Building on what Jamaican reggae and ska artists, such as Jimmy Cliff, Desmond Dekker, had done before in the late 1970s and 80s a new wave of British ska and reggae acts sprang up, form the ska bands on Jerry Dammers’ Two Tone record label to the homegrown reggae acts such as Janet Kay who was hailed by the Guinness book of records as the ‘First British Female Reggae Singer to top the UK charts’ (although this proclamation was premature as her hit Silly Games only reached number two).[1] The most significant of the ska bands of the late 1970s to the early 1980s undoubtedly The Specials who, like others before them such as Jimmy Cliff, weren’t afraid of tackling social issues in their music. However, unlike those who had gone before The Specials weren’t an underground act with limited recognition like Junior Murvin, nor did they dance around the issues they addressed. They tackled their subject matter head on whether it was racism, the economic situation of the working class in Thatcher’s Britain and the complacency of said working class. Other bands on the Two Tone record label included The Beat; whose saxophone player, Saxa aka Lionel Augustus Martin, was Jamaican and had played on records of the original ska artists like Desmond Dekker and Prince Buster; The Selecter, whose hits included On My Radio, and Madness whose success would survive the end of Two Tones relevance in the pop music world. The black and white checks of British ska was no accident, it was symbolic of the fact that the majority of bands in the second wave of ska were mixed race and their message was one of anti-racism, as shown on The Specials records such as Doesn’t Make it Alright and Racist Friend. The period in which The Specials recorded the majority of their output was one marked by a ratcheting up of racial tensions, Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech inn 1968 bought the subject of race hurtling back in to the public conscious with the National Front organising marches up and down the country and anti-racist anti-fascist groups organising counter marches against them.[2] By the end of the 1970s the question of controlling immigration had been wrested away from the National Front and their ilk and had become an accepted part of British politics and the police, especially the Metropolitan police, were targeting black communities with the stereotype of the black ‘mugger’ being imported into the UK providing a pretext for the police’s action against said black communities.[3] The second wave ska bands stood against that, Powell claimed that black and white could not exist in this country without strife yet there they were, resplendent in black and white checks giving lie to Powell’s claims with their unity.
[1] Lloyd Bradley, Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital, (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013) 209
[2] Mike Phillips & Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain, (London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1998) 265-367
[3] Mike Phillips & Trevor Phillips (1998) 266, 302-303
From Local to Global: The History of Music in London Group 2 