Don your pork pie hat and braces, Rude Boi, because we’re getting some quintessential Ska Revival Two-Tone. Terry Hall and company cover some classic ska tracks by the likes of Toots and the Maytals, and Prince Buster, but throw in a sizeable proportion of their own tracks, written by drummer Jerry Dammers.
Dammers is a vital part of the group, along with bassist Stephen “Sir Horace Gentleman” Panter who give the relentless ska beats, over which Hall and co-vocalist Neville Staples weave a slightly shambolic harmony. The horns of Dick Cuthell, and the trombone of Roci Rodriguez, especially on Message To You Rudy give a great texture to the sound.
Just as The Specials blend Jamaican and British musicians (Staples, and guitarist Lynval Golding are Jamaican by birth), they blend ska with punk – ramping up the beats per minute to give frenetic tracks like Do The Dog, while also doing the typical late Seventies thing of highlighting social deprivation among the working class.
They do this with a fair amount of slut-shaming, it has to be said. The pregnant teenage mother of Too Much Too Young, the track Nite Club that complains that the club “is full of slags”, and while the target of Little Bitch isn’t called out for promiscuity, she gets the full bore of Hall’s ire for snobbery and narcissism. Is it a surprise to you that the album was produced by Elvis Costello?
The track that really stands out to me is Stupid Marriage, with Staples framing the narrative as a judge in court, Hall the man in the dock who vandalises his ex-girlfriends house because he is jealous of her new husband. I love the way the whole ensemble collapses into chaos, you can imagine a kind of Benny Hill chase in the courtroom. It feels like a counterpart to Here Come De Judge (Pigmeat Markham / Rowan and Martin / Sammy Davis Jr.)
Of all of the rock-reggae mixes so far, this one is one of the most infectious, probably because it uses the more upbeat ska. And, you have to love a musical genre that was pretty much explicitly established to fight racism.
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