One Step Back

An interview (or should that read question and answer session?) with Steps in the Sunday Express, revealed that the stage school karaoke band are bang up-to-date with current political debate - and, indeed, have strongly-held beliefs about current issues. "I think there should be more jobs for English people" and "Why are we paying for all these people [asylum seekers] to come into the country anyway?" the perma-smiling apprentice political philosophers opined. Their record company later tried to explain away their comments by saying (and get this) that "the band were caught out by clever questioning" and "their comments were not intended to appear racist". Two words for Steps and their apologists: the first is "get" and the second is "stuffed".

Apart from giving us another reason to hate them, Steps' malicious remarks are troubling in that the group's fan base is predominantly made up of impressionable pre-pubescent children alongside some very sad older people. The group are entitled to their opinion, of course - just as the rest of us are entitled to our opinion of them.

It was all thrown into sharp relief when listening to two new compilation albums by The Specials. Time was when bands eloquently expressed opinions about social and political realities and addressed injustice and ignorance - and could still be popular. A 28-inch waist and a crap Bee Gees cover seems to do the job these days. Which is not to suggest that The Specials were a political band. They merely wrote songs about their immediate reality, and if a political dimension led on from that, so be it. As such, they need to be evaluated as a product of their particular time and place - arriving just after the white-heat revolution of punk in a country where race and unemployment riots were as common as a tribunal of inquiry is now in Ireland. The obvious songs people bang on about are Ghost Town (written about urban decay) and Free Nelson Mandela, but flicking through the 46-track compilation Stereo- Typical, you'll find more prosaic stories about teenage pregnancy, youth crime, drink, drugs and the whole inner-city enchilada.

Formed in Coventry in 1977, The Specials were headed up by the maverick genius of keyboard player, Jerry Dammers and featured the (for then) curious line-up of three lead vocalists - Lynval Golding, Terry Hall and Neville Staples. Cited by both Blur and Massive Attack as huge influences on their work, The Specials combined a pounding rocksteady beat with the energy and attitude of early punk. An early support slot on a Clash tour had the major labels chasing their signature, but true to their Spirit of '77 DIY beliefs, they opted to set up their own label, 2-Tone. The pop-art graphics (black and white checks) became an emblem of their day, as did their ska fashion sense - 1960s-style rude boy outfits, complete with porkpie hats.

The first single, Gangsters (written about the record companies who were chasing them), was a top 10 hit and by the time the Elvis Costello-produced eponymously-titled debut album hit the racks, the second wave of ska was firmly entrenched with acts such as Madness, The Beat and Selecter following in their ska-crazy wake. Laughably enough, their biggest hit, the live EP Too Much Too Young, a pro-contraception song warning against school children becoming pregnant, was banned by the BBC (incidentally, the BBC forced them to change the title of Free Nelson Mandela to plain Nelson Mandela, which may or may not have something to do with the fact that they were scared of Margaret Thatcher, who had no problems trading energetically with apartheid South Africa.

Just as ska was dominating the charts and provoking a rash of dancehall wannabees from bands who would have had grave difficulty in spelling Jamaica, The Specials perversely moved on from the sound and on their second album, More Specials (album titles never being that high a priority with them), they invented Lounge music (strange but true) about 15 years before its time. The quality of the songs was still there, most notably Lynval Golding's very beautiful Do Nothing - one of the best songs of the 1980s if you ask me.

Increasing musical and personal tensions were tearing the six-piece group apart, though, and Golding, Hall and Staples left to form Fun Boy Three. The Specials reverted to their old name of The Specials AKA and limped along, releasing the pretty dire In The Studio in 1984. There was a revival of sorts when various permutations of the original group toured the US at the height of the third wave of ska - which was largely provoked by the multi-million success of local ska-lite band No Doubt who, like Green Day outselling the combined efforts of The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned, managed to sell more records in one year in the US than The Specials, Madness and Selecter did over their entire careers.

And as for Coventry's answer to Brian Wilson (if you will), little has been heard of Jerry Dammers over the last 10 to 15 years - which is a shame. Still, you can relive those heady two-tone days courtesy of these new releases - Singles, which is on the two-tone label, and Stereo-Typical: As, Bs and Rarities, which is on the EMI label. By the way, talking about pro-contraception songs and Steps in the same article - you can make the connection yourself.