THE SPECIALS – The Special AKA Live! (EP)
The Specials are a nexus point in British pop, and it’s easy to see why they were so important to so many. They pick up on the thread of Britain’s love for Jamaican dance music and the skinhead culture of the early 70s. They’re another incarnation of Britpop’s Hamburg Ideal – bright, straight-talking lads honing their pop to an awesome no-bullshit sharpness. Their working model of collective, cross-racial collaboration has been an indirect blueprint for almost every mutation in the UK’s urban music scenes since. And by giving that concept a label – Two Tone – and tying their creativity so closely to the ferment of British street politics, the band moved from blueprint to inspiration. Like all bands, they were a roil of individual egos; like many, they fell apart too soon, but it would be tough to argue that the Specials were anything other than a Good Thing.
But none of that explanation captures the hard physical response the Specials’ music inspires – particularly this Live EP. The less famous tracks – a clutch of covers acting as a ska primer for the band’s new audience – are as compact and forceful as any of the dance music we’ll meet later. But it’s lead track “Too Much Too Young” that sold the EP – it captures what made (and makes!) Two Tone so exciting, its understanding of how a dancefloor balances between abandon and aggression. “Too much” gives you both at once in its double-time peaks – “Aint he cool? NO HE AIN’T”, Terry Hall’s exasperation making the song explode. The interlock of band and backing vocals is thrillingly tight, but Hall’s the star here, his anger pushing the song along, his sardonic edge giving it an extra expressive dimension: he’s also, as ever, a naturally funny performer, timing each line perfectly until the tempo – and the anger – peak and the song smashes into its brick wall.
8
Tom in FT / Popular • Pop • 1,905 views • Share/Save
Re. Rosie at #14 – it’s salutary to be reminded of the cyclical nature of these things! Rosie, my partner would completely agree with you. Three years my senior, and still something of an unreconstructed hippy at that stage (I’ll bet he caught the John Martyn tour that lonepilgrim mentions at #19), he was totally alienated by 2 Tone, to the extent that it hastened his own process of cultural disengagement.
More specifically, a particularly ugly, violent atmosphere at a Madness gig at Leicester De Montfort in early 1980 traumatised him to the extent that he stopped going to stand-up gigs altogether. Prior to that, he had caught every band which came to town as a matter of course.
Mike @ 26: My mantra for much of Popular so far has been “there is no new thing new under the sun”. And while we’re quoting the book of Ecclesiates, “one generation passeth away and another generation cometh”.
The irony is that in a couple of years Madness will cover that anthem of arty-farty hippy habituées of theatres and jazz clubs and poetry readings (like me), Labi Siffre’s “It Must Be Love”. And to the chagrin of that older generation, it will become the “standard” version!
John Peel had played ‘Gangsters’ to death so ‘The Specials’ were familiar to me when this came out. Even so it was suprising that such a rough and ready recording was sitting up top the charts. I have to concur with an earlier comment that one of the stand out features of this was the brazen mention of contraception and I have a vague memory that it was banned from airplay on some radio stations for that reason. For the teenage me it was a pretty exciting single and the fact that it outraged a few people as well didn’t do it any harm. I probably would have liked Two-Tone bands a hell of a lot more (and gone to the gigs) if there hadn’t been an undercurrent of moronic skinhead support for them (admittedly this was not the bands fault – but there was certainly an association there that they did not necessarily discourage). Thankfully over time it dissipated and I felt more comfortable listening to the music. For me it’s Terry Hall’s vocals that give this the edge and he would go on to be a particular favourite of mine (especially his work with The Colourfield – more of which later).
“Gangsters” got me listening to Prince Buster. I loved his stuff then, and still love it now, and for that I’ll always be grateful to the Specials. To me at 19, this was my first time around for the ska sound (apart from a few of the late 60s/early 70s reggae hits), and I bought all the early 2 Tone singles as soon as they came out.
The Specials’ second single (with Rico), “A Message To You Rudi” had been a slight disappointment, sort of treading water, and, good though the album was, it seemed to lack something. This live EP showed exactly what was missing – the raw energy of the live performance. Yes, the lyrics were dodgy, but you didn’t need to buy into them. We weren’t living in such PC-obsessed time then, and misogyny such as this, unpleasant as it undoubtedly was, was nothing out of the ordinary.
The other four tracks were certainly a bonus; all would have been familiar to any casual listener at the time as their originals had all been played regularly on radio as the ska craze spread over the second half of 1979.
It was a brave decision to release an EP, a Live EP at that, but the power of the performance, and, away from the lead track, the sheer joy evident both from the players and the audience to the other four tracks, justified that decision.
(Can anyone remember if this retailed at a higher price than a regular 7″? If it didn’t, as I suspect, maybe it wasn’t quite so brave to release an EP, and I note it was given a standard 2 Tone 7″ catalogue number.)
I had always been aware of the subject matter, but didn’t realise it had struck a chord with so many until I read the comments above. I wouldn’t imagine anyone would release something like this today (unless as a deliberate act of “outrage”), but it would be interesting to note the public’s reaction if someone tried!
This is one pf the records I was thinking of when I said 1980 might be better than 1979. I wouldn’t call this or much of Two Tone retro or all that backward looking either, the beat might be ska and the clothes late 60s skinhead but this record is definitely 1980. You might as well call The Beatles and The Stones retro for covering Chuck Berry songs.
It was the same price as a normal 7″.
The pic sleeve and paper label (you had tobe QUICK or know where to look, or both) was a limited edition (what quantity is not stated), and sold out pretty quickly, hence it’s progress to number one.
Brave? Nah, it was a right idea though.
On the recent BBC4 “Pop on Trial” series, Jazzy B expressed some bemusement about Two Tone – at the time he couldn’t understand why anyone would be exhuming ska when the reggae scene had moved on. So I think Rosie isn’t alone in seeing it as backward looking.
With the odd exception (Mirror in the Bathroom and the Special’s later popular entry spring to mind) Two Tone is something I quite like but don’t love; I own a ska compilation that mixes Two Tone with 60s ska songs and it tends to be the oldies that I prefer. In a wider context I feel the nexus between punk and reggae was usually better in theory than in practice – even the Clash’s reggae tracks I’ve always felt fell uncomfortably between two stools (again with one major exception, the Guns of Brixton). I could probably stretch to a 7 for this one.
Too Much Too Young is something I picked up on at about the time of a later number one by the specials which I can’t mention as is goes against your rule. I don’t know the rest of the EP but Too Much Too Young was great and it helps that it is live on stage. I love the whole ska deal and don’t trouble myself with politics. When I got older I got into earlier reggae and I commend Hall and others for alerting me to it.
This was a very significant moment for me. Mike’s post (as opposed to Mike Post) at 25, says most of it.
Having just turned 13, 2-Tone was my ‘punk’ equivalent and The Specials my Clash or Pistols. Among my peer group at school the band and the 2-Tone movement rapidly acquired iconic status. Numerous hours were wasted in lessons attempting to recreate Jerry Dammer’s Walt Jabsco 2-Tone man.
Ah, yes Jerry Dammers. Little mentioned yet on this thread -for sure the laconic Hall was a terrific front man. But The Specials were Dammers’ band. His unique musical vision created one of the great albums of the decade, even as the band were falling apart (“More Specials”, a far superior record to the lacklustre debut, combining muzak, ska, punk, reggae and dub to tremendous, if occasionally unsettling effect, best heard on “Man At C&A” and the “Stereotype”/”International Jet Set” double A-Side).
Despite the disappointment of the Costello-produced debut, the Specials were always a great singles band (all of the Hall-era singles went Top 10). “Gangsters” of course was missing from the LP, but the live EP version of “Too Much Too Young” captured the band’s raw energy and verve brilliantly.
It was thrilling that this made number 1.
Re 7 – “canon”? (still too wanky I suspect)
Re 19 – “Pearl’s Cafe” is the one you’re thinking of. It’s all a load of bollocks…
less wanky: “setlist”
Numerous hours were wasted in lessons attempting to recreate Jerry Dammer’s Walt Jabsco 2-Tone man.
There were lots of versions of him still graffiti’d onto desks and walls round my school a couple of years later. Loads of examples (of this, and other names and logos) were in the – freezing – toilets so you had plenty of time to contemplate them: to a 10-year old they might as well have been cave paintings. In the toilets downstairs from the music practise room someone had taken a compass and very painstakingly scored into the wall the single word “TAMLA”. I had no idea what it meant but knew it must be something incredibly daring and sophisticated.
“And do we really have to wait 17 years for the next contraception themed #1?”
unless you stretch to count the ace of base from 3 years earlier?
#38 – Kat identified a MUCH earlier one upthread!
DOH!
I’m still only seven at this point, and The Specials/Special AKA intimidated me. I guess the skins looked lairy on Bushey Heath street corners and I had a fringe and short trousers.
Whatever, it’s a thrilling record. The lyrics would have passed me by, but the rhythm’s one for barging around in the playground.
I picked up this very picture-sleeved single at a car boot sale about eight years back, lucky bugger that I am.
Ooh, this was a surprise – I knew it was a hit but never imagined it was a #1. Specials love for me came a year or two afterwards becuase by now I was so in my metal phase that nothing else could be considered. This is a 10 from me (and I’d imagine the last 10…although maybe there’ll be more nice surprises along the way. And yes…awesome sleeve.
I like the way that half of the back cover is given over to a photocopied article from the Coventry Evening Telegraph. Now, that’s giving regional print media proper respect! I approve wholeheartedly!
Such a fantastic burst of energy, and startling subject-matter. For me this was a gateway record to a lot of other great music, which I clearly have in common with a lot of you. A special shout-out for that high-pitched drum sound that punctuates the “bundle on the stage” section.
It made a bit of a link for me to something I’d read several years earlier – an NME “Rock File” book from about 1974 which included an article about “rude reggae”. It was there that I first read about Max Romeo’s “Wet Dream” before I was old enough to know what it was, let alone have one. And there in another quote were the Lloyd Charmer lyrics “Gimme the birth control, me no want a pickney”. It helpfully added “(kids)” to explain the word. Fast forward a few years, and there’s that line being chorused by Staples and Golding in “TMTY”. Another tribute to their influences. (And of course the word comes from the same root as “piccaninny”, as used by both Enoch Powell and Boris Johnson in various circumstances…)
I don’t particularly get misogyny when I hear this – it’s not aimed at womankind but at a particular woman, a particularly stupid woman who’s made her bed and has to lie in it. Judgmental yes, but emphasising she had a choice and ruined some of her best years – it’s socially conscious rather than hate-filled, I prefer to think. As with many Specials songs (“Rat Race” also comes to mind), there must have been a constituency of people hearing this and thinking “Christ, that’s aimed at me! – bloody good record though.” On the other hand in “The Boiler”, it’s clear that it’s the girl’s lack of self-esteem that makes her a target for rape, but that doesn’t make it her fault or award the aggressor any justification.
In the next couple of years there were any number of 2-Tone influenced bands turning up at my college giving the audience a good workout, and there was always one girl or guy who seemed to be making up the numbers – didn’t play anything or get to sing much, but did the bouncing dance well enough. (Remember the Not the Nine O’Clock News spoof “I Like Bouncing”?)
Johnny (#17) – I like the idea that all British music sounds like Blur when you’re 16! Just been reading the bit in Alex James’ autobiography “Bit of a Blur” where the band touch down for a US tour the day Nirvana release “Nevermind”, and find the British sound is yesterday’s news and the radio stations all think they’re from Madchester anyway…!
Tom #37 – don’t get me started on school graffiti! My favourite was the one where someone had scrawled “MOTORHEAD” on a desk, next to which someone else, in much thicker writing, had added “OH, YOU’RE HARD!!”
I think this was the first Two Tone single to have a picture sleeve, until then the early copies had what was called the “paper label” with the iconic Rude Boy image, then they reverted to a plain silver label.
I guess we’re better off talking about the Mod revival later on, but it was a big part of the Two Tone thing too, at least at my school.
conrad – good call on “more specials” being far superior to the debut. i’ve always wondered if the universal preference for the first album is a “had to be there” kind of thing? it seems pretty obvious to me that the second album is much more adventurous and fully realized.
i’d be curious to hear from anyone who was around when these albums came out. what did you think of “more specials” when you first it? excited? disappointed?
(hope i’m not derailing this thread. if i am, just ignore me.)
I loved it and admired them for not wanting to get stuck in the ska box. But this was long before easy listening and lounge music was in any way trendy so it caused a bit of head-scratching in some quarters, especially as the odd ‘Stereotype’ was the first single off it before the album came out.
The first album was a bit of a let-down, ’tis true. As for the second, the 2-Tone label’s artistic decline (The Swinging Cats – oh, please) had caused me to lose interest, and so I never sought it out. By then, I had newer, shinier distractions. My loss, almost certainly.
…from nowhere to Number One in six months, changed the way British youth dress, made two classic albums and then split at the peak of their powers. Has a British group since had such a perfect career trajectory?
I loved this song and I loved the fact Tony Blackburn made sarky comments about it on the Top 40 programme, which by this point I was listening to religiously every Sunday. It seems extraordinary now that such a racket was allowed to get to Number One.
One thing I can’t help but notice about the sleeve: there doesn’t appear to be any black people in the crowd. This got me thinking about gig crowds generally at this time and I was wondering where you may have found the most balanced crowds if not at ska-related gigs – maybe some of the more established reggae and jazz names?
I played the first album a month ago, after many years having not heard it, and was pleasantly surprised about how good it actually was.
I’d always pick “MOR-e Specials” as being better, but the first still rates a 10 for me anyway…
My answer to #50: at soul/funk gigs. The most evenly balanced crowd I’ve ever seen was at a Maze gig in Brixton. (Frankie Beverly: “Oh my goodness, just look at you. Like salt and pepper. That’s the way it should be.”)
SteveM @ 50
The demographic map in 1980 was rather different then. Coventry looked quite a different place from where I was living Hull, where dark skins were few and far between and almost always belonged to relatively high-status people – doctors, academics and so on. The same is true today in Barrow (though no longer in Hull) but Barrow, being an isolated sort of place, is very much the exception in 2008.
With the exception of my student years in Liverpool, and Liverpool’s very long-established black community is probably unlike any other, I’d never lived anywhere up to that point where anything else pertained. But in the course of the 1980s that all changed. Apart from the fact that by the end of the decade I’d landed in Notting Hill, via Hitchin (of all places) which is a small market town with many inner-city characteristics.
Two-Tone couldn’t have happened in any of those places, really. Coventry on the other hand, with its faltering car industry, had the right mix in the right relationships for the formula to work. That doesn’t mean it didn’t find a receptive ear in those places, but a Hull crowd for a Specials gig would be an almost all-white one.
I would have liked the first album a lot more if I had not first heard the bulk of the songs on a Specials live on BBC In Concert (I didn’t get the debut album until the Summer of 1980). The ferocious power of songs like “Do The Dog” sounded diluted in their studio incarnations, and the slow 6 minute version of TMTY was a real anti climax after the EP version.
As for “More Specials”, I was hooked by “Man At C&A”, “Jet Set” (which sounds like the precursor to a later Specials release best not mentioned at this point) and one or two others straight away but found some of it a bit bewildering on first couple of listens.
The ice rink strings version of “Do Nothing” is also superior to the album version, partly because the string sounds submerge the very out of tune piano riff that features prominently on the LP.
re jazz and racial balance: it possibly depends a bit what you mean by “established”, but on the whole brit jazz audiences were at this point quite white (and by the early 80s) not very youth-skewed — this would change a bit in the mid-80s, when a generation young black players got a lot of recognition
reggae audiences — unkess you mean ub40 — would skew black
my guess* for “most racially balanced” audiences prior to this might be jazz-funk, actually — a loyal and busy constituency way off the map of the normal rock grasp of history
*but it is purely a guess, i wasn’t attending them
‘More Specials’ is a more developed and interesting LP than ‘Specials’, its true – but then again the first album doesn’t have anything quite as uneccessary as ‘Sock It To ‘Em JB’ – a shouted list of James Bond titles – on it…
Not always a good idea getting other members of the band to contribute songs (see also: The Police)
#54 – reminds me, some Radio 1 DJ at the time played the album version by mistake, and persevered with it anyway, until it got into the ‘dub’ version at which point he acknowledged and sacked it.
Also, I think you’re in a minority regarding the ice-rink sounds, smothers the track and negates that piano riff for me.
#56 – That track was going to be a stand-alone solo single for JBradbury but I guess they changed their minds. In any case, he didn’t write it.
“Sock It To ‘Em JB” is a cover version of a 60s soul tune by Rex Garvin & The Mighty Cravers
Back when we covered “My Ding-a Ling” in 1972, I confidently said that Chuck Berry’s only number one had been recorded in the same venue as “Too Much Too Young”, namely the Locarno in Coventry. But according to what seems a reliable fansite, http://2-tone.info/2tone.pl?show102& , it was recorded at the Lyceum in London (wasn’t that where Bob Marley’s live album was recorded?) and Tiffany’s in Coventry. And here’s a revelation about the audience on the sleeve picture: it’s not even a Specials audience! A fan named Simon Joyce writes:
“I think I can solve the mystery of where the photo was taken. It was at the Lyceum, taken by Jerry Dammers, but not at a Specials gig. I’m fairly certain it was actually at a Selecter show there (I think it was one with early supporting appearances by the Beat and UB40), because I remember Jerry D taking photos from the stage — this must have been a few months before TMTY was released. Because I used to work in a very narrow record shop on weekends (I was still in school then) I was always good at finding my way to the front of the stage — that’s me with the hat on in the bottom left hand corner, while my best friend of the time, Chas, is about 12 rows back in the middle, so you can barely make him out. Somehow another friend of mine recognised my picture even before the single was released, from a small reproduction in the NME when it was “single of the week.” And since then, I’ve bought and lost or given away far too many copies of the damned thing.
One regret, though, is that an enormous skinhead (at least, that’s how I remember him) stole the hat I was wearing as soon as I got outside the gig, and I think it was the first and only time I ever got to wear it!.”
#57 – nope, i too prefer the single version. in fact, if i have one fault with “More Specials”, it’s that the ice-rink version of “do nothing” doesn’t appear.
All of More Specials is brilliant but my favourite track is I Can’t Stand It – domestic misery to the accompaniment of a cha cha cha beat.
Ice rink version took a while to sink in for me but, hey, I love both. I was suckered by the MOR aspect of More Specials (note strategically placed ’sticker’ that you couldn’t remove), especially I Can’t Stand It.
Stereotype, as mentioned in another thread (can’t remember where), had one of the weirdest chart histories of any single. It looked guaranteed to break their Top 10 run but in its fourth week on the chart it ended up going from 25 to 6, and then back to 22 the following week.
.. and they said chart hyping was dead!
About as suspect as you could get!
Oh yeah, and as per the Lesser Free Trade Hall audience for the Sex Pistols gig, the number of people who claim to be on that picure for the Specials’ live e.p. comes to…..
I was a fan of the Specials from an early stage – I went to this gig with Suicide supporting the Clash, sometime in 1978, and the other act were a band I’d never heard of called the Coventry Specials. I loved Gangsters, and I still love the first album (and I’m totally meh about the second). They made sense to me from the start – reggae and punk had been so linked, and a lot of people in my generation (I’d have been 18 or 19 at the time of that gig) had first heard a lot of reggae, stuff beyond the occasional hit, in a punk context. The combination of the energy of ska with that of punk made perfect sense at the time.
I didn’t much like this single, and still don’t – sonically it was fine, its anger is impressive, but it seemed to be sneering at not one particular woman but at countless young working class women who had babies at a young age. When this came out, I was living with a woman (we stayed together for 23 years), who had hung out with half a dozen other girls in school and just after: she was the only one of them who hadn’t had a baby by the time she was 17 (the earliest had been 14). This wasn’t any special judgement on her part, I think. I felt as if a band I really liked was sneering at the kind of person I was in love with.
We split up 7 years ago, but that hasn’t changed my reaction to this. Maybe it wasn’t the intention, but it felt contemptuous towards an awful lot of people who, as far as I could and can see, don’t deserve any condemnation at all. I’ve no idea whether early babies led to their having happier lives or not, but whatever the case, that’s not an excuse for this kind of emotion, for me.
So I’d have given Gangsters, say, a 9, but for me this would be worth about 3.
Oh, as for audiences: virtually all white for that early gig, of course, but also for the Selecter a little later, whereas I saw Misty In Roots around the same time, and my wife and I were the only white people there. Clearly the black reggae fans were not hugely taken with Two-Tone – or, possibly, the expectation of crowds of aggressive white people (there was a fight at the Selecter gig), the sense of a music and maybe atmosphere recalling skinheads, was an offputting factor to attending the gigs, I don’t know. I recall some years later (mid- and late-’80s) being a little disappointed that the African bands I saw had almost all-white audiences too.
The video was cut short on totp as well, it reminds me of being 17 and in a rough town called Chelmsley Wood, where I lived at the time, prefer this to the LP track which I didn’t hear until much later on BRMB on a chart rundown.
I saw the Specials at the Glasgow Apollo two days before Christmas – Sunday 23 December 1979 – and together with the Brotherhood of Breath they constitute just about the best argument for multiculturalism in music I can think of. Both groups took the genres they loved – ska, post-Ellington big band jazz – and directly injected vibrant and sometimes violent nowness. Theirs was empathically a living music, stripped of drear worthiness and stultifying respect; it existed for its own now and ideally had to be witnessed at first hand, aurally and visually.
The Specials – and concurrently, the 2-Tone movement – had emerged with their avant-garde post-punk take on ska in the summer of ’79 with the already strange “Gangsters.” Madness, the Beat and the Bodysnatchers rapidly followed in their wake – and eventually, and tangentially, Dexy’s and UB40. The movement was energising and inspiring; punk in its blood and rock steady in its Coventry-born genes. Watching the Specials onstage in their rumpled suits, porkpie hats and merciful-bordering-on-glum abandon made me think of what it must have been like to witness, say, the early Archie Shepp groups live; noisy and militant, but ultimately joyous in outlook. The first, eponymous Specials album was bountiful in raw colour, produced in a no-nonsense, get-it-down-quick-NEXT! fashion by Elvis Costello, and featured Chrissie Hynde enthusiastically joining in on the chorus of “Nite Klub,” keen backing vocals throughout from a then little-known American New Wave girl group called the Go-Go’s, and the imperturbable Rico, the direct link to their roots, the noblest of all trombonists with his effortless, natural authority.
The E.P. – the first live number one since “The Wonder Of You” – still gives a good idea of what it was like to experience the Specials on stage. Side one was recorded in London and features “Too Much Too Young,” a slow-burning, mournful (and seemingly endless) skank in its album incarnation which they despatch at 300 mph in a shade over two minutes, and their raucously steady take on “Guns Of Navarone” (so it’s also the only number one to involve Dimitri Tiomkin) featuring Rico’s majestic slide. Side two finds them on home ground, at Tiffany’s nightclub in Coventry, roaring their way through “Skinhead Symphony,” a tribute to the music which had inspired them as children a decadde earlier, a medley featuring “The Liquidator,” “Skinhead Moonstomp” and “Long Shot Kick De Bucket,” all of which they play as though they had been written two minutes ago and as though they only had two minutes left to live.
As a souvenir, a snapshot of about-to-be-happy youth, it’s indispensable; as a fuck off to the bonehead racist Right (who continually tried to disrupt Specials gigs) and isolationist racists in general, the band and the document still stand tall and proud – this is how we can coexist happily together. The listener gets so carried away in the currents that even the intentionally nitwit misogyny of “Too Much Too Young,” a harangue against teenage motherhood, seems palatable; mainly because singer Terry Hall whines it in the purposely puerile manner of a spoilt brat (“When you should be having fun with ME!”) such that its very Thatcherite message (“You’re just another burden on the Welfare STATE!”) is revealed as the childish tantrum it really is. Meanwhile I danced and danced like the proverbial Lanarkshire dervish, and continue so to do.
Fantastic record that defined not only the era then but also today. The Specials, in my view, were one of the best “unknown” bands to ever grace this country. They lost there way just after the Ska explosion with drivel like Rascist Friend, War Crimes and the Crap Nelson Mandela as these things didnt effect or bother us or were part of our every day life like Ghost Town, Nite Klub or Rat race did. I was there, in awe, on there first tour in Plymouth as a spotty 13 year old in 79 and I was there in awe as a hairy arsed bloke, in Newcastle in 2009.