DC Share Revival: Review: The Specials

Rating: 90/100 - Genre: 2 Tone, Jamaican Ska, Rocksteady.

The Specials’ eponymous debut, released on 19 October 1979, arrives in the record-collecting canon as an intense, frame-by-frame report from a small Coventry scene that was suddenly speaking to the whole of Britain; the record’s production credit reads Elvis Costello, and that pairing — a band rooted in Jamaican rhythm and working-class Coventry urgency with a young, literate English producer — set the tone for what follows. From the moment the first brass riff on A Message to You, Rudy opens, the album announces itself as an exercise in assembly: old Jamaican songs reworked alongside original compositions by Jerry Dammers, all recorded in the summer of 1979 at TW Studios in Fulham with engineer Dave Jordan working alongside Costello in a compact, deliberately live setup.

The album cannot be understood without its label and visual programme. Jerry Dammers had launched 2 Tone as a record imprint and a public identity in 1979; the checkerboard motif, tonic suits and rude-boy references were not only decoration but a public code that projected the band’s cross-racial membership and political stance into shops and posters as surely as the grooves projected it into living rooms. The business arrangement Dammers negotiated with Chrysalis — an imprint model that gave the fledgling label national distribution while keeping tight creative control — explains how a Coventry operation escalated quickly into national visibility and how singles and new acts were able to find immediate audiences.

The studio sessions themselves were compact and purpose-built. The record was cut quickly, with horn veterans invited in to do more than ornament the arrangements: Rico Rodriguez and Dick Cuthell appear as guest players who physically bridge the record’s present with the 1960s Jamaican sources the band was reworking. That decision to bring elder Caribbean players into the room anchored the band’s covers in living practice rather than mimicry. According to group memories, Dave Jordan acted as an extension of the live setup, helping the band translate the stage electricity into a tight studio recording while keeping the performances immediate. “The studio sound was helped immeasurably by the session’s engineer, Dave Jordan, who became our live-sound operator and unofficial eighth member,” as one member later recalled. The sleeve’s back photograph — the band arranged in the binary black-and-white vocabulary that became 2 Tone’s shorthand — was shot by Chalkie Davies, whose image-making helped make the album visually inseparable from the brand it launched.

Costello’s brief as producer was pragmatic and intentionally unornamental. He later described his mission as getting the group on tape before a more “skilled” outside hand polished what worked; his account of stocking the studio, cutting the lights and encouraging a club-like looseness in the cramped TW Studio conveys a will to reproduce that live give-and-take inside a small London room. “My job was to get the band on tape before some more skilled producer got ahold of them and screwed it up completely, by perfecting things that didn’t need perfecting,” he wrote about the sessions. That production approach yields the album’s central paradox: the record is clean and organised in its mixes while carrying the abrasion and spoken urgency of a stage show. Reviewers at the time split over this balance; some welcomed the clarity and the horns’ placement, others argued the studio pacing softened the band’s live thrust.

The political and social ground under the music is as important as the arrangements. The Specials came out of Coventry in an era of factory closures, rising unemployment and racial tension; those conditions form the background of tracks such as Concrete Jungle and the Dammers-penned pieces about urban alienation. Jerry Dammers himself has been frank about how anti-racist conviction lived in his work: “So anti-racism was always part of my make-up really. And so that carried into 2-Tone,” he said in interview transcripts that look back on the label’s formation and aims. The band’s connection to anti-racist organising and to movements like Rock Against Racism was not an incidental PR line; it was structurally integral to the ways 2 Tone marketed and toured its roster and to the scenes the band entered onstage and in the press.

Musically, the album stages a conversation between revival and revision. A Message to You, Rudy, lifted from Dandy Livingstone, and Prince Buster covers such as Too Hot and Monkey Man sit next to Dammers originals and songs by Roddy Radiation and others; that sequence insists the group were both heirs to and reproposers of older Jamaican material, not novices aping a sound. The presence of Rodriguez’s trombone on A Message to You, Rudy reads as a deliberate gesture — an elder voice answering a new generation’s call — and the single’s chart ascent into the UK top ten confirmed that such cross-generational work could find mainstream purchase.

There are specific moments on the record where the band’s social anger and dancefloor craft collide. Too Much Too Young operates as compressed sermon and skiffle-fast rebuttal to the routines that trap youth; the band pushed a live EP version to single release and that live document reached No. 1 in the UK in January–February 1980, underscoring how The Specials’ true force was often kinetic and communal. Gangsters, issued earlier and credited to the Special A.K.A. on some pressings, retools Prince Buster’s gangster motif (complete with an opening car engine sound) and served as the group’s first major breakthrough, a prelude that prepared record buyers for the full LP.

A walk through the album’s tracks reveals contrasts that repay careful attention. The opener, A Message to You, Rudy, keeps its rocksteady speech but tightens the rhythm into an urban brusqueness, Rico’s trombone a line of authority cutting across Terry Hall’s cool cautioning. Do the Dog and It’s Up to You present muttered street reports and impatient exhortation; Nite Klub, on which Chrissie Hynde supplied backing voices, recreates the hot, claustrophobic club scene the band lived in, full of call-and-response and staged menace. Doesn’t Make It Alright is quieter, a frontal appeal against racial abuse whose restraint only increases its sting; Concrete Jungle pushes guitars forward in a narrower, angrier register, the lyrics naming Coventry’s grit without flinching. Too Hot and Monkey Man pay tribute to their Jamaican sources by allowing the music to breathe, while Dawning of a New Era returns to Dammers’ social sketching with a bitter, prophetic edge. Blank Expression and Stupid Marriage show the album’s capacity for moral seriousness alongside satire; Too Much Too Young hits like a compressed sermon; Little Bitch snaps with sullen impatience; the closer You’re Wondering Now leaves a melancholic aftertaste, an ending that keeps the feet moving while the mind keeps wandering.

Critics at the time negotiated the album in several registers. Some praised the record for reassembling decades of black and white popular musics into a compact, urgent set; others pointed out that the studio sheen could smooth the ragged edges that made the live band an event. In the years since those first reviews the record has been revisited through archival reissues and anniversary remasters (including a 40th-anniversary pressing that reissued original mixes), which has kept attention on the record’s construction.

The album’s pressing history, for collectors, shows incremental label changes — paper labels on early runs, later Chrysalis-pressed grey labels — evidence of an imprint aesthetic scaling up into mass manufacture. That manufacturing arc is a concrete sign of how a DIY operation transformed into a national phenomenon in a matter of months. The band’s paratexts — the checkerboard, the cartoons, the press photos — were not afterthoughts but the public grammar of 2 Tone: they made the band legible in stalls, on posters and in the tabloids in ways that extended the music’s reach to audiences who would not otherwise have encountered Jamaican recordings in the shops.

There is a scholarly reason the album keeps returning in studies of British popular culture: it bundles migration histories, subcultural style, small-label entrepreneurship and explicit anti-racist positioning into a compact popular format, and that configuration offers historians an unusually clear case-study. Museum shows in Coventry and curatorial work around the 2 Tone story have treated the record as part of a larger social project, assembling posters, flyers and oral testimony alongside the vinyl to show how one local scene entered national conversation.

Two production anecdotes illustrate the record’s method. First, Costello’s studio tactic of re-creating club conditions — glasses, dimming lights, friends in the room — was not theatre for its own sake but an attempt to harness the band’s responsive energy inside a control room: it explains the record’s alternation between studio tightness and on-the-spot banter. “I stocked up on booze, switched off the lights, and stuffed the studio with the band and their friends,” Costello later recalled, describing how the ambient noise and callouts were allowed to remain in the final takes.

The album’s commercial footprint confirms what the music implied: it entered the UK album charts strongly, and singles from the cycle (notably A Message to You, Rudy and the live Too Much Too Young EP) made the public charts, showing that the band’s mixture of dance-floor beat and topical lyrics had appeal across scenes. International visibility followed in modest forms, with later US chart entries and European placements that hinted at a reach beyond the Isles.

You might also like the article I wrote about "Evolution of Genré: The Original Jamaican Ska".

Wednesday, September 24, 2025

Review: The Specials - Specials (1979)

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