Going to gigs was one of life’s great excitements when I was young, but I always regret the ones I missed. Of course it would have been fantastic to have seen the Beatles at the Kaiserkeller on the Reeperbahn in the early 1960s; or the Jimi Hendrix set at Woodstock which culminated in his version of the Star Spangled Banner; or The Who at the Leeds University Refectory in 1970; or that famous gig in 1976 by the Sex Pistols at Manchester Free Trade Hall which had 27 people in the audience. Unlike the young Billy Bragg, I was not in Victoria Park, Hackney in 1978 for the Rock Against Racism concert headlined by The Clash.
Attending these gigs would have involved time travel. But I’ve managed to miss plenty of gigs which it would have been easy to get to. I was offered a ticket for the Smiths in Manchester in 1986, but decided not to go. They split up soon afterwards. I failed to be among the 27,000 who saw the Stone Roses at Spike Island in 1990, despite living not far away. I was probably at a Labour Students event.
I was reminded of all this during the week when I rectified one of my biggest regrets – never seeing the Specials – by landing a ticket to see them at the Brighton Centre. It was a fantastic concert. I’ve been going to the Brighton Centre for over 20 years. This was the first time it wasn’t for Labour party conference.
The band eschewed any desire to play material from their experimental new album (there isn’t one). They opened with Gangsters and encored with Ghost Town, and ran through all the hits and all the album tracks. They gave the crowd – a curious combination of 40-something skinheads and people born a decade after Ghost Town was released – what they wanted: loud, celebratory 2-Tone. The music of LPs, C90s, Top of the Pops, and school discos. If you don’t know what an LP was, it was, in the words of Stewart Lee, like a ‘flat, black MP3 file which was better than your entire life.’
At the start of the gig they showed huge images on a screen of iconic moments from the past 30 years. When the crowd booed Thatcher, my heart leapt a little. It was like the 80s all over again. Then they booed Blair, Brown and Cameron, and I was brought back to the 2010s with a bump. The fact is that the audiences that came to Specials gigs in their early 1980s heyday were being politicised. The founding principles of the Specials were anti-racist, at a time when casual racism was everywhere: in stand-up comedy, in sitcoms, on football terraces, in newspapers and in the workplace.
It was also a time when non-casual racism, that is carefully constructed, deliberative and pre-planned racism, was everywhere. The National Front marched through the cities. Policemen got injured. People got killed. The National Front stood in local and national elections. They worried the Conservative party so much that Thatcher felt the need to head them off with her notorious ‘swamping’ interview in 1978. One of the NF’s leading lights in the 1970s is currently a member of the European parliament representing Yorkshire and Humberside.
The importance of 2-Tone was that it challenged racism in all its forms. It did it, not in an abstract polytechnic sociology kind of way, but instead in a physical, visual and auditory way. Elvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin – these acts adopted black music (mostly Rock n Roll and the Blues) but didn’t bring any political message to the party. Indeed Rock Against Racism was formed partly as a reaction to Eric Clapton’s chanting of ‘keep Britain white’ and his declaration of support for Enoch Powell at a concert in Birmingham. The irony of a racist blues guitarist was not lost.
The Specials, the Beat, The Selector and other bands of the genre adopted black music – ska, dancehall, reggae – and gave it a British urban twist with a punk ethos. By combining black and white musicians, the bands were a physical manifestation of friendship and collaboration between blacks and whites. The Specials black and white album art and the cartoon figure in his pork-pie hat, tonic suit and black tie where symbols of racial integration. Their song lyrics too addressed urban alienation (‘Concrete Jungle’, ‘Ghost Town’) and anti-racism, for example the words to ‘It doesn’t make it alright’:
‘Just because you’re a black boy
Just because you’re a white
It doesn’t mean you’ve got to hate him
It doesn’t mean you’ve got to fight.’
Later, the Specials became the Special AKA to record the seminal In the Studio album, which included the song ‘Racist Friend’. It went:
‘If you have a racist friend
Now is the time, now is the time
For your friendship to end
Be it your sister, be it your brother
Be it your cousin, or your uncle, or your lover.’
‘Free Nelson Mandela’, the anthem of the anti-apartheid movement, also appeared on this album.
Thirty years on, the racial tensions that provided a backdrop the Specials’ early years are not the same. Racism is still prevalent, but has changed its terms of engagement. The BNP is defeated, but not dead. Mandela is free. The audience in Brighton this week were not political, and there was no attempt to politicise them. They booed all the political leaders, without favour. The anger has been replaced by nostalgia; the politics by consumerism. The young men who marched against the NF are now older, probably more concerned with their allotments, and it’s hard to tell where the skinheads end and male-pattern baldness begins.
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Paul Richards is a former special adviser and writes a weekly column for Progress, Paul’s week in politics
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The young men, who like me marched against the NF, who harried their police protected demonstrations, who marched to Victoria Park to watch the Clash and Tom Robinson – are not more concerned about their allotments. Many like me are active in politics. Most however – unlike myself – have long left the Labour Party with its pro-big business capitulation to Capitalism. Remember we came from an era when Tony Benn was only narrowly defeated for the Labour Party deputy leadership. Where Thatcher only maintained her popularity by the Falklands War.
I was at Coventry (Lanchester) Polytechnic when the Specials formed in that city – they used the term Special AKA in the very beginning, shortening to the Specials. I think I remember seeing Terry Hall with the band he was in before the Specials. I remember the spate of racist murders and the anti-racist marches where the youth section of the Labour Party (the LPYS) was, in its thousands, a key element on all anti-racist marches – not just a bunch of wannabee MPs. I saw the Specials then, and I saw them last year in Liverpool. Don’t believe the older elements who booed Blair and Brown were just anti-politician. They are anti-sell-out, anti-war, anti-Capitalist. Blair was Thatcher’s off-spring, stealing the Labour Party to make it safe for Big Business. Winning power in1997 on a wave of anti-Toryism, that would have seen any alternative elected, he then proceeded to carry on with Tory policies. Brown was Blair without the presentation skills. Both paved the way for this Government.
Politics hasn’t left music. Billy Bragg – who played at LPYS Conference one year (with 3,000 present you could put on such gigs) – is about to tour with the King Blues. They supported the Specials at the Albert Hall recently. A brilliant ska / acoustic punk band combining all the best elements of the early 80s, and bringing things up to date. But don’t expect them to be selling the Labour Party to young people. To quote a couple of their songs:
“Going to war, to prevent war, was the most stupid thing I ever heard.”
“We have the right to choose between Labour and Tory, just like we have the right to choose between Coke and Pepsi.”
To my way of thinking the latter quote sums up the situation that Blair, Brown and their followers at Progress, have created. Fortunately, aside from a handful of wannabee MPs that populate Labours curent Youth, your ideas won’t find an echo amongst young people – or old punks.