Showing posts with label reggae. Show all posts

Thursday, 10 July 2025

2-Tone and possibly my best gig ever

If I had to pick the best concert I’ve ever been to, there are several candidates. I’ve written about seeing Pink Floyd play Dark Side Of The Moon in 1974, seeing the outrageous Tubes at Hammersmith in 1977, BobMarley at Madison Square Garden in 1978, or the sensuous and sublime Joni Mitchell in 1983. Steely Dan at Hammersmith in 2000 had probably the best sound.

But above all those, I think, in terms of sheer funky excitement was this genuine contender for best gig ever. It was 17th November 1979 at Loughborough University Students Union – The Specials, The Selecter and Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Three bands at the top of their game.

What a gig. Each band put on a funky soul-stirring show that would have been terrific if it had been just the one band alone. As a three-fer it was outstanding. I couldn’t say who was better, they were all fantastic.

I even kept the street poster - massive, like the ones you used to see posted on street corners. Kept it for years until I emigrated and it was just too big to pack into my memorabilia case. Wish I still had it, as a memento of a wild night. The one pictured here is from the same time, different venue.

Dexy’s Midnight Runners had already released their debut single, Dance Stance (changed to its original title, Burn It Down, on the album Searching for the Young Soul Rebels) and had been looking for a major label deal. Jerry Dammers, leader of The Specials and founder of the 2-Tone record label, wanted to sign Dexy's and offered them a support slot playing alongside The Specials and The Selecter. They replaced Madness who had left the 2-Tone tour after their initial success. Dexy's eventually signed for EMI, but for this brief moment, they were attached to 2-Tone.

Dexy's Midnight Runners, 1979

This was Dexy’s Midnight Runners in their full soul-boy mode, all of them wearing black thigh-length coats and wooly hats. They must have been boiling on stage.

Their second single, Geno had yet to be released. For now, they had to be content with third billing. Six months on from this gig, Geno would get them to Number One.

Like the other bands on that night, Dexy’s were at their best in a live club situation, with exuberant horns and a front man, Kevin Rowland, consumed by a passion for the soul music of his youth.

Rowland told The Guardian “The lyrics are all true. I saw Geno Washington in '68 at the Railway Hotel in Harrow. I was 15 years old and out with all the older kids – short-haired, cool-looking mods-turning-into-skinhead types. I didn’t have any intention to be a singer at that point. I just thought you go to school, go to work and that’s it. But when Geno came on swinging a towel, something clicked in me."

This studio staged video for the song 'There, There My Dear' gives you some idea of how Dexy's came across at the time.

Where Dexy's relied heavily on the soul bands of the 1960s for their style, the Specials and The Selecter combined reggae and ska with the energy of punk rock.

Jerry Dammers said he saw punk as a piss-take of rock music: "it was great and it was really funny, but I couldn't believe people took it as a serious musical genre which they then had to copy. It seemed to be a bit more healthy to have an integrated kind of British music, rather than white people playing rock and black people playing their music. Ska was an integration of the two."

The Selecter, 1979

I was an early adopter of 2-Tone. I had already bought Gangsters by The Special AKA the week it was released, and when The Selecter released their first single, On My Radio, that became a firm favourite too. As a big fan of funk music, The Selecter’s brand of funky ska was actually my favourite sound at the time.

'Three Minute Hero' captures that energy in this live clip. Their leader and chief songwriter, Neol Davies, put together a group of the funkiest players in Coventry, topped off with the charismatic Pauline Black as lead vocalist.

They were terrific live, totally a match for their label-mates in musicality and sheer exuberance. And like The Specials, The Selecter were a deliberately mixed-race band. Pauline Black said 2-Tone was standing for multiculturalism before the word had even been invented. "It was an exciting time. We'd all come to it from different backgrounds, but we found a unity in the message we were saying."

But like the numbskull skins who attached themselves to the punk movement, 2-Tone had to contend with the overt racism of a minority of their audience. Garry Bushell's review for Sounds noted that "Pauline got uptight at the arm exercises of a small German Movement turn-out who didn't suss how ridiculous they looked, showing their enjoyment via sieg-heils to a mostly black band playing mostly black music."

The 2-Tone movement started out at the same time as Rock Against Racism. "For me, it was no good being anti-racist if you didn't involve black people, so what The Specials tried to do was create something that was more integrated," said Dammers.

Rock Against Racism was a reaction to the rise of the far-right National Front and the race riots that had become more frequent in the late 1970s, peaking in 1981, just as The Specials were getting to Number One on the charts with 'Ghost Town'. It was a time of violent confrontation on the streets, reflecting conflict not just between whites and blacks, but the police as well. A disproportionate number of black men died in custody in those years, and still do.

The Specials. Jerry Dammers (centre)

The country was falling apart, said Dammers. "You travelled from town to town and what was happening was terrible. In Liverpool, all the shops were shuttered up, everything was closing down. Margaret Thatcher was closing down all the industries, throwing millions of people on the dole.

"You could see the frustration and anger in the audience. In Glasgow, there were these little old ladies on the streets selling all their household goods, their cups and saucers. It was unbelievable. It was clear that something was very, very wrong."

Dammers wasn't afraid to use his platform to confront people on the issues of the day. He tapped into their frustration and lack of hope with songs that addressed them directly. Songs like Too Much Too Young, Rat Race, Stupid Marriage and Racist Friend.

You need stamina for a gig where all three bands are playing not just foot-tapping sounds but get-up, jump-about-go-crazy music. This was a student union, so not a massive gig, maybe a thousand people, and that lent an electric intimacy to the event. After Dexy's and The Selecter had done their thing, I remember thinking how can The Specials top that?

Once they hit the stage, their connection with the audience was such that there was never any question this was their show. They really were, yes Special. They could get a song about contraception to number one while uniting a black and white audience. It was completely unprecedented. The Specials live shows were so full-on and the crowd so rowdy, it really was like a punk gig at times, without the bad vibes. Each gig would finish with the audience invited onto the stage, and despite the chaos, the band carried on playing.

It's a shame that personality clashes brought an end to The Specials after just two albums. They were the conscience of a generation for a short period of time and it should have been longer.

In fact, all three bands went through some tough times after the initial excitement of those first gigs, with infighting and wholesale personnel changes.

Once Dexy's Midnight Runners broke through with Geno, they copped a lot of flak from the media for Rowland's confrontational stance: "We took the music press on by putting statements out in adverts instead of giving interviews, which infuriated them. We took everybody on, really. I take responsibility. I was far too controlling and aggressive."

Dammers was arguably just as controlling within The Specials. He had a right to be, but after a while the others didn't share his view that everything has to be political. "At first it was a great laugh, we're all in this together, there's no stars here," said Dammers. The level of intensity in The Specials music and their live shows would have been difficult to maintain, though.

Once the original band had dispersed, Dammers ploughed on. Another hit single, Free Nelson Mandela, led to Dammers founding the British wing of Artists Against Apartheid, raising awareness of the jailed South African leader of the African National Congress, and providing the inspiration for the 70th birthday tribute concert at Wembley Stadium in 1988. Another of my all-time best gigs.

BBC Documentary - 2 Tone The Sound of Coventry

THE SPECIALS: Live in Concert (UK Television 1979)

The Specials - "Blank Expression" (Live 1979)

Guardian article - The year rock found the power to unite

IF YOU LIKE MY BLOG, PLEASE HIT THE FOLLOW BUTTON ON THE SIDE PANEL THANKS

Also on this blog:

People Power - Live Aid, Mandela and Political Gigs

Seeing Bob Marley - live in New York 1978

How my mid-1980s funk band was revived in 2019

ALSO - Check out Michael Burdett’s live show ‘Before Fame’ in which he talks about discovering Wham! when they were a ska band. True story.

https://beforefame.co.uk/

Monday, 1 June 2020

Bob Marley and The Wailers - live in New York, 1978

In a recent blog on the punk rock bands, I mentioned my first visit to New York in 1977. Since then I have been back there on many occasions, most recently in the late summer of 2019, for my epic 50th anniversary weekend in Woodstock country.

The reason I am so fond of New York is there is always plenty of live music to enjoy. The best musicians on the planet - the ones playing on all your records - are either in New York or LA. Any night of the week you can see them playing in small clubs. If I had to choose one city to live in, other than where I live now, New York would be it.

The first big live concert I saw there was in the summer of 1978, when I returned from my home in the UK to stay with a friend and her family in Long Island. One day, itching to get out of the suburbs and looking through the newspaper, I saw an advert for a concert at Madison Square Garden - Bob Marley & The Wailers, supported by Stanley Clarke.

Too good to miss, I thought, so I got the train into the city and headed for The Garden.

My ticket

I wasn't so familiar with how to get about the city in those days. As I mentioned in the punk story, New York in the 70s was not a safe place. The city was on its knees financially, virtually bankrupt. There were regular blackouts and street crime was commonplace.

I once saw a guy chasing his girl down the street in broad daylight brandishing a kitchen knife. She ran out in front of a police car (the only way to get them to stop in some neighbourhoods) and the guy walked back past me with the knife tucked under his shirt. Everyone else just carried on as if this was an everyday occurrence.

There was a group of vigilantes - the Guardian Angels - policing the subway so that folks could travel safely. On one occasion in Manhattan, I had made the rookie mistake of getting on the wrong subway train - the famous 'A' Train that - as the song says - takes you to 125th Street in Harlem.

The New York subway has express trains that skip several stops and the A train is one of them. I got on it downtown and then it sailed right past my stop. When it arrived at 125th St, I stepped off the train and was greeted with a scene straight out of the Velvet Underground's I'm Waiting For The Man.

"Hey white boy, what you doin' uptown?"

It was comical really. I didn't feel at all threatened. It was obviously a routine situation for these Harlem drug dealers. I politely declined the goods on offer and crossed the platform without fuss.

On the night of the Bob Marley concert I had no such issues, because the Long Island Railroad terminates at Penn Station, which is right where Madison Square Garden is located.

Once inside, I was keen to hear Stanley Clarke slap that bass. I was a jazz rock fan and Stan was The Man. He had crossed over with the rock audience at this time, with his albums School Days and Journey To Love. But the Bob Marley crowd at The Garden were not much interested and became restless during his set.

I remember Clarke said something from the stage like, "I know you're not here to listen to this...we won't take too much more of your time...here's one called School Days..."

Here's a clip of the Stanley Clarke Band from Montreux in 1977 which includes his more well-known tracks like Silly Putty and School Days https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFdfD4-jm7M

Bob Marley & The Wailers were one of the top acts in the world at this point. It was a privilege to have witnessed them in such an auspicious venue. The crowd were in good spirits - there was a constant waft of dope smoke - and the concert seemed to get better as it went along.

The 1978 US tour was promoting the latest album Kaya. I had the record, so I was familiar with the new material as well as recent classics such as Exodus, Get Up Stand Up and No Woman No Cry.

A review of Bob Marley at MSG

Bob and The Wailers started the show with Positive Vibration and they played several other tracks from the Rastaman Vibration album, one of my favourites, including Crazy Baldhead and War.

Reviews of the tour from the time reflect the fact that in America reggae was still considered black people's music. While we in England drew no racial distinction - in that white kids enjoyed reggae too - in the US white kids were getting their kicks mostly from Aerosmith, Fleetwood Mac, Peter Frampton and Foghat.

Make no mistake, this was Bob Marley at the peak of his powers. You can hear what the 1978 band sounded like on the live album Babylon By Bus.

After the concert, I bought the tour t-shirt, which might have been a mistake since it featured a picture on the back of Bob smoking a massive bifter. I put the shirt down the wash chute back at the family house in Long Island.

Second time I saw them was at Crystal Palace, 1980

It didn't come back for days. I went down to the den room and it was draped on the back of a chair - Bob in all his Rastaman glory, puffing on a spliff. I took that as a message of disapproval. A youthful indiscretion on my part. I'm sure my parents had the same reaction when I took it home.

* * * * *

I've pasted here some contemporary clips of Bob Marley to give you a flavour of the times.