Two-tone stars mix up a new special brew
The Specials make a semi-glorious return with a new album, ‘Encore’, their first original material in two decades, writes Barry Egan
SKA for the madding crowd. Encore, The Specials’ third album — their first new material in two decades — bristles with rage relevant for the times: everything from Brexit to misogyny to racism. The album kicks off with a discoish cover of The Equals’ 1973 classic Black Skinned Blue Eyed Boys.
B.L.M. — Black Lives Matter — tells the tale of Jamaican-born Lynval Golding’s father and his journey from Jamaica to a deeply racist England in 1954: “The sign on the window kept saying the same thing: ‘No dogs, no Irish, no blacks.’ Welcome to England,” sings Golding.
“Looked all around the world, could be a beautiful place,” Terry Hall despondently sings on We Sell Hope, “Do what you need to do without making others suffer”.
There is even a rendition of The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum, the 1982 single by Specials’ after-project Fun Boy Three.
On the almost spoken word beauty of The Life And Times (Of A Man Called Depression), Hall literally sings his pain out.
He told The Guardian in an interview in 2003: “I got stopped in Camden by one of those students who wear aprons for different charities. And this was from a mental health charity. I’ve suffered from depression quite heavily for years. And he had a clipboard and said, ‘Come on, cheer up’. That’s not how you approach someone who’s got an illness. Because I’ve had ‘cheer up’ since I was f ***ing four,” said Hall who sings: ‘The truth is it was hate at first sight/Starin’ down the barrel of a man with no real opinions.’
Hall is no stranger to soulbaring honesty, having written the heartbreaking Well Fancy That on the second Fun Boy Three album Waiting in 1983 — about being sexually abused as a kid by a teacher on a school trip to France. ‘Woke up with a shock, and your hands on me/I couldn’t shout, I couldn’t scream.’
(In another take on the tragic story of how his deep-seated depression developed. Hall said in a recent interview that at the age of 12 he had been “abducted by a paedophile ring” and sexually abused for four days in France before being “punched in the face and left on the roadside”.)
In reference to Brexit and the madness ahead perhaps, the voice of The Specials’ 1981 zeitgeist-capturing masterpiece of a Thatcherite Britain in the chaos of inner city riots Ghost Town is predicting more anarchy ahead on the cabaret-y Breaking Point: “With the help of God and a few marines we’ll blow this place to smithereens...”
10 Commandments deconstructs Ten Commandments of Man, Prince Buster’s 1967 homage to chauvinism.
Guest vocalist Saffiyah Khan — the pink-haired activist in a Specials T-shirt who was photographed smiling bemusedly while facing down a burly, pink-faced male English Defence League protester at a far right hate rally Birmingham in 2017 — takes on all and sundry: the antifeminists, the victim-blamers, the cat-calling women-haters and the brainless knuckle-dragging Neanderthal misogynists who judge.
‘Terry Hall recently said that at the age of 12 he was abducted by a paedophile ring’
“Thou shalt not tell a girl she deserved it/Because her skirt was too short,” sings Khan, standing up to those who call her “a feminazi or a femoid... I shall be seen/And I will be heard.’
Hearing Encore poses the question: is this really The Specials? Clearly they are no longer the mixed-race ensemble Coventry ska septet who set 2 Tone alight back in 1979 with songs of youth anger with an anti-racism message, skinny suits and Too Much Too Young and A Message To You, Rudy... This is because The Specials are now a well-fed middle-aged trio of Hall, Golding and Horace Panter.
Jerry Dammers, Neville Staple and Roddy ‘Radiation’ Byers are no longer in situ (and both drummer John Bradbury and trombonist Rico Rodriguez died in 2015.)
As much as I love The Specials, there is the feeling that Encore would possess much more of a cutting edge with the gap-toothed vicar’s son, Jerry Dammers on board.
A message to you, Terry.
The Specials play Dublin’s Olympia Theatre on April 11, 12 and 13. All nights are sold out