Ghost Town peaked at #20 in New Zealand but did spend 13 weeks in the charts. The Specials’ Free Nelson Mandela – not quite GT but v.v. good – had 3 weeks at #1 in 1984.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13780074

Back to Southampton, and the whole family had gone out for a meal in Town. A restaurant that belonged to some family friends was where we ate. I had steak iirc. That night, I had my first irish coffee. The evening had been fun, but the taxi ride home, we saw 70 or more rioters at the far end of the street we were supposed to go down. The taxi driver turned down a side street and took the road that ran parallel. We heard the sirens and the shouting. I caught glimpses of the riot in progress, as we passed 3 connecting side streets… cars got set fire to and people were running. The glimpses fuelled my imagination. After the school holiday, I wrote a composition, where all the youth of the nation had risen up to crush the establishment, and nothing worked properly and people began to starve. I called it “Ghost Town”.

It’s hard to determine whether home life was that different in nature; my father felt more settled in his final months, yet there were still the outbursts, the unnecessary stress, everything pointing to a premature end. Perhaps he could have completed his journey towards happiness in another year or two, but in most senses it was already too late. In any case the end came on the morning of Tuesday 14 July, when he suffered a coronary thrombosis and was taken to the local hospital; although he had rallied round to a degree that afternoon, he declined suddenly on the Wednesday morning (the hospital rang us at 7:40 am) and by the time we got there he had gone, eleven days after his fiftieth birthday. His was the first dead body I had seen; he looked asleep and felt unutterably cold. The open mouth was really the factor which shook me.

There was an unusually black and low-level mass of clouds in the Airdrie and Coatbridge sky that morning on our way back home; my mother made a great play of being inconsolable, but really – and shamefully? – we were relieved, as though released from a huge weight which had been slowly crushing us over the previous decade. Is it inhuman and unforgiving for me still to be feeling this, a quarter of a century later, despite the fact that it was my father’s love and passion for music and art and cinema and literature (oh, what he would have made of Blue Velvet!) which pretty much formed the person whose words you are reading now? Is anything worthwhile in life anything less than complicated?

It was many, many years later that I discovered that Jerry Dammers had written “Ghost Town” specifically with Glasgow in mind; the Specials toured there in late 1980, and took especial note of the decay (though their native Coventry could tell a similar story, as could most British inner cities). It is the slow terminus of everything which had previously manifested itself as life, and I do not say this simply because it was the last number one record which my father lived to see; its intent is implicit in its title, and its atmosphere, with harmonies partly drawn from Ellington’s “East St Louis Toodle-Oo” (my dad spotted that very quickly), was that of an abandoned vaudeville palace from a century before; the Dickensian cackles of the wordless backing vocals, the immense, vast, dark deserts of spaces between anything being played or said, partly ascribable to dub but bearing a huge debt to the spaces inside Joe Meek’s head, and the song’s two hopeless twin peaks – that heartbreaking moment when the sun shines and Dick Cuthell’s cornet celebrates in curlicues as Terry Hall sings “Do you remember the good old days?” and its polar opposite on the full-length 12-inch version, with Rico’s mournfully eloquent, Roswell Rudd-esque trombone elegy, drum crashes around him thundering like bulldozers or closing down on him like a gigantic sarcophagus lid.

Equally it is difficult to imagine trip hop or even grime and/or dubstep having gone on their particular aesthetic autobahns without the example of “Ghost Town,” and Dammers’ experiments with avant-muzak on 1980′s More Specials album, to inspire them. For me, at my age, in that context, in those circumstances, “Ghost Town” felt like my life closing down, and the principal imperative for me to begin another one. The winds howl over the tenements of Easterhouse and Castlemilk at its conclusion just as they did over John Leyton’s moors twenty years previously; as a record it is unparalleled and unequalled, as a number one it is still scarcely believable – did I dream that a record sounding like this and saying what it says went to number one? Did I dream the riots in Southall and Toxteth and Brixton which erupted during its stay at number one? – but, as with “God Save The Queen,” it is a cold gauntlet (wanting so much to be warm) thrown down at the rest of pop; as with “Telstar” it is utterly sui generis; as with these two number ones, it is one of the greatest.

Just remembered that on my tape of Piccadilly Radio’s end-of-81 rundown, the howls at the end of “Ghost Town” segue beautifully with the howls at the start of “Prince Charming”, to the extent that I can’t hear the former without imagining the latter fading in.

At the time we in Scotland (thankfully) were rather disengaged from the riots (tho if I remember rightly some acolytes of a recent CBB evictee tried to foment some 1980s bother, but got no takers). I’ve always thought of this as being a better record than a song, and I appreciate it rather more now than I did at the time. I can see why it’s a 10 as a means of capturing a moment of time, but don’t rate it that highly as a musical offering.

For me, this is the week I graduated, and that Harry Chapin was killed. That, to me, was much more important than what was happening in cities that seemed to me then as alien as LA or New Orleans.

The day before we flew out of San Francisco, my mom and I were staying in a hotel. It was the first time I’d seen the tv news in a while, as our tv had been packed up for weeks. A big hotel tv with the news of rioting all over England, and then the huge face of Thatcher intoning this or that. It had gone on for…days? Weeks? All over the place. And this song, which I would argue goes to a place where numbers (crucial as they are) don’t really matter much any more, was already number one, though I wouldn’t hear it until the fall when it hypnotized me and shocked me (and yet sounded oddly familiar too, going back to U.S. jazz songs of the Depression)…little did I know that the man who was eventually going to become my husband was going through his own life-changing summer as well – ghosts for both of us, moments of the past, there and yet not there.

Ranking Roger – at the height of the riots, The Beat performed “Doors Of Your Heart” on Saturday morning kids’ TV – I think it was still Swap Shop – and Ranking Roger looked especially impassioned as he toasted: “Stick ‘im in the living room and turn out the light / Bet you wouldn’t know if ‘im was black or white … so what’s the use in fighting / warrrrrr – alright!” Such an underrated band.