Fuck The BNP - Everyone Is Special

 

The first album I ever bought with my own money was the Specials eponymous debut album. The cover gave some indication of its contents - seven grim faced men in immaculate suits staring upwards in stark black and white. The lyrical subject matter was equally as intense, drawing upon inner city violence, alienation, racial tension, stupid marriages, blank expressions, nights spent pissed up the wall in grotty nightclubs - young lives wasted and gone to the dogs. It was like a snapshot of 1979, the newly ushered in Thatcher era promising little in the way of hope or enlightenment for the nations youth.         

     But if the words were harsh, the music itself was something else all together. As an eleven year old lad, I had not heard any ska outside of early seventies stuff like “My Boy Lollipop” or Desmond Dekker – the stuff they would play on the radio as “novelty” records. The Specials first album took the most jubilant elements of Jamaican ska and reggae and added a distinctly British punk rock twist. The result was like front line news reportage set to an electrifying dance soundtrack. Like most kids my age I was swept along by the entire Two Tone thing – I wanted to dress like The Specials, dance like them; fuck it, I wanted to be a Special.

       Thirty years after doing the skinhead moonstomp in my local Youth Club I found myself in Millenium Square, Leeds, witnessing a part of my youth come back to life. The reformed Specials, far from being a cosy little nostalgia trip for the early forties set, have turned out to be very bit as vital and contemporary as they were in 1979.

      Because the thing is, I’ve been a bit anxious lately, what with the re-emergence of the far right whispering in the ear of a new breed of voters who are too young to remember the British Movement or the NF. Combine this with the lack of a coherent voice on the left and the middle ground clogged up with careerist politicians on the fiddle who don’t even bother to lie anymore, and you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s the mid seventies all over again.

        In Millennium Square, The Specials blew away my apathetic impotent despair and filled me full of hope again. I can’t remember a gig where the audience have been so joyously mixed, in terms of race, age and gender. I can’t remember such a genuine sense of celebration at an outside event.

         The only question is, where are the new Specials? Where, when we need them more than ever, are the kids with attitudes and vision and songs, and a desire to shake up the party? If you have found them, please point them in my direction.

           In the meantime, Fuck the BNP - Everyone Is Special.