Simon Price contribution to this book was about The Specials less vaunted second album. Price is another who has made a good career for himself in music journalism since he wrote this. The Rock and Pop critic for The Independent for twelve years, he's also written for virtually every music magazine going since his nine years with Melody Maker in the late Eighties and for much of the Nineties.
During his time there he was pretty much their Goth and New Romantic correspondent. He raved about many rather dubious bands over the years and a few good ones. He had a perverse obsession with Duran Duran and inadvisably put his full force behind the misguided and doomed Romo movement in the Nineties. The Maker were pretty much the only ones who gave it any press at all and Price was largely responsible. But he probably didn't care and probably still doesn't care if he was misguided, he wrote about what he knew and to give him his due always wrote pretty well which no doubt accounts for his success after he left the paper in 1997.
He writes pretty well here, making a good case for a very interesting and diverse album. More Specials came out at a point in time in Britain when the threat of nuclear war, the Iranian Revolution and the economic and cultural ravages of early Thatcherism made Britain a grim place indeed. The Specials response? Gallows humour and dark, mordant tunes. But tunes that swang. They continued to have hits even as they experimented with their sound. Jerry Dammers, (still really the leader of a band of strong, conflicting personalities), lured them towards a queasy 'lounge' sound. This is most of all a strange album and Price accurately nails it as such on the way upbraiding them for the misogyny of the lyrics of so many of their early records, still the major blot on the band's copybook, even all these years later.
It was the original line up of The Specials' last album. Inevitable really. There were too many conflicting elements in the mix. They were a multicultural band plagued by violent, fascist elements in their audience. One that put out singles focused on the bleakest issues imaginable which nevertheless shot straight to the highest slots in the chart. Their first seven 45s reached the Top Ten. Full of strong characters who were bound to be forced in separate directions sooner rather than later. There was this, there was the Ghost Town, which soundtracked a summer of rioting in British inner cities during the summer of 1981. It stayed at Number One in the singles chart for three weeks.Then they splintered and never really came back together. Dammers abstained from the reformed Specials who reunited in 2009 and have been doing so intermittently ever since in a gradually diminishing line up like a Two Tone Magnificent Seven. I witnessed the first concert of that tour ten years ago at the 02 Academy in Newcastle. It remains one of the best gigs I've ever seen just as The Specials remain one of the truly special bands.
'Enjoy yourself. It's later than you think...'
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