York World Fair as the Jamaican sound was taken to America.

As music changed in the United States, so did ska. In 1965 and 1966, when American soul became slower and smoother, ska changed its sound accordingly and evolved into rocksteady before reinventing itself into what is known as reggae. The mass immigration to the UK from Jamaica via the ship Empire Windrush in 1948 meant that Jamaican influences and styles would inevitably follow, but it wasn’t until the mid to late Sixties that the styles and sounds would be appreciated by the British. Artists such as Prince Buster, Laurel Aitken, The Pioneers, The Maytals, Harry Johnson, The Ethiopians, Desmond Dekker, Pat Kelly and Max Romeo made a huge impact on the UK music scene and it was their sounds that brought together young white, working-class youths and young Jamaicans in dance halls. This mix brought about the Skinhead youth cult, as the styles of the Jamaican Rude Boy were blended with those of the British mod as a celebration of the melding of the two cultures.

In Coventry, during the late Sixties and early Seventies, the throbbing beat of ska captivated a young man called Jerry Dammers and he began to formulate a plan. If ‘You’re Wondering Now’ then read on…

PART ONE

THE DAWNING OF A NEW ERA

“We don’t play Jamaican music…We play English music.”

Jerry Dammers 1980

iF YOU ask anyone to name a city known for its contribution to music the answer will no doubt be London, Liverpool or Manchester. Few would think of the City of Coventry, but the town which nestles in the Midlands of England, better known for the antics of Lady Godiva, World War Two bombings and that enigmatic phrase ‘being sent to Coventry’, was also, in the Seventies, the birthplace of Britain’s last great youth movement, 2Tone. 2Tone grabbed the British music charts by the throat, and for a short and volatile time turned the country into a sea of black and white chequers. The seven young men at the heart of this musical revolution were the Specials, a band whose music and ideals would leave such a legacy that, even today, their momentum is still felt on the on the face of the fickle British music industry. The Specials led the way for other bands that joined the 2Tone movement, such as the Selecter, Madness, the Beat, the Bodysnatchers and the Swinging Cats. Their music gave a voice and cause to disillusioned youth up and down the country, showed them how to stomp on the dancehall floors and shake the dust from the rafters. If you were young at that time and embraced the sounds and styles, you got a real sense of belonging. If you were part of it then you know how it felt. A simple Specials’ button badge immediately linked you with total strangers who treated you like part of the club, and that’s what 2Tone was – one big club. To be part of it all you needed was a love of the music.

The musical, political and social vision behind 2Tone was the brainchild of just one man: Jeremy David Hounsell Dammers. Jeremy, later to be known as Jerry, made his way into the world on May 22nd 1954 in Ootacamundi in Southern India, son of the Right Reverend Alfred Hounsell Dammers and his wife Brenda. Jerry’s father lead an amazing life dedicated to serving others through the church. Born in 1921 in Great Yarmouth, he became known as ‘Horace’, a name given to him by his teacher after the Roman poet. He was a staunch Labour Party supporter all his life and a Cambridge scholar who, during the war years, became involved in the church and slowly rose through its ranks. He travelled extensively before arriving in Coventry in 1965. Eventually he became the Dean of Bristol where he set up a chapel used for peace and anti-apartheid vigils and supported the city’s homeless and other minorities. In 1972, he founded the ‘Life-Style Movement’ that encouraged people to give up their luxury items, he also wrote several books on the subject of faith. Jerry’s father had a profound influence on his son’s ideals and beliefs, especially on the anti-racist front.

As a child Dammers had been made to sing in church choirs, something he detested, and as he grew he started to rebel. It became apparent that his strict, respectable upbringing was going to lead to a clash of personalities and that trouble would follow. Jerry was certainly the most unconventional member of his family. His brother went on to become a doctor and his two sisters took up social work. He had been into music at an early age when, much to the amusement of his brothers and sisters, Dammers recorded a tape and sent it to John Lennon! Aged 13, Jerry was forced to take up piano lessons but he soon gave them a wide berth, although in hindsight they were to prove invaluable in his later life. At 15, he became what he later described as a mini-mod, before adopting the hippy look, hair and all. Together with a friend, he escaped the humdrum of reality and fled to a small island off the Irish coast that John Lennon had previously bought for use as a commune for peace-loving dropouts.

Very early Specials flyer

“God, it was awful.” Jerry later recalled, “They put us to work ploughing the fields and every night we’d be given a bowl of flour and water. The fields were laid out in the letters of the word L-O-V-E. That was when I stopped being a hippy and became a Skinhead.”

Aged 15, Dammers gained his trademark missing two front teeth when he went over the handlebars of his bike; he was left with a huge brace and stitches in his face. One night at a youth club in Baginton, a village just outside Coventry, a progressive rock band were playing, albeit terribly, and after they had left the stage, the disco erupted to ‘Liquidator’ by Harry J’s Allstars, an original reggae track. As Dammers watched the few Skinheads in attendance diving around to the tune, something switched in his head: “Once you’re hooked on Reggae,” he explained, “it becomes a bit of a cause. ‘Live Injection’ by The Upsetters is probably the most ecstatic dance record ever made. Of course, I thought it had something to do with Skinheads then, I didn’t know it was Lee Perry working his African magic across continents – but we were all misled and still are. I might have been stupid but I can remember thinking then, if only the skins weren’t, according to the stereotype, kicking the shit out of hippies or immigrants, or each other at football, if only all that energy and anger was directed into something positive and against the system, which brutalised them in the first place. I was very idealistic, some might say bonkers.”

Jerry left school at 16 with one art ‘O’ level to his credit, which scuppered his mother’s plans to send him on to university. Instead, he became a student at Nottingham Art School for a year or so before transferring to Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry. He spent most of his time there making films and cartoons, drinking and getting into youthful trouble. His career of vandalism came to an abrupt end one day when he started to jump up and down on the roof of an occupied car and fell straight through! Luckily, nobody was injured but Dammers collected a £250 fine and the gravity of a court appearance put him back on the straight and narrow. While at college, he made three intricate animated films. One concerned the Fifties boxing match between Rocky Marciano and British champ Don Cockell, another was entitled Disco, which included a reggae soundtrack composed by Jerry and a fellow student from the year above whom he had befriended and whose name was Horace Panter.

“Disco was about two minutes long,” said Jerry, “there was a lot of work in all of them and I did all the animation myself. The soundtrack was pretty good and I was really pissed off when I discovered it had been nicked from college.”

Jerry’s third film was an epic: “It was a mixture of live film and animation set in Seventies Coventry. It started with someone walking down the street and you’d see all these people doing things. Then suddenly it would change to animation. There was a bloke running along, a sort of football hooligan, who throws a brick through a window and in animation, you saw the glass smashing. Then there was this old tramp, a mate of mine really, who falls over and spews over the pavement. The camera zoomed into on the spew and it was all bones and things bubbling away. There was an old woman crossing the street who gets run over. Some of it was full animation, but a lot of it was done with cut-outs, a very tedious business. It was about that time the IRA were going round and at the end a bloke puts a bag under a car and the whole street gets blown to pieces, guts flying everywhere.”

Tom and Jerry it certainly wasn’t! Dammers eventually got his degree, but dismissed it out of hand: “The actual degree was irrelevant, really; that was just a by-product of what I was really doing which was just using the college facilities to do what I wanted, which was to make cartoons. I hate the idea of degrees and all their connotations of privilege and success. I hate privilege, that’s why I never collected my degree from them.”

Apart from film, making music was another of Jerry’s burgeoning passions. He based his decision to become a musician on two things; one was hearing Graham Parker’s number ‘Not If It Pleases Me’ that made Jerry think that he could do things on his own. The other was when he saw the the Who perform ‘My Generation’ on TV, although he was taken solely by the music, rather than the band’s approach. His own musical preferences included reggae from his Skinhead days and a whole range of bands from the Small Faces to Slade. His first taste of ska came courtesy of his brother: “I borrowed my brother’s records all the time. One day I was sitting on the floor sifting through them when I found Prince Busters ‘FAB-ulous Hits’. I listened to it and it had a great effect on me. I really took to the record.”

After college, Jerry played in a number of bands that weren’t really to his satisfaction. Some of them had curious titles including Cissy Stone Soul Band, Peggy Penguin and the Southside Greeks, Ricky Nugent and the Loiterers, and the Lane Travis Country Trio but undoubtedly the best was Gristle. He also had a stint with Ray King. Ray King was a local Coventry legend and it is fair to say that without him the 2Tone phenomenon may have never got off the ground since the majority of 2Tone musicians cut their musical teeth with him. His real name was Vibert Cornwall, and his band, well respected in the local area, was originally called Suzi and The Kingsize Kings. He acquired the stage name Ray King and the band mantle changed to the Ray King Soul Band. Their reputation quickly grew, and they were soon asked to play at the Playboy Club in London. They later recorded an album at that venue and signed to major labels such as Pye and CBS before splitting in the Seventies.

Ray had acquaintances in the town of Gloucester called Lynval Golding, Silverton Hutchinson, Desmond Brown and Charley Bembridge, all of whom later became big players in the 2Tone movement. Ray moved the Gloucester boys over to Coventry and formed another band, with himself on vocals, called Pharaoh’s Kingdom. Hutchinson had a friend called Neol Davies who turned up to rehearsals and he brought with him Jerry Dammers. A couple of guys called the Smith brothers also joined up and a new group, Night Train, was formed. Ray King had wanted to play out-and-out ska but Dammers himself was not overly keen to play in this style at that time and left, and not long after Davies followed. Ray King himself carried on in music for a while, then ended up in management and devoting time to helping the local West Indian community.

With the advent of punk Jerry became heavily involved in song writing and took on the persona of Gerald ‘The General’ Dankey, most of his early compositions at this time being embryonic forms of future Specials tracks. He became well known in the close-knit Coventry music scene and by early 1977 was trying to put together his own band. Dammers joined forces with old friend Neol Davies to record some demos on an old Revox tape recorder in Jerry’s living room. They needed to involve other people and so recruited bass player and college acquaintance Horace Panter. Horace was born Stephen Graham Panter on August 30th 1953 in Croydon, and was later adopted and moved to Kettering where his nickname of ‘Horace’ was given to him by a schoolteacher. He was working as a van driver and playing bass with the soul band Breaker when Jerry went to see them play in Coventry and afterwards asked him to play on a track he had written.

“After the gig I remember Jerry coming up to me,” said Panter, “and as he talked he spat saliva over me. He wanted me to help him with some demos so I said okay. After he had gone I wondered what I was letting myself in for!”

In Horace’s book Ska’d for Life he said: “I did recall him from college, one of the new boys who were loud and aggressive and didn’t seem to give a toss, with his tartan trousers, sideburns and grown-out mod haircut.”

Jerry reflected on those times, and added: “We used to wreck the hippie parties, play Prince Buster records. I had this band playing dodgy versions of Desmond Dekker’s ‘007’. We used to gob at each other on stage. I was like a forerunner of punk but I suppose realistically punk was a bit of a musical dead end for me. I went to punk gigs but enjoyed the reggae they played between sets more. I thought the Sex Pistols played boring power rock, though I related to punk’s lyrics and anarchic attitude. People felt able to write their own songs and about their own lives. I got thrown out of a local band for wanting to play our own material so it was then that I decided to form my own band.”

Horace went along to rehearsals and was introduced to a true form of reggae, which he wasn’t used to playing. He eventually mastered the sound and became a fully-fledged member of the group, now going by the name of the Hybrids. The inclusion of Horace as bassist had a bitter taste for one young graduate called Andrew Calcutt. He thought it should have been him taking his place in history but it was not to be: “Straight after my finals I moved to Cambridge to join Jerry and a couple of local graduates, one of them a Coventry kid like us, in forming a band of wannabe rude boys,” said Calcutt. “I borrowed the phrase from Jamaican slang via the NME and introduced it at a rehearsal the previous summer, to general hilarity! Except that JD didn’t show up as I thought we had agreed. A year or so later I received a phone call asking me to go hear him play at an American airbase, (‘Soul Showband’ or ‘Rock’n’Roll Revival’, it could have been either) somewhere in East Anglia. When I couldn’t go, I got a message to the effect that if I wanted to join up where we had left off, I’d better get back to Coventry quick because of another good bass player in the offing. The other good bass player was Sir Horace Gentleman, and the off-ing happened to me, not him. Horace and I have a history, though we have only ever exchanged the briefest of pleasantries. He plays bass; so did I. He played bass in a band with Jerry Dammers; so did I (though when we started playing together, Jerry was still ‘Jeremy’). I gave Jerry my organ, the cast-off my dad got cheap from the church where he was priest-in-charge.”

Calcutt remained a musician and recorded with the band Ersatz, later going on to obtain an MA in Journalism and Society at the University of East London.

Dammers also grabbed the services of Tim Strickland, a gawky youth, on vocals. Strickland couldn’t really sing a decent note, a fact which Strickland does not deny. He told writer Andy Clayden’s ska and reggae website: “Hey! This was the time of punk mate, anything went! I was with the band for about nine months. Jerry had seen me perform, very badly, but enough to convince him that I was the one, at least for a short time, with a college band called Dave and the Ravers. I was the token punk although I thought I had more of a James Dean fixation! We rehearsed and gigged mainly in a pub called the Heath Hotel and regularly filled the place, which still amazes me! We were good, although I still never saw myself as musical or a pop star. I used to read the lyrics (all Jerry’s) off sheets of paper, which I thought was appropriately punk and used to sit on the edge of the stage through the instrumental bits. We did record three or four songs as demos live in the Heath Hotel but I don’t know what happened to them. Jerry invited me to rehearse with the band following a meeting on a train. I later worked at the Virgin record shop and as manager employed Brad (John Bradbury), later the drummer with the Specials, as assistant manager.”

Strickland moved into band management, later being involved with Terry Hall’s mid-Eighties combo the Colour Field and then becoming creative director of the doomed Museum For Popular Music in Sheffield that opened its doors in 1999 and closed in 2000. Also in the fledgling line-up was drummer Silverton Hutchinson who came from Barbados, and who was well known in close circles for his mood swings. He was an expert reggae drummer who had played with Dammers in Pharaoh’s Kingdom.

The man who would later give the Specials their essential offbeat ska rhythm, Lynval Fitzgerald Golding, came next. Lynval was born on July 24th 1951, in the Mendez District of St Catherine in Jamaica (a place that until the early Eighties didn’t even have electricity). Life changed forever for Lynval when he was 10 years old. His mother sent him and his sisters to Gloucester, England with his aunt who would eventually bring them up. Lynval recalled: “I thought my mother was coming with us. I had no idea my mother was staying behind. When I was going on the ship, I was half way up, looked back, and saw my mother on the dockside crying. I wanted to run back but my aunt was shouting at me, everyone was walking up. For years, I didn’t understand why she sent us away from her. Now I can see what an amazing, selfless act it was. It must have been the hardest decision she ever had to make. Sending her children to England because she believed it would benefit us. And she was right. I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you if it wasn’t for that woman. I wouldn’t have done the Specials or anything else in music. I wouldn’t have had any of those opportunities. Can you imagine sending your children thousands of miles away because you knew they’d have a better life away from you? I’m forever grateful to her for the sacrifices she made to give me the life I’ve had. Before she passed, we had some very special moments that I’ll treasure forever. I learnt a lot from her.”

Lynval fondly told RockersRevolt in 2008 about his early years in Jamaica: “It sounds like a cliché but we didn’t have anything in Jamaica. We made our own toys, jigs and trucks and played marbles. They were cheap to buy. I used to love when it rained. The downpours were torrential, but pass just as quick as they started. We loved playing out in them. Everyday, first thing, we’d go and fetch the water from the well; there was no running water there. Then we’d move the goats to feed, then back home to wash, then walk the two miles to school. It was a very simple life, but a very happy one, surrounded by love and music everyday.”

The transition to life in England was a hard one for young Lynval to make and he was miserable. He hated it here and thought it was very cold, missing the Jamaican climate, but the first summer he had in England was long and hot so that seemed to help him settle down. The family first lived in Southampton, then spent time in Birmingham and Gloucester, where Lynval went to school, before settling in Coventry. Once he had moved to Gloucester he enjoyed school, but after a while the larger kids at school subjected him to racial taunts: “School was the thing that got me. School in England was the first time I experienced racism. I didn’t know what it was! I had no idea! I couldn’t understand why these kids were calling me ‘gollywog’ and all these different names they had for black kids. I hadn’t experienced racism in Jamaica. We had three white kids in our school in Jamaica and we just thought our job was to look after them. School in England were the worst years of my life. I hated it. The older kids spat at me and called me names. I just wasn’t used to that kind of thing because in Jamaica prejudice didn’t exist. There was no ‘Oh, you’re white so I’m not gonna talk to you.’ In my school days in England there were only ten or so black kids, but nowadays it’s a lot more mixed with Asians and West Indians, so at least its better for them.”

Lynval’s only real interest was music. His first guitar, a Fender, was purchased from his own pocket at the age of ten and funded by money he had made doing odd jobs. When he was 16, he left school and desperately wanted to be in a band but he began to tinker around with car engines, which got him a job as an apprentice motor mechanic. However, music had a magnetic attraction for young Golding and he was soon in his first band, the Merrytones, a soul-influenced combo that existed on covers of Otis Redding and Sam & Dave. By the time he was 20 he was married with a daughter and was an accomplished guitarist: “I don’t think my father thought I could really make a creative career for myself in the music scene,” said Lynval “so I intended to prove him wrong.”

Later, as already documented, he teamed up in Coventry with Charlie ‘H’ Bembridge, Desmond Brown and Ray King in Pharaoh’s Kingdom and it was during this time he met and befriended Jerry Dammers. Lynval already lived a mere fours doors away from him, they met frequently in the local pub The Pilot, and the friendship blossomed, with Dammers eventually asking him to join his band, the Hybrids. They played their first gig in 1977 at the Heath Hotel and went down quite well, well enough anyway to gain them a fortnightly residency along with some punk bands.

It was just after this that Jerry spied a singer in a local riotous punk band called Squad. He had seen the band wrecking some show in Coventry and phoned Horace Panter stating ‘We need this guy in the band!’ Jerry dragged Horace off to catch the group and its sullen, enigmatic young singer a couple of times before it was decided that Tim Strickland would have to go. His replacement would come in the shape of the soon-to-be former singer of Squad, Terence Edward Hall, a volatile 18-year-old who was known to perform gigs with his back to the audience. He possessed a perfect punk sneer and stage presence, based around one of his punk heroes, Johnny Rotten.

According to Terry there had been a bit of hero worship: “He was amazing. It was just the way he stood on stage and gazed for half an hour. I’d never seen anything like it. His stance was like an extension of standing still, it was like a meaningful glare. But I don’t stand still.”

Born on March 19th 1959, Terry had a happy upbringing in the city of Coventry. His father, Terry senior, worked as a technical author at the Rolls-Royce Parkside car plant in the city while his mother Joan worked as a trimmer at the Talbot car plant. Hall spent his early childhood tucked away in corners avidly reading copies of The Dandy and Beano and recalled his only major upset as a child was at Christmas one year when he was given what he thought was a cheap Johnny Seven GI figure when he had set his heart on an authentic Action Man! However, as is often the case, his rebellious streak soon started to develop.

He thoroughly hated school. Whilst attending the Frederick Bird Primary School in Swan Lane he actually jumped off a wall in an attempt to break his arm so he wouldn’t have to attend. It didn’t work, although he recalled he had a sling made up to make him look the part! As he approached his early teenage years, he began to break away from his parents, particularly when the original Skinhead movement arrived in the late Sixties to early Seventies: “I remember I wanted a pair of real Oxford Brogues,” explained Terry “and my mum said she would get me a pair. She came back with these boots and they were (and I mean no disrespect to spastics) like spastic boots. I was supposed to be a Skinhead and I was going out done up like a spastic!”

Hall moved on to the Sidney Stringer Comprehensive School in Cox Street, now a community technical college, where he was duly picked on and constantly bullied. Terry said: “People thought that I was a poof because I didn’t go around pretending I’d slept with every girl in the class.”

His days of being tormented by the school thugs soon ended when one day three boys who regularly bullied him were waiting for him in a subway: “One of them hit me,” Terry recalled, “so I punched him hard in the mouth and kicked hell out of him. I felt much better for it.”

At the age of 13 he was a promising footballer and was signed up by Coventry City’s youth team as a centre forward but his destiny as a professional striker was cut short when he discovered the charms of the opposite sex. “I used to make a right twat out of myself when it came to girls,” he said, “I used to find them all difficult really. I never knew what to say to them. My first girlfriend was called Valerie and she was fat and quite horrible. We were both 14 and I used to blow kisses outside her bedroom window. It was acutely embarrassing. I wasn’t even aware I was going out with her until someone told me! As I got older, though, they became less and less of an irritation and more and more a pain in the arse.”

Terry realised there was more to life than going to school when he joined a local gang called Blackfoot. It was here he was involved in gang fights and where he first ran into a young Lynval Golding. He left school at 15 and never regretted it. He went straight into employment working with the disabled. He would often sort through the jumble sent in to raise funds and help himself to anything worthwhile, as did the other employees, especially searching out decent working radios. He later tried his hand as an apprentice bricklayer, as a clerk, and even considered hairdressing: “I remember working on a building site,” he said, “and I was bored and I thought I wanted to go off and cut hair for a change, but that’s as far as it got!”

His last main job was as a numismatist working for David Fletcher Ltd in Coventry’s Station Square where his elegant job description meant that he dealt in coins and medals. Fletcher recalled his young apprentice: “Yes, I remember Terry Hall; he was employed by me at our stamp and coin shop by Coventry railway station sometime in the Seventies. His main duties were packing orders and dealing with the mailing. He seemed a decent young man. I think working for me was one of his first jobs after leaving school. I was quite surprised to see him all over the Coventry newspapers and TV with his group.”

It was whilst sitting bored in this job that he realised his true vocation in life; music: “It may sound like a sob story,” Hall explained “but having left school with no qualifications I was just bumming around in and out of about 20 different jobs. The only thing that remotely appealed to me was singing and music. I loved the early days of being in the Specials. I was also a bit over-awed – I used to sit there like a good lad and listen and try to work out what it was all about. I was 17; I had a lot of belief in Jerry. He was about five years older than me; they all felt a lot older than me at that time. They felt like grown-ups.”

This led to Terry’s riotous romp with Squad and after seeing him in action Dammers wanted him in his band, now known as the Automatics. So, in a shot, they voted in the sullen, broody Hall and Tim Strickland was out: “The move to replace me,” said Strickland “was a little more organised. The band rehearsed Terry Hall, from Cov punk band Squad, and called round to take me for a pint and broke the news none too gently. I was already suspicious, as Jerry had never bought me a pint before! I was mildly pissed off but not really surprised and would never have had the dedication to go through what the Specials did after that. To my great embarrassment I did throw half a pint of beer over Terry one night when they had a support slot at Tiffany’s!”

Strickland worked with Hall many moons later and there were no grudges borne over the beer-throwing incident!

The line up of what was to be the Specials took another major step forward with the conscription of lead guitarist Roddy Byers, known locally as ‘Roddy Radiation’. Roderick James Byers was born on May 5th 1955 in the mining town of Keresley near Coventry, where he would stay for the first 18 years of his life. His father, Stan, played trumpet for a number of bands in the sixties and was very well known around the Midlands. When Roddy was 11, Stan introduced him to the trombone and his brother Chris to the trumpet, but a couple of years later young Byers found what he was looking for in the shape of rock ‘n’ roll. Out went the trombone and in came the electric guitar. Roddy joined a few school bands and gained a few youth club gigs and it was in these early days when he first encountered Jerry Dammers. The 15-year-old Dammers was in a band called Gristle when Roddy tried out for the group but it was only years later that they both realised they had been in the same band!

“Jerry was playing drums but he was a terrible drummer,” said Roddy, “but the guitarist was even worse. I really didn’t like him but he was someone to play with. The trouble was that no one else liked him either so I was always getting beaten up for playing with him!”

As school finished Roddy joined a band that played tunes during the interval at the bingo in the local Top Rank and he joined the local authority as a painter and decorator, which enabled him to buy a new guitar and a much-needed amp. Roddy soon upped the ante in his musical direction by joining a club show band called Heaven Sent, who played at working men’s clubs, the hardest of all musical training grounds. Roddy’s musical preferences and fashions changed in the Seventies and he adopted a Ziggy Stardust-style persona and the guise of Roddy Radiation, a moniker given to him by his brother Chris in reference to the fact that Roddy’s face glowed when he had had one too many drinks! Roddy decided to keep the name when punk crept into the scene. Around this time, he wrote the track ‘Meanest Creature’ in Bowie-esque style and then expanded his musical boundaries, getting heavily into Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and the New York Dolls, which propelled him to form his first real group. With spiky hair, drainpipe trousers and safety-pins the order of the day, the Wild Boys became known as one of the better bands on the Coventry scene and played mainly covers interspersed with five or six songs that Roddy had written including ‘Eighties Teddy Boy’ and a song called ‘Concrete Jungle’ which would later become part of Specials folklore. The original line up of the Wild Boys included the UK Subs’ Pete Davies. They played mainly local gigs apart from a highlight in Manchester where they played support to Buzzcocks. Jerry Dammers took Horace Panter to see them in action: “We went to see them at the Golden Cross. They were deafeningly loud and I didn’t stay very long.”

Also around this time, Roddy met Terry Hall. He was still screaming with Squad, who supported the Wild Boys at one show. The association did not last long because by the time the Wild Boys had come on stage Squad had broken all the microphones and spat over the crowd: “Me and Roddy were in the first group of punks that ever appeared in Coventry,” said Terry Hall. “People just took the piss all the time. That only made us more hardened to the ridicule and afterwards things didn’t worry us again.”

Coventry muso Kevin Harrison recalls his good friend Roddy: “Everybody I know celebrated the arrival of punk. The Sex Pistols and the Clash played Coventry Lanchester Polytechnic. I met Joe Strummer, friendly, positive, and Johnny Rotten, snotty, negative. Perfect! The gig was a great inspiration, that is until some cretin pogo-ed on my Lynda’s foot! We met 20 or so other punk revellers requiring medical attention in Casualty at Cov and Warwick Hospital including my good mate from Keresley, Roddy Radiation, who later would pop round to our gaff and record a few demos.”

Neville Staple remembered Roddy from around Coventry. Apparently, he had been hard to miss! “I used to see Rod around Cov, with his safety pins, spiky hair and eye make up. I thought to myself ‘what the bloody hell’s goin’ on there?’”

The Wild Boys split in 1977 just before Punk truly burst out nationwide. Roddy left but his brother Mark, known then as ‘Mark Extra’, carried on and they remained a draw to Coventry punters. They eventually recorded, and the track ‘We’re Only Monsters’, written by Roddy, appeared on the album Sent From Coventry