![]() That, said Dammers curtly, would be his last word on the matter. It was magnificent and at the same time, you could tell why his former bandmates might have had their ears on something different. The Trinidadian poet Anthony Joseph toasted over the familiar wails before being overwhelmed by synthesisers and brass fighting like foxes in a skip. The one Specials song included in a set heavy on Sun Ra, Moondog, Martin Denny and Alice Coltrane was, of course, “Ghost Town”. From the outside, the cause of the renewed fighting on the dance floor appears to be that while the rest of the band wanted a pension-boosting nostalgia trip, their former leader was bent on musical experimentation.ĭammers or no Dammers, “Ghost Town” remained at the heart of the band’s set - at one festival, bolstered by an overawed Amy Winehouse in a chequered two-tone top.ĭammers, meanwhile, materialised with his own Spatial AKA Orchestra, “a tribute to Sun Ra and other musical mavericks”. For reasons still unclear, they excluded Dammers. In 2009 The Specials reformed for a tour to mark their 30th anniversary. ![]() There is nothing celebratory here, no joy even in nostalgia. There are long gaps, punctuated by electronic murmurs that could just as easily be far-off emergency vehicles or breaking glass. “This town,” sighs The Spaceape, as if looking out from a high window on a scene of bleak despair. Their version is reduced almost to lyrics alone. The black-and-white video shows flooding in Bywater and the Lower Ninth, residents cycling through standing water, a spray-painted warning, “You loot, I shoot”.ĭubstep pioneers Kode9 and The Spaceape went in the opposite direction. It was half celebration (“Do you remember the good old days . . . ?”), half wake. In 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ Hot 8 Brass Band recorded a largely instrumental version, fast, hard-driving, heavy on the sousaphone. Notably, “Ghost Town” has been unbundled into its core components. The Specials in 1980 © Sunshine/Camera Press (As the Fun Boy Three they went on to record some of the decade’s most miserable music.) The juxtaposition seemed fated: “Government leaving the youth on the shelf . . . No job to be found in this country.” When the band appeared on the BBC music show Top of the Pops, vocalists Neville Staple and Terry Hall, and guitarist Lynval Golding announced that they were quitting. The song climbed to the top of the UK charts in July 1981, just as riots erupted across Britain, from Aldershot to Edinburgh. Nonetheless, reggae producer John Collins assembled the individual parts into a coherent recording, fading in and out over a spectral synthesiser moan. “Too much fighting on the dance floor,” runs the first verse, and the fighting had started in the studio: at one point guitarist Roddy Radiation kicked a hole in the control room door. The song they were recording depicted Britain as a ghost town filled with unemployed youths and no entertainment but violence. ![]() Most of the group chafed at the tightly composed orchestration of the band’s founder, Jerry Dammers. By April 1981, when the band convened in a tiny recording studio in the midlands town of Leamington Spa, tensions were high. The Specials were the champions of two-tone, music steeped in Jamaican ska and bluebeat but played with punk aggression by a multiracial band. ![]() More than three decades later it is still a nexus of acrimony. For most people, though, there is only one “Ghost Town”: the song released by The Specials in the summer of 1981 that provided a soundtrack to UK-wide riots and split up the band. A couple of months ago, Adam Lambert and Madonna both issued singles called “Ghost Town” - his, in his words, an “existential dance goth rave thing” to her “post-apocalyptic love song, mid-tempo”.
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