If you read something you love on our site today, please consider becoming a monthly or annual tQ subscriber โ our journalism is mostly funded this way. On the 45th anniversary of one of The Special A. And then the bandleader went back to sleep. The Specials were just three dates into their first U. The gig was a daunting prospect, and not just for fear of a hostile crowd.
Meanwhile Panter and drummer John Bradbury had their post-gig celebrations cut short when the club they ended up at turned out to be a seedy strip joint. So, on the morning of 29 January , this motley crew of shell-shocked and hungover Brits enjoyed a champagne breakfast in an unfriendly town thousands of miles from home where they were now certified top of the pops.
Let me take you back to the late s when The Beatles ran a poster campaign inviting hopeful songwriters to submit tapes to their newly launched Apple Records. No one did. While Dammers was busy practicing his chops on the organ, a Jamaican music veteran was finding a fresh audience amongst British skinheads who liked their reggae kinda kinky.
Where di pill? Beyond the vocal booth, Tyrell was an accomplished piano player and organist, briefly recording instrumentals as Augustus Pablo before passing the name onto the soon-to-be king of dub melodica, Horace Swaby. One person paying attention was Jerry Dammers and by he had ditched the local soul circuit to form The Automatics, a multicultural rock meets reggae project, inspired by the Black and white mix-up of the Rock Against Racism movement.
This was it. For the album sessions, producer Elvis Costello adopted a fairly austere approach, capturing the band as close to their live sound as he could achieve without leaving the studio. Somewhere between the joyfully indolent album version and the single release, the tempo shifted again. A relentless list of live dates with increasingly rowdy crowds, and no doubt the growing tensions and frayed nerves within the band, had led to much faster, harder versions of their set list.
