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.

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.

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…..

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.

“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!.”

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.

Not always a good idea getting other members of the band to contribute songs (see also: The Police)

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

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.

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’d always pick “MOR-e Specials” as being better, but the first still rates a 10 for me anyway…

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.

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 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.

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!!”