…And Start Stomping
Four decades on, live ska movie Dance Craze returns.
THERE WILL be a fitting way to remember Terry Hall – as well as his late Specials bandmate John Bradbury, plus Ranking Roger, Saxa and Everett Morton from The Beat and Winston Bazoomies from Bad Manners – this March 24. On that date, a restored version of 1981’s six-band ska concert film Dance Craze will be launched at the BFI. Filmed in 1980 during the height of 2 Tone mania, Dance Craze’s limited cinema run brought together performances from the above-mentioned groups plus Madness, The Selecter and The Bodysnatchers. Apart from a VHS release in 1989, in the absence of film materials since rediscovered, it has been unavailable since.
“It’s great that it’s finally getting a release,” says Jerry Dammers. “The BFI have taken it up, as much because of the cinematography [as the music]. I didn’t realise at the time, but [cinematographer] Joe Dunton had invented this new camera on a harness over his shoulders so he could bounce around and get right in there with the action. There were no cameras out front, so it’s more or less completely an on-stage view, like you’re right in there with the action. It’s the best document that there is of 2 Tone, and the nearest thing you’re ever going to get to seeing a real 2 Tone gig. It’s the excitement of youth!”
“Back then what you got to see of bands [on screen] was like The Old Grey Whistle Test,” says The Selecter’s Pauline Black, “just completely sterile with no atmosphere. But Dance Craze actually captured that atmosphere.”
“There was enormous camaraderie then,” says The Beat’s Dave Wakeling. “We did tours together and everyone was happy to have alternative headliners. The Specials would end up on-stage for our last song or we would come out for You’re Wondering Now. It wasn’t just anti-pop, it was anti- the whole capitalist model of how pop groups should be.”
Dance Craze began life when US director Joe Massot, who helmed Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains The Same, saw Madness on tour and wanted to film them. Thanks largely to Dammers, the project soon took in the entire 2 Tone movement. Though Massot was credited as director, it was the pioneering use of steady-cam by Dunton and his team that made the film such an immersive document, edited for maximum impact with a short interval of British Pathé newsreel footage from the ’50s. “We didn’t plan anything,” Dunton recalls. “I became like a member of the band on-stage, anticipating where they were going to go. The camera was just following the music.”
“The original idea of the film was that people would be dancing in the aisles [to it],” remembers Dammers. “It was trying to recreate that, to do something for the younger kids who couldn’t go to the gigs, so they could get an idea of the whole excitement and energy of it.”
At Dammers’ suggestion, Dance Craze was launched with a special under-18s premiere at The Sundown in Charing Cross, although it would prove to be so successful at getting audiences to dance that many cinema owners stopped showing it due to the volume of 2 Tone fans marauding through the aisles every time it was screened.
“The reception was fantastic,” remembers Wakeling. “Because a lot of venues would try and stop people from dancing, they ended up getting their revenge by dancing in cinemas to the film. It was like the battle of the cinema aisle. Parties were made around showings of the film and they would have midnight screenings. People went to the cinema to celebrate.”
After Dance Craze’s run in UK cinemas ended, Dunton sent prints of the film to the US where it gained a second lease of life being screened at university campuses throughout the decade. As well as being re-available for viewing on DVD and Blu-ray, the original 1981 soundtrack album has been remastered – due to contractual reasons, Madness were omitted from the later CD reissue – alongside all 27 tracks from the film itself.
“What makes me shudder a bit are the stage invasions,” concludes Dammers, who had to seek refuge from fans on top of his keyboard during the film’s performance of Nite Klub. “I’m just so pleased that no one actually got hurt because it doesn’t look very safe! I suppose that it got out of hand, but we couldn’t stop it – I knew that we couldn’t stop it.”
The interviewees were speaking before the news of Terry Hall’s death.