Tome of Beasts 2

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Costello: The run of singles [as new incarnation Special AKA] leading up to the In The Studio album – War Crimes, The Boiler and Racist Friend – were extraordinary and uncompromising.

Suggs: We realised it could be fun and serious. We all agreed we were anti-authoritarian, but we’d work the politics out afterwards. The film ends with the dam bursting: during a Specials performance of Nite Klub (filmed in Leicester) there is a full-on stage invasion by fans. Be-harnessed Dunton found it both “frightening” and “pretty spectacular”. For Panter, these invasions became so regular that they eventually become an irritation. “It was fantastic for an encore. But it was getting to the point where after five songs there’d be 50 of Swansea’s finest clambering up on stage. It wasn’t that they were nasty – they were generally just drunk,” the bass player says. The Specials would withdraw to an extra drum riser at the stage’s rear – “a second line of retreat” ­– while roadies formed a protective line in front of them. Davies: Two thousand people plus, every night. Fire limits obviously being exceeded. Such a thrill.Tone’s message of solidarity continues to be heard as incarnations of The Specials, The Beat and The Selecter appear on stages all over the world. The fantastic sound in the finished Dance Craze was recorded separately using the Rolling Stones mobile recording rig, among others. The songs were mixed at Abbey Road by in-demand sound engineer Bill Rowe. “He finished doing Star Wars and I went in with Dance Craze,” says Dunton, who went on to receive a Bafta for outstanding contribution to British cinema (presented in 2010 by Terry Gilliam). Such are the rewards for dicing with death with the 2 Tone gang. Dakar: I’d written The Boiler for the Bodysnatchers. A friend had been raped in different circumstances to the song, but the lyrics reflected her fear and terror. Some idiot on Capitol Radio played it at 9am on a Saturday. Complaints flooded in. It was taken out of shops but reached No 35. Jerry fiddled with The Boiler for a year, and he did the same thing with Ghost Town. It was more than perfectionism – I think it was performance anxiety. He was worried about failing, not being the best, but to his credit, he had much more of a sense of posterity than anyone else. One day Jerry came into the rehearsal room with a chorus, “Free Nelson Mandela …” I phoned Artists Against Apartheid to get information about Mandela and came up with: “Shoes too small to fit his feet, he pleaded the cause of the ANC.” Dammers: Everything was taking too long and costing too much. By the time we finally had a hit with Free Nelson Mandela, everyone had left the band. I was asked to organise a British branch of Artists Against Apartheid and the festival on Clapham Common drew a quarter of a million people. It was the proudest moment of my life. We performed the song at the Mandela concert at Wembley [1988]. By the second Wembley concert [1990], Mandela had been freed. Hopefully all the 2 Tone and anti-apartheid efforts made some sort of contribution, but there’s still so much to be done.

We tried to look at the musical roots of 2 Tone as well,” Roberts continues. “As well as punk feeding into it, the other key influence was Jamaican ska. We tried to cover that story – of how Jamaican ska was brought to this country by migrants from the Caribbean, who moved here in the 1950s and 60s.” The combination of punk and ska defined the 2 Tone sound, while the social climate gave the bands a strong political and anti-racist attitude. The scene starts to fall apart amid band squabbles and music scene shifts, but a legacy has been built that stretches from generations of global ska-punk bands to the end of apartheid. Panter: That first 2 Tone tour was 40 people on one bus for 40 nights. It was like a school trip with no teachers.Rhoda Dakar with the Bodysnatchers on the second 2 Tone tour. Photograph: Virginia Turbett/Redferns Dammers: Neol Davies had a great disco dub instrumental, The Selecter. I said if he overdubbed a ska rhythm we could put it on the B-side of Gangsters, the first Specials single.