The Specials Interview - Record Mirror (2nd February 1980)

In late January 1980, The Specials were on the verge of becoming a very big band indeed. This interview with Record Mirror's editor Alf Martin in the freezing Lowlands took place days before the band headed to America for their first US tour.

Sixty Minute Men

Alf Martin hits the land of cheese, clogs, windmills and dope dealers to track down some very Special boys.

One hour. Sixty minutes. 3600 seconds.

Anyone and everyone connected with a working band lives and breathes for that one solitary hour in the day when the lights, PA and adrenalin are turned on.

The Specials are no exception, only seeing them before any gig in their normal clothes, you'd never think they'd get it together.

Amsterdam on a cold day. Canals frozen solid. Feet and hands turning blue. Enter the hotel. Various  members of the band pounce when told we have all of that week's music papers. Starved of any stimulation that day they devour the contents, passing round interesting stories.

Out of a corridor appears Jerry Dammers, leader and keyboards player of the Specials. Now. I've seen some unlikely looking rock stars in my time but he beats the lot. For a start there's the famous Dammers teeth. or lack of them. Just a huge gap at the front where they should be. When he talks he tends to splatter you with saliva. Lucky he doesn't talk that much.

He's wearing an old and shabby suede coat, and hanging from the arms of the coat are a pair of gloves,

attached to a piece of elastic that runs up one arm, across his back and down the other. Perhaps he  loses a lot of pairs of gloves or he's just a kid at heart. All this is topped off with a scarf, wrapped around his neck and a black and white peaked cap on his head. Other members of the band are just as suitably attired .

Suddenly we're surrounded by people and trying to fathom out who's in the band and who isn't gets pretty difficult. Including the horns men, there're nine people in the band.

This is a story starring Jerry Dammers, keyboards; Roddy 'Radiation' Byers, lead guitar; Lynval Golding, rhythm guitar; Neville Staples and Terry Hall, vocals; Horace Panter, bass and John Bradbury drums. Plus supporting cast and bit - part actors.

First on the agenda is a trip to the town centre to catch Monty Python's 'Life Of Brian'. Because we're late we're pushed into front row seats, meaning that you have to lie almost vertically, to watch the film.

I'm not sure if this was some Monty Python joke but when the show ended, all the lights in the house

went out and the doors stayed locked.

Onto the Milkweg Club, a hangover from the sixties with dope, space cake, films, theatre, music and general "stoned - ness" . . . in that order. It causes great amusement to all those present, but you soon get bored .

Then another club but the party is depleted. 'Rapper's Delight' by Sugarhill Gang comes over the

speakers and Jerry Dammers is bopping away to It. He tells me that the Specials appeared on a TV

programme with them and he was amazed how professional those guys were. "Word Perfect." he

splutters at me.

By 5 O'Clock a few decide to go. Drummer John Bradbury has been hoarse all night. His throat is gradually packing up. As we walk out with manager Rick Rogers, John says he knows the way to go. One

hour later we are still walking, totally lost. Hugh, the record company's PR vainly tries to stop a car ...

only to end up being driven down the road on top of the bonnet.

I ask Rick Rogers how he gets the Specials going in the morning. He gives the obvious answer: "I tell

them to be ready two hours before we're leaving and we usually end up at the right time." 

Jerry Dammers was the last to go to bed and, in the morning’ the last to get on the coach. We're travelling to the South of Holland, Sitvaard and 80 miles down the road I join the coach. Jerry's back in Slumberland.

Bass guitarist Horace Panter is huddled in a corner with  his coat and hat on. The heater doesn't work. "We were told this would be a luxury coach," he moans "But look at it." He seems the quiet and sensible member of the group. As he looks the studious type I ask him if he has any hobbies part from the group.

"I was thinking of taking up a hobby but that has to be something you like and music is the thing I like. I'm in a job I enjoy doing, I can travel and I get paid – probably about as much as your average teacher - for it."

Horace takes pride in telling you about his stereo system as though it's his pride and joy. "It isn't

expensive but it's beautiful." he says with a glint in his eyes. He doesn't want anything else but: "One dav I'd like to buy a house and maybe alittle car."

Being the quiet one in the group I asked how he got on with the others. "Well, there's enough of us to form different groups at different times. If you want to be on your own you can and if you want to party you can.

"Robert Fripp once said you need three things to make a group – a love of music, to like one another

and to like money. If you have all those or at least two. it should work."

One thing that strikes you about the Specials is they may not look like regular rock stars, or act like

shrewd businessmen, but when you talk to them about 2-Tone, their own record cop3any, there's no flies on these boys.

"I'm not sure if it's too early for some of the groups." says Horace. " Sometimes I get a bit worried . Like if we sign the Bodysnatchers, what are we letting them in for?

At the moment we're sticking to the people we've got. Later we might expand. "

Enter Sitvaard. Hotel, and soundcheck. The gig is next door to the hotel.

The gig. This is what it's all about. That one hour in the day which the band and anyone connected with

them has been waiting for. The transformation of tired, bored, sleepy - eyed scruffs into a pulsating rhythm machine. The clothes, the hair and the vitality are all geared for this moment.

Dressed in their best outfits - flashy glasses, ties and shiny shoes - they are greeted with shouts of

"Rude Bwoys". They open with 'Dawning Of A New Era' and continue into 'Do The Dog'.

How can anyone play that much good music while concentrating on superb dancing as well? Neville

Staples' muscular body gets into action and never stops. He toasts (although it sounds like singing to

me) along with Terry Hall and sweats bucketfuls. Throughout the set he climbs over the amps, hangs

from the balcony and falls all oyer the stage.

He even cuts a chunk out of his face when he drops his monitor onto himself. "It happens all the time," he says later.

The gig was one of the hottest, tightest, energy - packed sets I've ever seen. Praise should definitely go to drummer John Bradbury for pushing and holding the whole thing together; not forgetting horn me  Rico and Dick for adding the extra oomph.

With the Specials you don't just listen to their very catchy songs, you want to dance with them as well. Especially when vocalists Neville Staples and Terry Hall try to out-dance one another on 'Night Club'. One line in the song says: "I wouldn't dance in a club like this." Well, no one’s listening because the mass is definitely moving.

Their hits, other hits, and five encores ending with 'Madness', make it a superb night. Jerry Dammers even jumps headlong into the audience to finish it off. Then the change takes place again.

Back to being tired and scruffy. .. off-duty Specials.

At the hotel three British guys who are in the RAF have travelled from Germany to see them. A

drinking session starts and the small hotel is going crazy with about 30 orders all coming up at once. Perry. chief fan from Britain supplies sweets and someone shouts the news that Coventry have beaten

Liverpool 1-0.

"Oh well." says Rick Rogers. "That's the last time John Peel plays any of our records."

It’s getting like Barnum and Baileys circus now with people milling about all over the place. Terry Hall is about to do an interview over the phone with American radio. He's kept his moody. straight faced look for the whole of the time I've been there but when he comes back and says the name of the girl that interviewed him a smile cracks his face. Jane Hamburger. The smile soon goes as he sits down on his chair, topples over and falls flat on his back.

I turn to Neville, who has had problems with the law in the past, and ask if music had kept him out of

prison. "Well, it was music that got me in there in the first place. I had my own sound system and wanted to build my own speakers. I nicked some wood from a yard and got .caught!"

Jerry Dammers wants to know more about America. Is it possible to get around there by travelling in

the truck instead of flying? "I'm scared," he says, "I even used to get nervous in cars ." But he knows that on some of the gigs he's got to fly, so there's nothing he can do about it.

The drinking' continues. The eyes get blurry. No wonder they look tired the rest of the time. Apparently

John Bradbury and Jerry Dammers stay up all night.

They're off to America now, and I'm sure, in the daytime, they'll be just as tired. But I bet the Specials, and everyone else involved with them will still have every ounce of stamina for that one hour that matters.

Terry Hall Obituary The Guardian 20th December 2022

Singer with the Specials whose chart-topping Ghost Town evoked the sense of social collapse gripping Britain at the turn of the 80s.

Famously deadpan, dour and slightly menacing, Terry Hall, who has died aged 63 after a short illness, shot to fame at the end of the 1970s with Coventry’s groundbreaking multi-racial band the Specials. They emerged in the aftermath of punk, with a fizzing, politically charged mix of ska and new wave, and enjoyed instant success with their debut album, The Specials, which reached No 4 on the UK chart. For a time, the Specials’ 2 Tone Records operation became the UK’s most successful record label, with releases from Madness, the Beat and the Selecter alongside the Specials’ own.

Their second album, More Specials, featured a broader and jazzier musical palette and scorched to No 5. The band scored Top 10 singles with Gangsters, A Message to You Rudy, Rat Race, Stereotype and Do Nothing, peaking with their chart-topping classic Ghost Town in 1981.

Hall commented that “I don’t believe music can change anything” because “all you can do is put your point across”, but the Specials caught the fraught and dangerous atmosphere of the turn of the 1980s with an eerie intensity. Ghost Town in particular chillingly evoked the sense of social collapse and economic decline gripping a riot-torn Britain.

The Specials found themselves in the eye of the storm, with neo-Nazis frequently targeting their gigs. Hall and the band’s keyboards player, Jerry Dammers, were both arrested when they waded in to try to break up fighting between fans and security guards at a gig in Cambridge. They were found guilty of “incitement to riot” and fined £400 each.

However, when recording Ghost Town for an appearance on Top of the Pops, Hall and his bandmates Neville Staple and Lynval Golding announced they were leaving the band, as the result of internal personality clashes. They went off to form Fun Boy Three.

Building on the ska legacy of their former band, Fun Boy Three hit the UK Top 10 with their eponymous debut album (1982), and scored a Top 5 hit single with the infectiously catchy It Ain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do it), its chart-friendliness much enhanced by the addition of the female trio Bananarama. Hall had brought them on board after seeing them featured in the Face magazine.

The same combined team enjoyed a further Top 5 hit with Really Saying Something, which also reached the Top 20 of the American club chart. After a second album, Waiting, and Top 10 hits with The Tunnel of Love and Our Lips Are Sealed, Fun Boy Three split up following an American tour.

Hall was born in Coventry, where his father worked at the Rolls Royce aeronautics factory and his mother at a Chrysler car plant; he had two elder sisters. Though he showed academic potential, passing his 11-plus exam with ease, and was skilled enough at football to be invited for a trial at West Bromwich Albion, he was given little encouragement in either direction by his parents.

His childhood was scarred by his experience of horrific sexual abuse. When he was 12, he was abducted by one of his schoolteachers and delivered into the clutches of a paedophile ring in France. He wrote about the episode in the song Well Fancy That, a track he recorded with Fun Boy Three in 1983. It included the lyrics: “On school trips to France / Well fancy that / You had a good time / Turned sex into crime”. Hall commented that “the only way I could deal with the experience was to write about it, in a song. It was very difficult for me to write, but I wanted to communicate my feelings.”

The traumatic events resulted in Hall being put on valium at the age of 13, and the effects of these experiences would continue to haunt him. During the 1990s he used drinking as a crutch and slipped into alcoholism. In 2004 he tried to kill himself and he was subsequently diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which had to be controlled with anti-psychotic medication.

He left school at 14 and undertook a string of temporary jobs, including as a bricklayer and a trainee hairdresser, before joining the punk band Squad as lead singer. Hall described the band dismissively: “It was just like 1-2-3-4 then make a noise for two minutes, and then stop and say 1-2-3-4 again.” When Squad supported an early incarnation of the Specials, then known as the Automatics, Dammers was impressed and invited Hall to join them. Hall liked the Automatics’ songs enough to accept, though it would take some honing and refining before the distinctive Specials sound emerged.

Hall’s post-Fun Boy Three career found him hopping between a bewildering variety of projects. In 1984 he formed the Colourfield with Toby Lyons and Karl Shale, which produced the Top 20 album Virgins and Philistines (1985) and a string of singles, of which only Thinking of You made much impression on the charts. Hall also undertook songwriting collaborations with Ian Broudie of the Lightning Seeds, before forming Terry, Blair and Anouchka in 1989, alongside Anouchka Grove and the American actress Blair Booth.

The trio were united by their fondness for cheesy 60s pop, and they covered the Captain & Tennille’s hit Love Will Keep Us Together, but their solitary album Ultra Modern Nursery Rhymes failed to chart, and a couple of singles did little better. “A lot of the stuff I’ve done is pretty much a wind-up,” Hall admitted. “Terry, Blair and Anouchka was completely taking the piss out of us and everyone else.”

Another project was Vegas, a collaboration between Hall and the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart. Their solitary album fared poorly, though their version of Charles Aznavour’s She reached the Top 50. He undertook further collaborations with Tricky, Lily Allen, Shakespears Sister, Nouvelle Vague and Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz, and with Mushtaq (from Fun-Da-Mental).

He was also part of the Specials’ various reunions post 2008, one of only three original remaining members. The band’s comeback album Encore (2019) topped the UK chart. In 2021 they released Protest Songs 1924-2012, a collection of cover versions of famous sociopolitical songs down the decades, which reached No 2.

Hall is survived by his second wife, Lindy Heymann, and their son, Orson, and by two sons, Theo and Felix, from his previous marriage, to Jeannette, which ended in divorce.

 Terence Edward Hall, singer and songwriter, born 19 March 1959; died 18 December 2022.

Adam Sweeting

Terry Hall R.I.P.

 

It's another bad December, echoes of 2016 all round. Terry hall, one of this country's best front men has left the stage at just 63. Whilst this site was set up as a vehicle for my passion for The Stranglers, The Specials mean the world to me as well. A band with such spirit that picked racism up by the braces and showed it for what it was and sadly still is.... bullshit!

You will I hope forgive me if over the next week I indulge myself with a few Terry/Specials related posts.

R.I.P. Terry Hall, the world is a poorer one without you.

Vanian Inked.... again.

 

'We're just having some fun

Messing round with a gun

Don't get excited

I'm just killing some time

It's a fantasy crime

And I'm living it again.'

Dave Vanian of The Damned

A4 linoprint

Black ink on dreadnaught grey art card.

Jet Black Obituary The Guardian 12th December 2022

Founding member and drummer of the Stranglers who set up the group after a business career in home-brewing and ice-cream.

The Stranglers rose to prominence alongside the mid-1970s punk movement without ever being part of it, being a little older and more musically seasoned than bands such as Clash or the Sex Pistols.

Pivotal to the Stranglers’ development was their drummer and founder member, Jet Black, who has died aged 84 of respiratory problems. As well as being a musician who had grown up with jazz rather than rock’n’roll, Black was also a successful entrepreneur who had built his own home-brewing empire and enjoyed a lucrative career in the ice-cream trade. He later also managed to invent the patented Jet Black Power Bass Drum Pedal, allowing the drum to be played remotely.

In 1977 the Stranglers achieved immediate success with their debut album, Rattus Norvegicus, which reached No 4 on the UK album chart and delivered the Top 10 hit Peaches. Despite Peaches’ provocatively sneering, sexist lyrics, it became an enduring favourite, frequently used in TV shows, movies and video game soundtracks. Black’s jazz background had given him a level of expertise and flexibility that enabled the band to stretch out experimentally, as with their improvisatory revamp of the Dionne Warwick hit Walk On By or the prog-rock perambulations of Genetix.

Their most successful single, Golden Brown (1982), was conceived by Black and the keyboards player Dave Greenfield, and featured a quasi-baroque harpsichord part as well as a distinctively stuttering time signature. “It all took place in about 30 minutes, so it was very unusual,” said Black. The song reached No 2 on the UK chart, despite their then-record company EMI’s apathetic promotion of it. They belatedly sent the band a case of champagne after it zoomed up the charts.

Black played on all the Stranglers’ albums up to Giants (2012), and expressed a particular fondness for The Gospel According to the Meninblack (1981), the band’s enigmatic concept album about alien invasions, among other things. The recording sessions were fraught with problems and pitfalls. “It seemed that we’d touched something very occult with that album, and the day we finished it all the problems ended,” said Black. “We feel it’s stood the test of time and a lot of people think it’s our most interesting work.”

Black was born Brian Duffy in Ilford, Essex. His father, who had come to Britain from Ireland as a young man, was a headteacher who later became a private tutor, and his mother was a milliner. He recalled that “my mother was non-musical and my father, I think, actually hated music”, yet he found himself having piano lessons at the age of five. However, he displayed little aptitude for the instrument, and his musical progress lay dormant until he was sent to the Holy Cross Residential Open Air school in Broadstairs, aged 10. He suffered from asthma, and it was felt that the sea air of the Kent coast would be beneficial.

He described his time as a boarder at the school as the happiest time of his childhood, since it was an escape from the “domestic warfare” of his parents’ unhappy marriage. It was there that he also discovered an unsuspected gift for playing the violin – “within a short time I was the best in the school” – but when he left the lack of support at home deterred him from pursuing his violin studies.

Later, however, a visit to an Essex jazz club fired his interest in jazz drumming, and he formed a band with a group of fellow enthusiasts. As he pointed out, he grew up before rock’n’roll had been invented, and his idols were jazz players such as the drummer Buddy Rich. Unable to afford a drumkit, he initially had a go at playing the clarinet, but ended up behind the drums after stepping in to replace the band’s original lacklustre sticksman. Once he secured an apprenticeship as a cabinet-maker in London he was able to buy the drumkit.

The band performed regular gigs and cut a four-track EP under the name of the Omega Dance Orchestra. Black then branched out on his own as a semi-professional musician, playing regularly until his seven-year apprenticeship came to an end. Deciding against trying to become a full-time musician, he worked at a series of temporary jobs before getting involved in the ice-cream business. Initially he drove an ice-cream van, and was then offered a job as a depot manager in Guildford, Surrey, responsible, among other things, for organising ice-cream supplies to events such as the Farnborough airshow and Royal Ascot. He recalled how, in that period, he informally played drums at house parties thrown by Barbara Andrews, a veteran pianist and music-hall entertainer who was the mother of superstar Julie Andrews.

Black then then diversified further by pursuing an interest in brewing his own beer, and made a deal with a brewery to acquire a large building in Guildford with an off licence, The Jackpot, on the ground floor. He renovated the premises and installed his own brewing equipment, and was soon reaping rapidly escalating profits, developing a successful international wholesaling operation. However, his fixation on his businesses caused the collapse of his first marriage. After a bout of self-examination, he concluded that “I ought to be back in music! Music is where I belonged.”

After a period of experimenting and auditioning musicians, he met the guitarist and vocalist Hugh Cornwell, who had been in the Anglo-Swedish band Johnny Sox, and they were joined by bass player (and classically trained guitar player) Jean-Jacques Burnel as well as the keyboards player Hans Wärmling (also from Johnny Sox). In 1974 they named themselves the Guildford Stranglers – of various nicknames they took, Jet Black stuck – and played middle-of-the road pop, travelling to gigs in one of Black’s ice-cream vans. Wärmling was unhappy with the musical direction and quit the following year, to be replaced by Greenfield, establishing the classic Stranglers lineup.

Black stopped performing live with the Stranglers in 2015, having suffered various chest problems as well as an episode of atrial fibrillation (heart arrhythmia). He died at his home in Wales.

He is survived by his wife, Ava Rave, and their children, Charlotte and Anthony.

 Jet Black (Brian John Duffy), musician and businessman, born 26 August 1938; died 6 December 2022.

Adam Sweeting.

Jet Black 1938 - 2022

 

Early evening my Facebook newsfeed went into overdrive for all the wrong reasons. It was May 2020 all over again and once again, it was our daughter Mo who broke the news which a note on Messenger, 'Sad news about Jet!'. So the thing that we all knew would happen some day has happened. Knowledge of the ill-health that Jet has endured over many years now does not counter the shock of him finally going. These people that we have grown up with, admired and looked up to, musicians, actors, comedians, even politicians, that we always known to be there, are slipping away. In the case of someone like Jet Black, he was a part of my life, admittedly from afar, for more than 40 years, that is incredibly more than three quarters of my life... and I certainly wouldn't consider myself to be a spring chicken!!

Jet was the elder statesman in a band of elder statesmen who had become considerably older still by the time that Jet reluctantly passed on his sticks and his stool (that sounds wrong!) to a younger man. Sure,  he retained an omnipresence in the band even when he wasn't physically present. But he did more than simply guide the band and steady the Stranglers' longship on what were more often than not extremely turbulent and choppy waters. His interest in several esoteric topics, perhaps most notably the UFO story and even more niche, the phenomena within a phenomena of 'The Men In Black', gifted us some of the quirkiest, madcap, brooding and sinister music of the early 1980's. Porky meat sandwich anyone?

I always loved in issues of 'Strangled' that this band of four independent thinkers would address issues that in some way shaped the music of the band and in this respect Jet was always very articulate in presenting a given case. A point in case, although not within the pages of 'Strangled' was the BBC West piece that Hugh and Jet collaborated on about the significance of the colour black and its use as a tool of control and intimidation.... I have worn nothing but black since first seeing it... but I cannot carry off the intimidation part of it!

I am glad that Jet is no longer locked in a head to head battle with failing health, but of course feel greatly for Ava and his family for their loss. But I also think that it is fair to say that Jet, in exactly the same way as his band brother Dave, lived a full life and they lived it well. To be in a band is the dream of many. To be in a band that has success is something that is enjoyed by few. To be in a ground breaking band having one or more of their songs known and loved globally is wonderful. To have lived a life doing something you love across the globe for over 40 years is a rare, yet deserved, privelige.

So thank you Jet Black for the beat and the great memories.

Pete Shelley 6th December 2022 - 4 Years Gone.

 

So, another run up to Manchester to visit Mo and to fulfill her request for us to bring up some warmer clothes as for once the rain has abated and the weather seems to be perishingly cold, although this may be related to the unseasonably mild weather that has bathed the UK for the past few weeks.

Saturday morning is bright and cold, the best weather that a British winter can offer. After 30 minutes or so of wandering around Manchester Cathedral, we boarded a V1 bus that would take us out of Manchester, through its little sister of Salford to Leigh. The reason for this diversion from the metropolis? Why, Pete Shelley of course!

The town of Leigh is part of the Metropolitan Borough of Wigan and is the birthplace of Peter McNeish, universally better known, to my generation at least, as Pete Shelley, the enigmatic singer and songwriter of Buzzcocks (but there's now need for me to you that is there!). Earlier this year I made a promise to myself that the next time we were on family business in Manchester we would make the pilgrimage to view the exceptionally good mural painted in his honour on the gable end of a property in the centre of town. A truly huge canvas! 

Of course I have seen many online photographs of the work from its early execution through to the unveiling in July 2022. However, a still image viewed on a computer screen is no substitute for a up close and personal encounter of the mural! This Malcolm Garrett design was realised by acclaimed Manchester artist, Akse P19. However in contrast with other Akse works (Ian Curtis and Marcus Rashford) that are in black and white, the first thing that impresses upon the viewer of the Shelley mural is the vibrancy of the colours involved. The red and blue intensity of the Garrett heart motif leaps out from the brickwork, whilst the sky blue background illuminates the work whilst providing a stark contrast to the monochrome portrait of a young Pete staring intensely into the lens of photographer, Chris Gabrin's, camera.

I am so glad that the Andrews family, minus one, made the journey to say hello to Pete. I felt quite emotional standing before it I must say. I just hope that it is respected and that money is available to ensure that it is maintained such that its impact is not lost for future visitors. The fact that Pete's family have been involved in the project from the beginning gives me hope that this will indeed be the case. After all, the Manchester climate is no respecter of art exposed to its elements!