Done nothing

The Specials then - in the early 1980s

IN OVER 30 years of following chart music, it is hard to think of a number one record as intelligent, as unremittingly cool, and as fine as Ghost Town.

Even those who hadn’t directly experienced the loss of industry mourned by the song, or shared in the Specials’ despair at a working class turning on itself were entranced by its haunting hook and its willful refusal to conform to the diktats of a three-minute hit. Of course, ska had been playing fast and loose with those rules for a couple of years by then, with Madness’ Night Boat to Cairo the most obvious example. But none of them got under the skin of an anxious country in quite the same way.

It is easy to forget just how anxious we were. Ghost Town‘s run at the top of the charts was sandwiched by two of the biggest riots in postwar history – in Brixton in April 1981 and in Toxteth, in Liverpool, some three months later. It was coincidence, but the record hit a nerve, and not in a good way. Fear was everywhere. There was still a very real threat of nuclear war (or so we were led to believe) and unemployment had breached the three million mark, while Thatcherism’s hard and often harsh economic reforms were all set to blow up spectacularly in the face of the two-year-old Tory Government. The country was all set for a confrontation as the have-nots began to organise against those reforms.

Thatcher blinked first. Fortunately for her, Baron Scarman’s reports into the 1981 riots gave her the opportunity. Although predominantly race-related in its cause, Scarman also concluded that the unrest was linked to social problems – what we now call social exclusion. The Conservatives hastily dispatched Michael Heseltine to head up the Merseyside Task Force, which would go on to devise ways of reviving run-down areas, ways that later provided a blueprint for inner city regeneration across Britain, including in Wales’ three cities.

The video promo for Ghost Town was almost as memorable as the song. No matter that it was the dark and empty streets of London that the band chose to career around in an old Vauxhall Cresta rather than their native Coventry, which had inspired the song. It provided the atmosphere the band was looking for. This was a Britain of braziers outside factory gates and the three-minute warning, of crumbling concrete tower blocks and uncovered asbestos, of IRA codewords and hurrying home after dark, even if the Yorkshire Ripper had been arrested that January. Bleak, bleak, bleak.

Their finest moment would also prove to be The Specials’ swansong. Around the time that Ghost Town fell out of the charts, lead singer Terry Hall, along with singer Neville Staple and founder member Lynval Golding left the band to form the Fun Boy Three. Key figure Jerry Dammers, with whom the three had fought, revised the line-up and continued with The Special AKA until the mid-1980s, most famously with Free Nelson Mandela. One of the crucial factors in the split may well have been Hall’s considerable problems with depression, which wasn’t successfully treated until a couple of years ago. Dammers, however, remains the only member of the original line-up that has elected to stay at home while the group tours this time around.

Of course, many bands – particularly from the 1980s – have got back together again and gone on the road again, capitalising on both the nostalgia generated among responsibility-heavy 40-somethings eager to remember a time when there was just music and the opposite sex to get excited about, and among subsequent generations that regard the era as cool or have grown to sincerely love their parents’ music, helping to throw the pop music rulebook out the window in the process.

But there are reasons to argue that this is not a reunion tour for The Specials. Even though bands such as Spandau Ballet, A-Ha and even Madness have recorded new music since rejoining, they are there simply to pedal the old hits to balding accountants. Such bands are spent as a creative force and have become something else – purely comforting, like slippers we once swore we’d never wear.

But even though The Specials aren’t recording fresh material, their re-emergence couldn’t have come at a more timely moment. Their lyrics slice through the generational gap, and make them as relevant as ever. They still have something to say that we should listen to.

So what kind of things did they say? Surprisingly, the band only ever recorded one overt anti-Thatcherite song, a re-tread of Bob Dylan’s Maggie’s Farm. Some of their songs were about the issues of the times impacted on the personal life (Do Nothing, Man at C&A, Concrete Jungle), or the callousness of the better-off (Hey Little Rich Girl, Rat Race, International Jet Set). But most of them were about the unthinking ways people drove themselves into dead-end existences (Blank Expression, Nike Klub, Stereotypes, and the peerless anthem Too Much Too Young).

This last theme is taken to its logical conclusion in Ghost Town, with lines like: “Too much fighting on the dance floor”, and “Why must the youth fight against themselves?” There is no optimism and no search for solutions. It’s as if everybody – The Specials included – are all out of ideas, beaten down. But in hearing these lines after previous songs that laid out the band’s loathing for individual behaviour, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that Hall & co believed the working class had a responsibility to itself to find its way out of hardship and back to hope.

It seems an almost unusual view to take these days, but it wasn’t always so. Perhaps the greatest example of working class self-empowerment was to be found here in Wales, in the miner’s institutes, founded on the pennies of colliers eager to lift their fates and those of  their families out of the laps of the gods – or, more accurately, away from the whims of coalmasters.

If a band like The Specials was to emerge these days, would they do the same? It seems doubtful. Everyone involved in alleviating poverty and disadvantage (with perhaps the exception of Ian Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice) appears to believe that it is the fault of anyone except those affected by such problems. In that respect, so the thinking appears to suggest, they remain entirely blameless.

There have been other instances where the behaviour of the working class (and, subsequently, what came to be known as the underclass) has been called into question by those on the left, but they remain few and far between. In Our Friends in the North, a stay-at-home thug that beats senseless Nicky’s father Felix, the revered but impersonal Jarrow Marcher, for having the temerity to ask him to take his boy in hand. However, this shocking incident seems to be there to illustrate Thatcher’s most infamous maxim. A case of “There’s no such thing as society” brought to life.

Setting aside the discussion on abrogation of responsibility, what The Specials had to say on Ghost Town rings down the years. We are reminded of how powerless we are made by recession, left to huddle together while the winds of economic downturn pass by. But those changes that the song’s lyrics document can still be felt now. Post-industrial areas such as the South Wales Valleys have never truly recovered from Thatcherism. Improved, perhaps, but not recovered. Even though the decline of British heavy industry and manufacturing was well under way by the time the Conservatives wielded the axe (they might say the pruning shears), there remains a sentiment that things might not have been quite so bad if the Government had not acted so decisively.

We shall probably never know. But successive administrations – including Labour governments fully committed to social justice, as inequality and poverty is now termed – have only ever managed to tinker round the edges, alleviating rather than curing, waving away evidence of social decline such as generational unemployment in favour of the latest project spend headline. But perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on our politicians. Nobody has yet managed to come up with a solution to poverty, and the issues we have in Wales might take decades to resolve.

The Specials knew that they never had the answers. Instead, they set themselves the equally tough task of chronicling the times. Neil Tenant once said that pop songs will always be better than rock music, because whereas rock music is always looking to become timeless, pop plants the listener in a moment, making it a powerful and evocative memory tool.

And The Specials now - tearing it up earlier this year

The advent of downloading has changed music in a way where perhaps Tenant’s Law no longer applies. Teenagers no longer sit glued to the radio on a Sunday evening, frantically starting and stopping the record button on their tape recorders. Many don’t pay any attention to the charts anymore, with TV music channels, Spotify and – yes – Pirate Bay now preferred. And tastes have become less tribal and far more catholic. It’s not uncommon to find 13-year-old Johnny Cash or Trojan Records fanatics. Rather than avoid like the plague, many teenagers now raid their parents’ music collections. No doubt some of them will have come across and got into The Specials. And surely, in an age when one in four of all 18 to 25-year-olds are without work, words like “Each day I walk along this lonely street, Trying to find, find a future” will chime with a new audience.

But it’s worth remembering that these songs weren’t written to last. They were recorded in response to a recession-wracked Britain in the grip of huge economic and social change almost three decades ago. That they resonate today should be of no comfort to those of us that were moved by then back then. Many of us have grown up into decision makers, and yet this country still faces many of the problems that make The Specials’ lyrics so relevant. We have abrogated a responsibility of our own, to our teenage promises. For that reason, there should be no nostalgia. Ghost Town should haunt our dance steps.