The Specials
At The Sound Academy in Toronto on Saturday
"Are you ready to start dancing?" a dapper Lynval Golding asked the roiling crowd wedged up against the stage at Toronto's Sound Academy late Saturday night. The query seemed odd, given that it came mid-set and that most of the surprisingly large collection of latter-day rude boys and girls had been in full bop mode since the opening number, Do The Dog.
At the risk of sounding facile, Saturday night was indeed something special for fans of the pioneering late-seventies English ska band the Specials. The seven-piece hit-makers (whose hits were more consistently Top of the Pops than Billboard) have almost fully reunited for the first time since their 1981 dissolution, and their live appearances, both in North America and Britain, have been wildly embraced both by middle-aged fans and a significant and surprising number who weren't even alive during the band's heyday.
The original ska movement was an interesting, though short-lived, chapter in recent pop-music history. It appeared at the end of the late-seventies punk movement, but grew more as an antidote to punk than a vestige of it. Based in Jamaican pop, but with elements of R&B and British northern soul mixed in, it was a politically motivated but dance-happy alternative to the nihilism fostered by the punk movement.
Ska burned brightly on the British charts for about three years, spawning bands such as Madness, the Selecter and the Beat. The Specials, based in recession-weary Coventry, were pioneers and leading lights in the movement, mixing damning lyrics on the state of post-postwar Britain (they targeted such societal issues as youth unemployment and racism) with a funky Caribbean groove that was impossible not to dance to. Hits included such pointed reflections as Concrete Jungle, Doesn't Make It Alright and Ghost Town.
This current string of live appearances started last year in Britain with a well-received number of concert dates, and has carried on in North America. The reunion has not been without controversy, as the lineup does not include petulant songwriter/keyboardist Jerry Dammers. But with lead singer Terry Hall still in the mix, and five other original Specials still providing a resilient groove, Dammers is not particularly missed.
This show burned from the outset. And while the rude boys of old have morphed into dapper fashion plates (Hall looking timeless in his shirt and jacket, half the band still sporting the trademark porkpie hats) the groove was as strong as ever. Lead guitarist Roddy Byers seamlessly mixed rock and ska leads on Rat Race and Too Much, Too Young. Horace Panter's melodic bass line brought a reggae feel. And drummer John Bradbury, still looking aloof and dangerous, underpinned the whole affair with the crack ska rhythms that defined the band's sound as much as any other member.
Performing in front of a huge band logo that dwarfed the stage, Hall and the band (padded out by a small horn section, one of whom occasionally added extra percussion) delivered the songs as if totally convinced that the societal issues plaguing Britain in 1979 still matter today. "This song kills fascists," Panter announced as a prelude to the hand-clappy but ominous lyrics of Concrete Jungle unspooled.
While it's doubtful that Britain's white-supremacist National Front party is still a threat, maybe "the knife" and "the mates" still are a necessity. Maybe there still are reasons for urban paranoia to fester ( Blank Expression). Maybe there are still a large number of British kids "drinking [their]age in pints" and wasting away ( Stereotype). And certainly teenaged pregnancy never goes away (Too Much, Too Young).
Or maybe these problems have been superseded by others: matters of homegrown terrorism, for example, that Hall and company don't address because those problems are not of their time.
So yes, there was a kind of dated feel to this performance, like a 30-year-old British time capsule being opened and all of Britain's end-of-the-century problems being re-examined with grooves and backbeats. But for most of this audience, raised on the rhythms of ska revivalists such as No Doubt and Rancid, the lyrics didn't matter as much as the infectious grooves that the band still provides. This was one band reunion with absolutely no rust.
Special To The Globe and Mail