Rip It Up and Start Again (36 page)

During the year of silence that followed the release of
Flowers of Romance,
PiL relocated to New York. Staying at first in hotels and then, as Virgin’s advance on the next album ran out, moving to a large loft apartment, PiL sank into a quagmire of apathy. Lydon spent whole days in bed watching TV, getting fat on lager and torpor. There was no shortage of sycophantic yes-men who eagerly trooped out to replenish the beer supply. “What was good about PiL when it worked was that he had a few
no
-men around,” says Levene, “like me and Wobble.”

By this point, Levene had quit heroin, but his relationship with Lydon was crumbling. What had been unique about the PiL setup—a world-famous rock star working with an avant-garde virtuoso in a major-label subsidized context of “do what the fuck you like”—slowly unraveled. Lydon, the nonmusician, began to resent his dependence on Levene’s musical ability. Levene, dependent on the Lydon brand name, chafed because all the media attention was on the singer. Early in PiL’s career, Lydon had made strenuous and sincere attempts to present the group as a real collective, not just Johnny Rotten’s new backing band. But by 1982, says Levene, “It was like John had decided to take that line in our first single literally: ‘Public Image belongs to me.’”

Another source of confusion and conflict was the question of where to go after
Flowers,
which had sold poorly. That kind of untrammeled avant-gardism was clearly not going to keep PiL solvent. In the short term, the group resorted to “hit and runs,” one-off gigs done cynically for the fat fees they could demand on the strength of the Johnny Rotten legend. When it came to PiL’s recordings, a strategic shift toward accessibility seemed the best course. This was signposted by the working title of the fourth album,
You Are Now Entering a Commercial Zone,
and the oddly radio-friendly sound of the LP’s first side, sort of “death disco” with most of the death removed. At a press conference in Hollywood, Lydon adamantly stressed that PiL was not arty and wanted to be accessible.

Tensions reached a head in mid-1983 over the single “This Is Not a Love Song.” When Levene entered the studio to salvage what he deemed a disastrous mix, he found himself under close surveillance from Martin Atkins, now Lydon’s right-hand man. After a fraught, all-night session, Levene received a phone call from Lydon, who was in Los Angeles, ordering him to “get out of my fucking studio.” Following the departure of PiL’s de facto musical director, Lydon hired a bunch of session musicians as his new backing band (Atkins doggedly hanging in there as the drummer), did a lucrative tour of Japan, and rerecorded the album.

Toward the end of his PiL tenure, Levene had noticed a weird thing happening. “John Lydon sort of became Johnny Rotten again.” In truth, the singer had never voluntarily relinquished “Rotten.” Malcolm McLaren legally prevented Lydon from using his stage name for a few years, a blow the singer turned around and made into a grand this-is-the-
real
-me gesture. Living in America, Lydon found himself feted by awestruck fans and courted by big-shot managers who encouraged him to exploit his legend to the hilt. Eventually he decided, or realized, that the Sex Pistols adventure was where his rock-myth bread was buttered. After Levene left, the ex-Pistol started to do something during PiL gigs he’d once sworn that he’d never do again: sing the Pistol anthems “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “God Save the Queen.” A decade and a half later, he re-formed the Sex Pistols as a touring nostalgia revue, reneging on everything PiL represented.

JUST AS “DEATH DISCO”
started sliding down the U.K. charts in July 1979, another single shot up like a rocket. “Gangsters,” the Specials’ debut, shares a surprising amount with PiL’s single: a bassline that pounds against your rib cage like a heart full of fear, baleful vocals (singer Terry Hall actually modeled his glowering persona on Johnny Rotten), and a sinuous, snake-charmer melody that’s almost like a cartoon version of Lydon’s muezzin wail. “Cartoon” is the key word, though. While the lyrics conjured menace and corruption (“We’re living in real gangster times”), the Specials’ manic exuberance made “Gangsters” pure pop.

The Specials and their comrades—the Beat, Madness, and the Selecter, all of whom started out on the Specials’ label, 2-Tone—dived into a yawning void in the market that had emerged by 1979, a consumer demand for a sound that came out of punk but was instant, full of teen appeal, and above all danceable. The postpunk vanguard, for all their experiments with funk, really made music for “heads” at home, not bodies on the floor. PiL’s “Memories” and Gang of Four’s “At Home He Feels Like a Tourist,” those groups’ most blatantly disco singles, hadn’t exactly set discotheques on fire. 2-Tone, crucially, was all about dance music played by live bands. The movement reclaimed dance music from disco, which was based around DJs’ playing records, not live performance. 2-Tone also ignored the innovations of seventies black music, all the advances involving intricate production and arrangement, and instead reached back to the rawer, high-energy black sounds of sixties soul and Jamaican ska, when a record was barely more than a document of the band playing in the studio. Appropriately, the Specials’ first number one single in the U.K. would actually be a
live
EP.

The Specials,
the group’s self-titled debut album, makes for a striking contrast with
Metal Box,
which was released less than a month later in the winter of 1979. Where
Metal Box
was a studio concoction,
The Specials
was sparsely produced—by Elvis Costello—to capture the band’s live energy. Where
Metal Box
’s featureless packaging refused image,
The Specials
reveled in it, the cover showing the seven members of the band looking supercool in porkpie hats, thin ties, and sharp sixties suits. PiL’s matte gray canister was starkly functional, a pointed exercise in demystification, but
The Specials
’s black-and-white sleeve harked back to an older glamour, resurrecting the monochrome feel of early sixties British pop shows such as
Ready Steady Go
(from before the introduction of color television), early rock ’n’ roll films such as
A Hard Day’s Night,
and Northern social-realist movies such as
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning
.

Yet the social reality the Specials’ songs depicted was bang up-to-date and essentially identical to that addressed by PiL, Gang of Four, and the rest of the postpunk vanguard.
The Specials
is a snapshot of Britain in 1979, on the cusp between failed socialism in retreat and reenergized conservatism on the warpath. Considering the group’s outward appearance of boisterous fun, it’s striking how
cheerless
their songs actually are. In “Nite Klub,” the wage slaves piss away their paychecks with beer that already tastes like piss. “Too Much Too Young” starts as a taunting diatribe against an ex-girlfriend who’s lost her youth to premature motherhood (“try wearing a cap,” jeers Hall), then turns rueful and almost compassionate for the life they’ve both lost (“You done too much, much too young/Now you’re married with a son when you should be having fun with me”).

“Too Much Too Young” and the similarly themed “Stupid Marriage” both recall British kitchen-sink cinedramas of the sixties such as
Up the Junction
. The eerie thing about
The Specials
is that this music
sounds
as monochrome as those social-realist films
look
. The group’s oxymoronic vibe of lively bleakness dramatized the basic 2-Tone mise-en-scène, a dance floor hemmed in by desperation on every side. “Concrete Jungle,” the standout track on the album, takes a snapshot of street life in 1979, a record year for racial attacks and muggings. Embellished with the sounds of breaking glass, “Concrete Jungle” is driven by a disco-style walking bassline that periodically accelerates to a panicked sprint, as the protagonist starts gibbering “animals are after me” and “leave me alone, leave me alone.”

Few urban jungles are as wall-to-wall concrete as the Specials’ hometown of Coventry. Located in the West Midlands, Britain’s heartland of engineering and vehicle manufacture, Coventry was pounded relentlessly by the Luftwaffe during World War II. Like its neighbors Birmingham and Wolverhampton, the city was rapidly rebuilt according to the modernist architectural ideas that prevailed after the war, resulting in a drab sprawl of tower blocks, cement gray shopping centers, and tangled motorway overpasses. In one of the first music press features on the Specials,
Sounds
’s Dave McCullough describes 2-Tone’s birthplace with brutal precision:

No one would have described Coventry as pretty. Indeed, guidebooks to England usually struggle to summon up
anything
to entice tourists to visit the town. But it was a vibrant place until the late seventies. The West Midlands was the success story of the postwar British economy, thanks to pent-up consumer demand for cars. Like that other motor city, Detroit, the compensation for living somewhere so harsh was plentiful jobs and good pay. But upheavals in the world market for cars in the early seventies began to affect the West Midlands, causing unemployment rates, which for most of the postwar period were half the national average, to rise steadily. When Thatcher’s monetarist policies mauled British industry at the end of the seventies, the boomtowns of Coventry and Birmingham became ghost towns almost overnight.

In the fifties and sixties, Caribbean immigrants moved to the West Midlands for jobs. As a result, there was a long-established local tradition of black and white musicians intermingling. Before punk, most of the Specials’ five white and two black members had apprenticed in soul bands of one kind or another. Jerry Dammers—the Specials’ founder, chief songwriter, and keyboard player—tried to persuade the groups he used to play in, such as the Cissy Stone Soul Band, to play his own songs. “Before the New Wave happened it was just unthinkable to do original songs,” he recalled. “It wasn’t until the Sex Pistols came along that you realized that you could get away with doing your own songs.” Terry Hall was equally galvanized by the Pistols, especially Johnny Rotten. “It was just the way he stood onstage and gazed for half an hour,” he recalled. “I’d never seen anything like it. His stance was like an extension of standing still.” Hall developed his own “meaningful glare,” an unblinking scowl accented by his heavy eyebrows.

The Specials were as mixed socially as they were racially. The rebellious son of a clergyman, Dammers had been a very young mod in the sixties, then a hippie, and then—in a bizarre shift—a skinhead. Not all British skinheads were neo-Nazis, as the stereotype has it. They had a complicated relationship with the U.K.’s new postimperial multiculturalism. Skins generally got on well with the Caribbean population. The second generation of immigrants were the skins’ contemporaries at school and lived in the same working-class neighborhoods. Skins admired and emulated Jamaican style (that’s where their cropped hair came from), while ska and rocksteady were their preferred forms of dance music. At the same time, skinheads had a frictional interaction with the more recent immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, who in the 1970s had not assimilated. Hence, the “folk devil” reputation of skinheads as thugs into “Paki bashing” (and hippie bashing, too) and the subsequent identification of the skinhead subculture in its entirety with the National Front, British Movement, and other neofascist parties. For many, though, being a skin was just about having a cool look and belonging to a youth tribe.

After school, Dammers studied art at Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry, where he specialized in animated films and met fellow art student Horace Panter, who became the Specials’ bassist. Another former mod, drummer John Bradbury was also a fine-arts graduate. Guitarist Roddy Radiation had paintbrush experience of a different sort as a decorator for the local council. Second guitarist Lynval Golding supported his wife and daughter working as an engineer. Singer Terry Hall had a skilled working-class job as a clerk at a coin dealer. He was the perfect mouthpiece for Dammers’s lyrics, lending them an authenticity they might otherwise not have had. Hall knew proletarian life from inside but, like Mark E. Smith and John Lydon, was too piercingly intelligent not to see right through its treadmills and traps.

Neville Staple—the seventh Special and, alongside Golding, its second Caribbean member—was the group’s resident rude boy. In 1960s Jamaica, the rude boys had been ska’s hard-core following. Unemployed youths who dressed slick and got into trouble with the law, the rude boys resembled the preconscious Malcolm X when he was just a zoot-suited street hoodlum. They were “rude” because they had insubordinate spirit and a raw sense of injustice, but they hadn’t yet acquired the ideological discipline of militants such as the Nation of Islam or the spiritual focus of Rastafarianism. “Compared to the rest of the band, I came from a rough-and-tumble part of the world,” Staple says. His crime sheet included burglary and disturbing the peace. He’d participated in a revenge attack on some National Front skinheads, and he used to steal timber to build the speakers for a sound system he helped operate. It was through his knowledge of sound equipment that Staple ended up working as a roadie for the Specials. At gigs he would hang out by the mixing board. During the group’s support stint on the Clash’s 1978 Out On Parole Tour, Staple grabbed the mic and started “toasting” over the music. He’d grown up around blues dances and sound systems, absorbing the “DJ talkover” chatting of Big Youth, U-Roy, and Prince Jazzbo. In the Specials, Staple’s gruff patois and rowdy yet baleful presence made for a superb contrast with Hall’s utterly English, alternately wry and sour intonation.

Initially, Dammers’s concept for the Specials was “punky reggae.” But for a long while the group struggled to integrate the two styles, even to the limited extent the Clash had managed on “White Man in Hammersmith Palais.” “We had songs where part of the songs were reggae, then they’d go into a rock section, then perhaps into reggae,” Dammers recalled, “and it would throw people off.” Eventually the Specials turned to ska as the solution: They would wind pop history back to a time when Jamaican music and the early forms of midsixties British rock (basically sped-up R&B) were much closer. Dammers also felt that contemporary roots reggae was “religious music. When we’ve played with some black bands, these dreads have come up to me and said we should leave Jah-Jah music alone. So we do leave Jah-Jah music alone and go back to when reggae was more just straight dance music.”

Ska began at the end of the fifties as a Jamaican twist on black American dance music from New Orleans, “upside-down R&B,” as guitarist Ernest Ranglin put it. The term “ska” is most likely derived from the characteristic ska-ska-ska-ska attack of the rhythm guitar stressing the “afterbeat,” which intensifies the music’s choppy, chugging feel. The Specials took the staccato pulse of sixties ska and amped it up with punk’s frenetic energy. The difference is most audible when comparing one of the Specials’ many cover versions to the ska original. The sixties source invariably sounds sluggish in comparison, less aggressive, but also simpler in arrangement compared to the remake.

The man generally credited with inventing the “afterbeat,” singer/producer Prince Buster, was even bigger in Britain than in Jamaica. He released more than six hundred singles in the U.K. between 1962 and 1967 and toured there frequently, often escorted between gigs by a phalanx of scooter-riding mods. The Specials upheld the mod tradition of worshipping Buster. “Gangsters” is loosely based on his “Al Capone,” replacing the original lyrics with new words about the record business’s sharks and shysters, but “sampling” the skidding car chase sounds from the original record. “Stupid Marriage” steals its courtroom trial scenario—Staple as Judge Roughneck meting out harsh sentences to rude boys—from Buster’s 1967 hit “Judge Dread.”

Love of Prince Buster’s music united the U.K. ska revivalists, but Madness outdid everyone with their debut single, their sole release for 2-Tone. On one side, a version of Buster’s “Madness Is Gladness” made for an instant manifesto. On the other side, “The Prince” paid luminous tribute, dropping references to Buster’s “Ghost Dance” (itself an homage to the sound system operators of
his
youth) and to Orange Street, the Kingston boulevard that doubles as Buster’s birthplace and the center of Jamaica’s music biz. “The Prince” sounds joyous, but lines like “Although I’ll keep on running/I’ll never get to Orange Street” capture the poignant pathos of the mod dream of escaping England through an obsessive identification with black music and black style.

When the ska revival bands appeared in 1979, they initially seemed like just one element of a larger mod revival, partly triggered by the release of
Quadrophenia,
the movie based on the Who’s 1973 concept album, and partly by the Jam, who emerged at the same time as the class of 1977 punk bands but who always seemed more like a sixties throwback. The original 1960s mod scene was based in the British working-class passion for up-tempo black music, sharp clothes, short hair, and amphetamines. “Looking good’s the answer/And living by night,” sang Ian Page of Secret Affair, the most successful of the nouveau mod bands that swarmed forth in 1979. The couplet crystallizes the mod “solution” to the impasses of British society with its class structures and crushing mundanity: style, soul, and speed (not just the drug, but whizzing around town on sleek, streamlined Vespa scooters). The Jam’s singer, Paul Weller, also caught mod’s essence when he talked about being into “clean culture” while loathing rock ’n’ roll’s scuzzy decadence, dirty hippies, and so forth.