Wednesday, December 28, 2011

The Specials / Ghost Town E.P.

CHS TT 17

2 Tone Records

1981

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The Specials + Rico / Do Nothing

CHS TT 16

2 Tone Records

1980

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The Specials / Stereotype

CHS TT 13

2 Tone Records

1980

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The Specials / Rat Race

CHS TT 11

2 Tone Records

1980

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The Special A.K.A. Live E.P. / Too Much Too Young

CHS TT 7

2 Tone Records

1980

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The Specials + Rico / A Message To You Rudy

CHS TT 5

2 Tone Records

1979

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The Special A.K.A. Gangsters VS. The Selecter

TT1 / TT2

2 Tone Records

1979

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Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Terry Hall / The Best Of 1981 - 1997 (January 2012)

As singer with The Specials, Fun Boy Three, The Colourfield, Terry, Blair & Anouchka and Vegas, as well as a solo performer, Terry Hall has been part of the musical landscape for over 30 years.

He has produced as many types of music as Bowie and collaborated with the great and the good, from Bananarama to Tricky.

This collection demonstrates the breadth of Hall's range and confirms him as one of the mavericks of British pop.

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Tracklist

CD 1
1 It Ain’t What You Do It’s The Way That You Do It*
2 Our Lips Are Sealed
3 Really Saying Something *
4 Thinking Of You
5 The Lunatics (Have Taken Over The Asylum)
6 The Tunnel Of Love
7 The Telephone Always Rings
8 Missing +
9 The Colour Field
10 Summertime (Extended 12” Mix)
11 The More I See (The Less I Believe)
12 The Windmills Of Your Mind
13 Ultra Modern Nursery Rhyme +
14 The Farmyard Connection
15 Running Away
16 Your Love Was Smashing
17 Life In General
18 She
19 Faith, Hope And Charity
20 My Wild Flame (Extended Version)
21 Faint Hearts
CD 2
1 Funrama 2*
2 Best Of Luck Mate
3 Heart Of America
4 Ballad Of A Landlord ^
5 Alone *
6 I Saw The Light ^
7 Can’t Get Enough Of You Baby
8 Going Home
9 Happy Families +
10 Possessed
11 We’re Having All The Fun
12 Castles In The Air
13 The Pressure Of Life (Takes The Weight Off The Body)
14 Music To Watch Girls By ^
15 Things We Do
16 Well Fancy That
17 Things Could Be Beautiful
18 Don’t Believe It
19 Summer of ‘82
20 Cruel Circus
21 Way On Down

Tracks with an * are performed by Fun Boy Three & Bananarama

Tracks with a + are performed by Terry, Blair & Anouchka

Tracks with a # are performed by Vegas

Tracks with a ^ are performed by Terry Hall

Released : 09/01/12

http://www.demonmusicgroup.co.uk/Product.aspx?ProductID=5927

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Jerry Dammers / The Spatial AKA Orchestra 18/11/11

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Jerry Dammers / The Spatial AKA Orchestra 'Barbican 18/11/11

It was an absolutely brilliant concert: surprising, stimulating, awe-inspiring, tender, funny, and above all musical: it made me think again about tunes I thought I knew, and introduced me to wonderful songs new to me (in particular Blue Pepper by Duke Ellington, and I'll wait for you by Sun Ra). The band consists of...wait for it....27 musicians (or thereabouts - there were also a number of mannequins positioned in and around the band, some of them apparently playing instruments, which made counting people difficult!): 9 brass and woodwind, 5 strings, 3 guitars, 2 keyboards, 4 drums, percussion and vibes, and 4 singers. The music was eclectic (an overused word I know but absolutely precise in this case), encompassing Captain Beefheart, 'Library Music' (not sure what this is), Ellington, Coltrane, a reworked and even more doom-laden Ghost Town by the original Specials, cheerful ska classics, Edgar Broughton, Johnny Clarke, Dvorak, In the Bleak Midwinter, and especially the music of Sun Ra, pioneer and promoter of black consciousness and interplanetary travel, spiritual mentor and forerunner of George Clinton and Funkadelic. Spatial AKA, like the Sun Ra orchestra, were kitted out in glittery and vaguely Egyptian robes, hairpieces, sunglasses and/or masks, arrived on stage piecemeal from amongst the audience, while making a collective sound like a gathering storm of didgeridoos (one instrument unaccountably absent from the proceedings). They played continuously for three hours, and then for another half an hour out in the lobby as everyone was leaving!

Visually, the movements of the band members and their costumes were augmented by a strange set involving already mentioned mannequins, three of which were painted silver and suspended above the band as if flying, along with what I gradually realised was a small lunar module about to crash to earth. Behind the band was a continuously changing and layered projection of slides, videos, and psychedelic lightshow, the like of which I haven't seen for years: it took me happily back to New Riders of the Purple Sage at Surrey University in about 1972! But this backdrop wasn't just for decoration, it imparted a powerful cultural and political flavour to the music, so that even though there were almost no overt political statements or references during the set, the whole experiene was flavoured with a clear enough set of political messages and affiliations.

There were so many terrific musical and visual moments: Alcyona Mick playing whirlwind piano solos while apparently motionless, a kettle drum solo involving continuous de-tuning and retuning of the drums during the solo, wonderful ensemble arrangements and solos amongst the brass, woodwind and strings sections, complex textures added by percussion and vibes, and poetry and scat singing as well as a joyous impersonation of the late great Captain Beefheart by Edgar Broughton, himself something of a legend in his own lunchtime for those of us of a certain age, singing Frownland from Trout Mask Replica. Johnny Clarke, the great Jamaican reggae singer, came on like a cheerful psychedelic Santa Claus, all in yellow and with locks reaching down to his calves! For me the single best moment was Francine Luce singing Sun Ra's I'll wait for you, in memory of her father. The band's website has a few short clips of music, and there are more on Youtube, but don't let anything stop you from seeing them live if you can.

Why am I writing about the Spatial AKA Orchestra here, in a blog focussed mainly on education? Well, the sheer size of the band got me thinking about the kind of organisation needed to put a concert like this together, and this led on to a perennial topic of thought and conversation with me: the qualities needed by the people who run such enterprises. I'd love to talk to Jerry Dammers about this: his must be an incredibly complex and difficult job. He is thought of as a song-writer and arranger, but he's obviously much more than that. The economics of big bands can't be easy: many, if not all, of the individual members of the Spatial AKA are absolutely at the top of the tree in their various specialisms, and they all need to make a living. I read somewhere that Miles Davis's legendary Birth of the Cool septet only existed long enough to make a single record, and didn't play any gigs, because even with only seven they couldn't earn enough in New York in the late 40s. Ellington and Basie managed it somehow, but for them it may have been easier because popular musical taste demanded large dance bands, at least during some periods; that is hardly the situation in 2011. Captain Beefheart's uncompromising vision led him, allegedly, to shut his band up for a year to practice, hardly feeding them anything, let alone paying them, until they were note-perfect on Trout Mask Replica. The band-leader's job, apart from choosing and arranging songs (for 27 parts!), includes all the organisational issues of publicity and marketing, negotiating and agreeing contracts with concert halls and promoters, travel and accommodation (for 27!), and then, most interestingly of all, the people-management issues within the band itself. There must be so many potential headaches among such a large group of creative people! Is Jerry an Arsene Wenger, an Alex Ferguson, or an ashen-faced Ron Knee? His musical arrangements depend for their success on the skills of all the individuals playing them: suppose some of them aren't so enthusiastic about them? This is analogous to footballers having to play within the tactical system designed by their manager: we know all too well how easily confidence of the manager in the player's capability, or of the player in the manager's system, can be broken down - similar issues must arise in big bands too.

All of this points to the fact that an enterprise like the Spatial AKA Orchestra is no trivial project, and this makes me marvel all the more at last week's gig: it was a triumph not just of musical creation and re-creation, but of leadership and organisation too. Each depends on the other. Thanks to everyone involved!

http://jayoptimistic.blogspot.com/2011/11/creativity-and-leadership-jerry-dammers.html

Friday, November 18, 2011

Jerry Dammers / Free Nelson Mandela Live 2008

Nelson Mandela joined music stars on stage at a concert in London's Hyde Park to celebrate his 90th birthday.

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The concert’s finale featured anti-apartheid campaigner and musician Jerry Dammers, who organized the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute. Dammers and Winehouse led the entire line-up of performers and the crowd in singing Dammers’ anthem “Free Nelson Mandela.” Formerly sung in protest against Mandela’s imprisonment, the song took on a celebratory tone and was a fitting end to an historic event.

All proceeds from the concert will go to 46664, the Nelson Mandela Foundation's campaign for global HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention.

"This post is a Tribute to Amy Winehouse who sadly passed away earlier this year"

Amy Winehouse

R.I.P.

http://rapidshare.com/files/164522461/V-Amy_Winehouse___Jerry_Dammers_-_90th_Birthday_Nelson_Mandela_Concert.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/164524771/V-Amy_Winehouse___Jerry_Dammers_-_90th_Birthday_Nelson_Mandela_Concert.part2.rar

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Jerry Dammers / Loose Ends BBC Radio 4

The much too young Nikki Bedi will be talking to her very special guest Jerry Dammers about founding 2 Tone Records and ska revival band 'The Specials'. His latest musical venture 'Jerry Dammers Spatial AKA Orchestra' is a mash-up of Sun Ra, Massive Attack, Specials and reggae, all filtered through Dammer's unique musical vision. They're performing at The Barbican as part of London's Jazz Festival on Friday 18th November.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0171yjw#synopsis

Friday, November 11, 2011

Jerry Dammers’ The Spatial AKA Orchestra / The Barbican 2011

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Following their highly acclaimed national tour and appearances at Glastonbury and on Later with Jools Holland, Jerry Dammers’ Spatial AKA Orchestra return to play a London date at the Barbican.

The Specials and 2 Tone founder Jerry Dammers’ funk and dub influenced arrangements of his selections from cosmic jazz, reggae, exotica and library music, have formed backdrops for some of the country’s finest jazz improvisers, in his highly acclaimed orchestra.

Orchestra favourites, new selections paying homage to a variety of futurist musical dreamers, adaptations of Dammers’ own songs, and a small amount of original material, are now moving the orchestra beyond its “Sun Ra Tribute band” starting point. Alternative musical styles, not always associated with jazz (from rock to jungle or dubstep) are also somewhere in the mix.

Featuring: Jason Yarde, Denys Baptiste, Larry Stabbins, Nathaniel Facey, Shabaka Hutchings, Terry Edwards (saxes), Finn Peters (flute), Robin Hopcraft (trumpet), Harry Brown (trombone), Anthony Joseph (vocals), Francine Luce (vocals), Alcyona Mick (piano), Roger Beaujolais (vibes), Larry Bartley (double bass), Patrick Illingworth (drums), Crispin “Spry” Robinson (percussion), Steve Gibson (percussion), Ollie Bayley (electric bass), Patrick Hatchett, Guy Clarke (guitars), Jerry Dammers (keyboards).

http://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event-detail.asp?ID=12611

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Horace Panter / A Special Talent 03/11/11

A Special Talent

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About which we talk to Specials bassist Horace Panter on art, teaching and not being Status Quo….

To have one successful and fulfilling career is as much as most of us can hope for. To have three would seem a bit greedy, although if they belong to Horace Panter, aka Sir Horace Gentleman, Specials bass-player, teacher and now exhibited artist, it is, perhaps, excusable. With the Specials latest tour winding down, we spoke to Horace about the band, his painting and the future.

“The tour’s been really, really good. We’ve played bigger venues than before, and we were a bit dubious about them but it’s worked out and we were able to do longer sets. Cardiff and Glasgow were great nights – the Scots especially went mental, and Wolverhampton was also a great one. Wolverhampton and Coventry are very similar places – they’re both still old-style city centres in the shadow of Birmingham.”

“The European gigs were good as well. The promoters must have thought ‘Ah, the Specials. What should we have supporting them – a band who sound like the Specials.’ It was astounding, we’d play in Milan and we’d have an Italian band who had gone to such obvious pains to faithfully reproduce the old ska sound, then in Stockholm a Swedish band who would do exactly the same. Like having a Toots & the Maytals tribute band with us every night.”

You toured two years ago; is this going to be a regular thing?

“I’ve no idea. We’ll let the dust settle and see what happens. We don’t want to take the piss though, become like Status Quo and put on the sort of show where people go for their office Christmas party. We want to keep our integrity.”

And new material? Will there be an Even More Specials album?

“I’m not sure. Sometimes we talk about it, but it’s difficult without Jerry (Dammers, the band’s main creative force, who refused to join the reunited band). We did set the barrier pretty high, although while our back catalogue’s a meal ticket it can also be a millstone round our necks. It’s like U2 or Bon Jovi, when they say ‘This one’s from the new album’ and the audience aren’t interested because they want to hear Pride or Living on a Prayer.”

When the tour’s over Sir Horace Gentleman becomes Horace Panter, with an exhibition entitled Robots, Saints and Extraordinary People opening soon at a West End gallery. What caused the transformation?

“I met Jerry at Lanchester Polytechnic, where I was doing an art degree, and it’s a subject that has always fascinated me – when we were touring, the band would hit the hotel bar and I’d hit the local art galleries. Then I spent ten years as an art teacher at a special needs school near Coventry. That made me focus on my appreciation of art and how I could sell it to the children. When I quit teaching to re-join the band I began painting to pass the time and soon had thirty or forty pieces which I had to do something with.”

You’ve obviously enjoyed all your careers, but which would you say was the most important?

“Shit….that’s a difficult one. I’d have to say financially, being in the Specials, for peace of mind painting, with teaching somewhere between the two. I loved teaching, I could bend the rules because I was teaching kids with learning difficulties so I could make lessons more child-centric rather than having to follow rules and get them through exams. “

You’ve been involved in education, as well as entertainment. What’s most important for a child –to enjoy themselves or to be educated?

“You have to qualify education – is it about getting results, or about learning? The two are often confused. I would say education is more important, but you have to bring both together and make education enjoyable.”

What do you want to be remembered for – teaching children or recording Ghost Town?

“That’s another really hard one. Answering that means you have to come to terms with your ego. You never really know….people ask me what I did with children and you won’t know for another 15 years. It’s not until they have children going to school themselves that they might appreciate what their teachers were like. But I’m always that bloke in the Specials.”

Horace Panter’s exhibition Robots, Saints and Extraordinary People is at the Strand Gallery, London, 22nd November-3rd December and then his work is part of the White Christmas X exhibition at the White Room Gallery, Leamington Spa, from 10th December.

http://www.horacepanterart.com/index.html

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Jerry Dammers / The Spatial AKA Orchestra (BBC 6 Music)

30/10/11

Songwriter/keyboardist Jerry Dammers founded, and designed the logo for, 2 Tone Records, and formed The Specials writing Ghost Town and many of the Specials other hits. Dammers has been a working D.J. for over 15 years and formed the Spatial A.K.A. Orchestra in 2008.

He will be chatting to Cerys ahead of his show Cosmic Engineering: A tribute to Sun Ra and other mystic mavericks. Featuring some of the UK's finest jazz musicians and his 18-piece orchestra he pays tribute to the cosmic jazz of Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane by mingling their sounds with those of dub innovator Coxsone Dodd, Exotica pioneer Martin Denny and many more.

Cerys and Jerry Dammers

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016k3dz

Monday, October 24, 2011

Imelda May / Ghost Town "Live" 2007

Imelda May Performs The Specials, Ghost Town At The Glee Club, Birmingham 27/08/07 Backed by The Palookaville! Burlesque Orchestra :)

Imelda May - Ghost Town - Candy Box Burlesque from Carrie Alice on Vimeo.


http://vimeo.com/20152620

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Pat Graham / Instrument (Book) Includes Jerry Dammers

Last weekend I photographed a load of Jerry Dammer’s keyboards for my upcoming photo book called Instrument. It was Guy Fawkes fireworks/ halloween weekend. This keyboard summed that up. Special thanks to Ben Norton for assistance and taking some shots as well. And Jerry of course for letting us do this.

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By Pat Graham 11/11/09

http://www.patgraham.org/

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Instrument-Pat-Graham/dp/0811874745

http://www.roughtrade.com/site/news_detail.lasso?story_id=1546

Thursday, October 20, 2011

The Specials "Live" In Wolverhampton 2009 / Sky Arts

The Specials In Concert

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Stunning concert filmed at Wolverhampton Civic Hall as part of The Specials' 30th anniversary celebrations. Includes Message To You, Rat Race and the era-defining Ghost Town.

Sky Arts HD
28/10/11
23:00

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Sounds Of The 20th Century / BBC Radio 2

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Jeremy Vine introduces Radio 2's audio journey through the years from 1951 to 2000, helping listeners to relive the music, news, radio, TV and movies of the times.

1979 - 20/10/11
is the year of Oliver's Army, the Eton Rifles and Blair Peach. Britain experiences its winter of discontent and gets its first million-pound footballer. And there are two new political leaders: Mrs Thatcher and the Ayatollah. The Boomtown Rats don't like Mondays, Pink Floyd don't need no education and Madness are One Step Beyond.

1980 - 27/10/11 ?

1981 - 03/11/11
the year of The Specials' Ghost Town and riots in Brixton and Toxteth. The New Romantics arrive to brighten up the clubs, there's some saucy skirt-ripping at Eurovision and a new political party is shaking up Westminster.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015n402

The Specials / Pearl's Cafe "Live" October 2011

The Specials - Pearl's Cafe (Live 2011) by Skinhead-Reggay-69

The Specials / Alexandra Park Festival 1981

Alexandra Park, Festival 04/07/81

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Monday, October 17, 2011

The Specials / Audio Cassette GMI Label

Here is a very nice Specials Cassette I picked up during the week, It doesn't have a title it's simply called The Specials but It's Basically More Specials with 3 extra tracks taken from the Ghost Town E.P.

These Cassettes were never available in Shops (Because they are Pirate Recordings) and were only sold in Markets in some Middle Eastern Country's during the 1980s when Cassettes were very popular and can still be found Today in Car Boot sales and Markets if you look hard enough.

Anyway enough of that back to The Specials The Ghost Town Art Looks great on a Cassette, I'm glad the Tracks are in the same order as the UK LP and the Bonus tracks fit in quite nicely too :)

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The Specials
GMI 3647

Side A
Stereotypes
Holiday Fortnight
I Can't Stand It
International Jet Set
Enjoy Yourself (reprise)
Ghost Town (Bonus Track)

Side B
Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think)
Man At C&A
Hey Little Rich Girl
Do Nothing
Pearl's Cafe
Sock It To Em J.B.
Why ? (Bonus Track)
Friday Night Saturday Morning (Bonus Track)

Another Pirate Specials Cassette with similar Artwork

http://2-tone.info/2tone.pl?display410

Rico & The Special AKA / Jungle Music

Happy Birthday Rico Rodriguez 76 Today, Let's Have A Party :)

Enjoy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrZRFpKRnLo&feature=player_embedded#t=0s

Jerry Dammers / BBC Radio 6 Music 30/10/11

Cerys On 6
Sunday 30 October
10.00am-12.00noon BBC RADIO 6 MUSIC

Songwriter/keyboardist Jerry Dammers founded and designed the logo for 2 Tone Records and formed The Specials, writing Ghost Town and many of their other hits. Dammers has been a working DJ for more than 15 years and formed the Spatial AKA Orchestra in 2008.

He chats to Cerys Matthews ahead of his show, Cosmic Engineering: A Tribute To Sun Ra And Other Mystic Mavericks. Featuring some of the UK's finest jazz musicians and his 18-piece orchestra he pays tribute to the cosmic jazz of Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane by mingling their sounds with those of dub innovator Coxsone Dodd, Exotica pioneer Martin Denny and many more.

Presenter/Cerys Matthews, Producer/Jax Coombes

BBC Radio 6 Music

Saturday, October 15, 2011

The Specials / A Message From You Rudy

The Specials are on their 30th Anniversary Tour! WinkBall caught up with the fans at the Hammersmith Apollo, 27th November. They asked: Which song are they most looking forward to tonight; and how they felt about original Special Jerry Dammers not being in the line up?

These are By Far My Favorite Clips :)





More Here

http://www.winkball.com/walls/7c1G81nzjDMM/the-specials-1

http://www.winkball.com/walls/Aq6poOtNIOi7/the-specials

Jerry Dammers Collaboration With Anthony Joseph

Anthony Joseph & The Spasm Band
Rubber Orchestras
22/09/11

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01 Griot
02 Started off as a dancer
03 She is the sea
04 Cobra
05 Tanty Lynn
06 Bullet in the rocks
07 Money Satan
08 Speak the name
09 Damballah
10 Generations (Produced And Arranged By Jerry Dammers)
11 Bossa for Dalston (bonus track)


Jerry Dammers (with whom Anthony Joseph has been playing for years in a project called The Spatial AKA), has also come to the banquet. The legendary founder of The Specials, one of the most important UK bands of the 80s, took to the controls to arrange and enhance a visionary and revolutionary poem, the iconic suite called ‘Generations’, which distils the essence of the songwriter’s message. “Those lyrics, which talk about my relationship to my land and its history through my ancestors, they struck a chord with Jerry. He definitely wanted to be part of it and it was an honour for me to have such a genius and visionary mind helping us. What’s more, it’s the meeting of two generations who look towards the future while still having a keen sense of the past.

http://www.anthonyjoseph.co.uk/main.html

http://www.hmvdigital.com/artist/anthony-joseph-the-spasm-band/rubber-orchestras

http://musique.fnac.com/a3675587/Anthony-Joseph-Rubber-orchestras-CD-album

http://www.africa-news.eu/entertainment/44-entertainment/3293-anthony-joseph-develop-something-truly-unique-and-different.html

Friday, October 14, 2011

Terry Hall / Specials Relationship 14/10/11

Terry Hall : It's a fragile reunion that is about to break.

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UNCOMFORTABLE silences: we were anticipating a few when we planned a hook up with Terry Hall, legendary frontman with The Specials and Fun Boy Three.

On stage and off, Hall has something of an enigmatic reputation. As frontmen go, he's a quiet and solitary animal that skulks in the shadows. “I frustrate our lighting engineers endlessly,” he smiles. “He sets these lights up for me and I never stand in them, but that's part of the fun really.

“I never understood why I had to stand out at the front and be this horrible Bono type character. We're a collective on stage. I've never felt the need to be the show.”

So when we hit our first silence about five minutes in, a flurry of panic sets in. Fortunately, it's far from being an awkward moment; instead we find ourselves lost in collective imagination with Terry as he reflects on the band's fragile reunion.

“I held off for such a long time because I didn't really see any point. I think I was too niggly before and I was too cynical.

“But a number of things happened over a period of maybe six months to a year where we sort of got back together, and that was down to a lot of things, like some of us had had serious illnesses.

“We got in touch again and once we started playing music again together, we realised we still enjoyed that side of our friendship. When we're together for 10 minutes in the dressing room, we really like each other,” he pauses. “Well, some of us do.

“But it's quite a big band, six men, it's a pretty unnatural situation to put yourself in. To live with those people can wear a bit thin. We're not great at socialising together or going to the cinema together, but....”

Then the silence. “I just pictured us all sitting in the cinema together, on the front row.” He raises a wry smile. “That was horrible.”

It's a fragile reunion that is about to break. This latest sold out tour, based on the band's seminal albums Specials and More Specials, will be their last; this three year romp through The Specials' best bits has come to a natural conclusion.

The idea of doing more as The Specials without new material makes Terry wince. And the idea of actually making new material makes him scratch his head in wonder.

“I don't know how we'd do it,” he says. “You can only tour this material so much and I don't want to get bored with it. I don't think we want to schlep around again after this tour.

“I'm still enjoying getting together with everybody and there's a sense of ownership of it and that's really lovely. The people that come to see us seem to feel a real part of it, but nobody wants it to get boring.

“We could write new material, or we could go off and do our own thing again. We're working on a couple of new things, but whether we'll record or not, I don't know...” he pauses.

“It's just nice to be mates again – to rekindle that is enough for now. We're very loose about the future really. We're at that age in life where you're just grateful to wake up in the morning.”

The original reunion, back in 2008, came about to mark the 30th anniversary of their debut album. Three years later, it coincides with the 30th anniversary of when it all famously fell apart in a Top Of The Pops dressing room and Terry quit to form Fun Boy Three – the pop tonic to The Specials' intoxicating socio-political agenda.

Terry also released a number of critically acclaimed solo albums and collaborations. At 52, he's no more keen to become a solo artist again than he is to be the frontman of Fun Boy Three, although he has recently tried to talk his son, 21-year-old Theodore, into performing some European shows with him. “He's like, 'You're a bit old. You're an alright dad but I don't want to be in a group with you'.”

His life-long battle with mental health issues continues; writing songs, and performing with The Specials, have been 'his therapy'. And he's also discovered painting: “My doctors thought it would be a good idea as part of my recovery. For two years I could paint nothing but the Jackson 5; no idea why, just endless paintings.

“Now I want to move on to something else. Maybe the Osmonds. I've been talking to people about an exhibition next year.” He laughs: “I've got thousands of pictures of the Jackson 5 I can show.

“But being on stage is one of the few places where I feel most like myself,” he continues. “The inhibitions go and I don't care what I feel like or look like or sound like – it doesn't matter.

“If I want to walk round on my knees I can do that. I can't really do that in the street,” he laughs. “Well, I can. But you'd get a very different kind of attention.”

It is, though, timely that the the project has run its course again inside three years. This bookend tour has not (as rumours online would have it) been engineered to make way for a Fun Boy Three reunion. Despite offers, Terry says he remains uninterested: “That group was a reaction to this group – to get away,” he says, “We haven't got that fire any more.”

But it was the right time to pull the material back out. Their songs, from Nite Klub and Gangsters to their biggest hits Too Much Too Young and Ghost Town, spoke about a nation in economic and social turmoil: of an unemployed, disenfranchised, disenchanted youth living on the poverty line.

Today, the band are singing those songs again in similarly recessive times. “I had that initial weirdness on our first rehearsal of the material that a percentage of it still applied,” Terry says. “It is horrible that you can still do a song like Ghost Town with conviction – that's not right.

“It would be nice to drop it out of our set because it no longer applied, but if we did that with all our material we'd have about three songs left in our set. This year has been a mirror image of the year we released Ghost Town: there's been a Royal Wedding, disruption, unemployment, rioting.

“We didn't write those songs as a solution to it. It was just a running diary about how we lived. The anger is still there, but it's not as easy to be angry at this age,” he smiles.

“If we were still that angry at this age, we'd all get locked up. We're older and milder, and now we feel we've done what we needed to do, and that was to get each others' phone numbers.

“That's what I wanted anyway.” Another silence. “Whether I change my number or not is a different matter.”

UK Shows:

Tuesday 11-Oct Wolverhampton Civic
Wednesday 12-Oct Wolverhampton Civic
Friday 14-Oct Manchester Apollo
Saturday 15-Oct Manchester Apollo
Sunday 16-Oct Hull Arena
Tuesday 18-Oct Glasgow SECC
Friday 21-Oct Nottingham Arena
Sunday 23-Oct Plymouth Pavilion
Monday 24-Oct Cheltenham Racecourse
Tuesday 25-Oct Brighton Centre
Thursday 27-Oct Bournemouth International Centre
Friday 28-Oct Cardiff Arena
Saturday 29-Oct Coventry Ricoh Arena
Thursday 3-Nov London Alexandra Palace

http://www.citylife.co.uk/news_and_reviews/news/10019941_terry_s_specials_relationship

The Specials / International Jet Set Live 2011

Here are The Specials performing International Jet Set At Wolverhampton Civic Hall on October 11th 2011. this track is taken from their 2nd LP More Specials and hasn't been played Live since 1981.

Enjoy



http://www.youtube.com/user/valblundell

Roddy "Radiation" Byers / Interview 14/09/11

Here's a nice Interview with Roddy "Radiation" Byers Guitarist with The Specials and Skabilly Rebels Recorded in Amsterdam last month.

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http://skabeatsandmore.blogspot.com/

http://www.roddyradiation.com/

http://www.thespecials.com/

Jerry Dammers / Interview 07/07/09

INTERVIEW WITH JERRY DAMMERS

by John Sinclair & Dylan Harding

Brixton Market, London, July 7, 2009

JERRY DAMMERS: Sorry, I’m feeling a little bit naked today. I’m just getting all this new material together for the one rehearsal—it’s a bit crazy. I’ve just managed to get the scores together by the end of it—just in time, you know, always the last minute. I’m not a person who really likes telling people what to do, but you have to, and it’s quite stressful.

JOHN SINCLAIR: What made you take on this project? Where did you get this mission?

DAMMERS: I just got a vision for these bands, and I just want to make them reality. They’re sort of fantasy bands, you know, that’s the thing…

DYLAN HARDING: The Sun Ra project: How long have you been thinking about actually doing that? Is it years? How did that occur to you?

DAMMERS: Well, I had this band called Jazz Odyssey, based on this Spinal Tap thing about you can’t play jazz to a festival crowd. So I formed this band based on that, and we did a few Sun Ra covers and I got that together. That must’ve been about ten, twelve years ago. But everyone was still smoking too much ganga then, and that all sort of disappeared in a cloud of ganga smoke.

HARDING: How big was that band?

DAMMERS: It wasn’t as big… it was about eight or nine people. It was one of those bands where the first person has left the rehearsal before the last person has arrived. It never quite took off. We only did one gig. You know, I had this idea of having a free pub concert inside of the Glastonbury festival, so we went and played at Glastonbury even though we weren’t officially booked, you know. We pretended to be another band, and we managed to get in, so we set up and played.

I started off doing kind of hip hop jazz sessions at the WAG club, the old Whiskey-a-Go-Go, and did some jam sessions there with Jason Yard, who’s still in the band, and in fact we got the vibes player back who was at those original sessions, Roger Bosely, he was at the rehearsal last night.

SINCLAIR: What kind of jazz did this band play?

DAMMERS: It was supposed to be like hip hop jazz, really—funky beats—and at one point it was going to be a crossover between hip hop and jazz. We had a real drummer, but it was very repetitive stuff. Well, like Miles Davis’ last album—like jazz over hip hop beats.

HARDING: Obviously it’s a thought you had, but coming up with the idea that you would actually do the Sun Ra thing in costume, did that come to you in a flash?

SINCLAIR: But what about deciding to do the music? The costumes kind of come with the music, but what about deciding to do the music?

DAMMERS: Oh yeah, the music. Well, the music was the first thing. But I think I’ve always been into jazz, really. I’m not a jazz player, myself…

SINCLAIR: But being into jazz and forming an orchestra to play the music of Sun Ra are kinda two different things, aren’t they? [Laughs.] One is way beyond the other…

DAMMERS: I had this vision of—apart from knowing about Sun Ra earlier—I always had this idea of being a hip hop producer, so I was always searching for break beats and stuff, and that’s when I got into record collecting. And I just dug deeper and deeper into stuff and got more and more… So Sun Ra’s kinda the ultimate, isn’t he, of something? I’ve been thinking a lot about—yeah, I think he probably was abducted by aliens, and he probably was sent back to… I’m starting to believe it’s all true.

But the final thing that tipped me into doing it: I got asked to—they had this arts event at the Roundhouse when it first reopened, it was called Space and they had all sorts of art to do with space, and they asked me to DJ a soundtrack to this Russian film about these cosmonauts—they went up into space in the Communist era and while they were there in outerspace, the Communist Party collapsed. And they were in space and they couldn’t come home, because then there was chaos. Because, obviously, being cosmonauts they were right in the thick of the Communist Party, and they sort of very happily had to change sides in order to come down again.

It’s a great film—it’s a documentary, it’s not a… They were trying to suss out what was going on, and then they started telling them what’s happened, that the regime has changed, and he says something along the lines of, “It’s a new dawn out of the earth” or something like that. And they get back and everything has changed. I didn’t actually use any Sun Ra records in the soundtrack, but—anyway, we had this night, and I just thought that wasn’t enough for one night, so I thought what else shall I do to make it a bit more interesting, and I put together a Sun Ra tribute band. And it was amazing—it all came together in two weeks. You know, I’ve got a good deal of friends who are great musicians, and I got in touch with them and it all came together.

SINCLAIR: Now your members, were they familiar with Sun Ra’s music?

DAMMERS: Were they familiar with it? Yeah, yeah, it’s just to different degrees, yeah. But that was the amazing thing—Sun Ra’s got this very special place, hasn’t he, amongst musicians? Because he sort of stands for the ultimate in a certain… something. It’s hard to say what it is, but through the generations, everybody name-drops Sun Ra.

SINCLAIR: Now what did you do to prepare the music? Did you transcribe it, or get sheet music?

DAMMERS: Yeah, I can read music a little bit—not very well, but I got some help from people in transcribing it, and then I organized it all into kind of a doable structure, you know, because… everything I do has got to be doable, I think that’s the…

I think the audience can—although they don’t realize it maybe, half the time, but—people can actually feel the structure, relate to the structure of something complicated, how it’s put together and stuff, even if that’s not part of what attracts them.

SINCLAIR: They can feel it. I had a mission at one time to expose regular music audiences to the music of Sun Ra, and they loved it. They went wild. It was very gratifying, because I thought they would. [Laughs.]

DAMMERS: It’s very accessible as well. People think it’s difficult, but it’s not.

SINCLAIR: It was just jazz fans who didn’t get it. Kids who went to a rock & roll show, they loved it. MC5 and Sun Ra—they loved both halves of the bill. It was quite amazing—I thought it was quite a gamble, but it turned out not to be at all.

HARDING: Where did “Sonic” Smith get his idea to dress up in costume? Was that Sun Ra? Because I like to think that that lineage—that Kiss is up on stage because of Sun Ra, you know?

DAMMERS: You’re not going to tell me that Pink Floyd weren’t influenced by Sun Ra. The first album that they played on was this soundtrack to—what’s it called, something about London? [Peter Whitehead’s Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London]—and they do this long jam, and if that’s not influenced by Sun Ra, I don’t know what is. And all that space imagery they came up with, I’m sure they got that from him. And I’m sure that—because they like to put themselves around as the inventors of psychedelic music, don’t they, Pink Floyd, but I’m sure they got a lot of it from Sun Ra. I know Pete Townshend was a huge Sun Ra fan—oh yeah, I mean all those hip guys knew all about that in the sixties. They probably weren’t letting on too much, but I’m sure that—I mean, I think that psychedelic music was invented in jazz, definitely, and then a sort of bastardized version was taken on in rock. But the whole idea of that spacy… whatever it is… comes from jazz, from all those spiritual jazz guys.

It’s kind of poetic as well, isn’t it? Oh, very, very poetic. I’ll tell you, Sun Ra—I think with all the space race that was going on, going to the moon, America, black people couldn’t afford to really—well, they weren’t really involved in any of that, so he was having his own space race, you know.

SINCLAIR: You start talking about in the fifties, he was way out there. Nobody talked about space in an artistic context, or having to do with this is space, you know? Space was out there. You shot things at it, like a moon shot. That wasn’t until what, 1969? He’d been into this since the early fifties. When you first saw those album covers with the planets and everything, it was just mind-boggling. But it was all just his vision of the cosmos.

DAMMERS: But he was always just trying to turn things around, wasn’t he, and have a different way of looking at things that always—you get that with Lee Perry as well, that whole thing of whatever the question is, he’ll turn the question on itself and turn it around on you, right?

SINCLAIR: Lee Perry: the Sun Ra of reggae… But Jerry, I’m still kinda interested in the nuts and bolts of putting this thing together and then making it happen—convincing these characters to go along with it.

DAMMERS: I suppose you take Sun Ra’s leadership on that, because like he said, the possible’s already been done, you know, so I suppose it’s just the impossibility of it that’s attractive. But also, that’s the kind of challenge, isn’t it, that he’s laying down—to anybody, really, and I sort of thought, well, ok, in that case, a Sun Ra tribute band—what’s more impossible than that? In a way, you know, because you can’t possibly get close to it. [Laughs.] But I do like the idea of a tribute band—just don’t do one to yourself. Do it to someone who’s worthy of a tribute. Never cover your own material, cover someone else’s. But that seems to be the way of the world now—everything’s a tribute band, so it’s much better to do a tribute to something good.

SINCLAIR: How did you pick the musicians for this project?

DAMMERS: Like I say, Jason Yard was there from those jam sessions that I used to hold years and years ago in the WAG club, so he was there from the beginning. Larry Stebbins I knew from the band Working Week, and he’s been kind of a free jazz stalwart since the sixties—a great player. Zoe Rahman, I heard her first couple of albums and they were really great, and she had that sort of spiritual thing going on. Dennis Baptiste is another really great player that I knew about mostly just through the grapevine, really. And then there’s my pal Ollie Bayley who was in the original Jazz Odyssey band, you know, I’ve been working with him for a long time—we’ve been DJing together, and searching out all these records and tunes and everything. I mean, this band is kind of…

That’s the other thing: covers bands, that’s another great tradition—I spoke to Larry about that, you know. In the sixties and seventies that’s how we came up, that’s how we learned the trade, was doing covers in the clubs, in working men’s clubs, you know, and that’s how everyone’s been. And that’s how you learn. And of course nowadays nobody knows that, but it’s actually a great learning process. I’ll just say that all this is a learning process, that’s why we’re doing it, because by doing covers you can learn about… music, and the whole thing’s a learning process. And that was a great tradition that we thought was worth reviving, really, you know, and now I’m a bit stuck whether I’m a tribute and covers-band purist—I’m scared to do any of my own material. [Laughs.] No, no, I’m joking.

SINCLAIR: How did you go about selecting the repertoire, once you got some guys together to play it?

DAMMERS: Yeah, well, I tend to select it. But that came from the DJ—the band comes from the DJ thing as well, because I did a chess club with a lot of spiritual seventies jazz and free jazz, with some very serious chess players. So we had this little club at the Egyptian Room, in the Atlantic Bar—it was a great room, man, it was all done out in Egyptian, and I used to play the records. They had some very serious hard-core chess players there—I mean, some of the chess players, the older guys, couldn’t take it, because I was playing really free jazz, but the younger guys… “No, no, how else do you play chess? You know what I mean—it drives you on… ” That’s what I was trying to tell the older guys. They said, “We can’t concentrate—it’s too noisy.” And I was saying, “No, no, you can concentrate better.” I was always trying to tell these guys—tell people that free jazz is, like, the most relaxing music there is. But you’ve got to listen to it, not at it—a lot of people listen at it, and they have a bad reaction. But you just go with it, and it takes you where it takes you, you know.

HARDING: Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy…

DAMMERS: That’s right, it’s very therapeutic. So, from the jazz DJing with chess, that’s when I started thinking that we should try playing some of this music. So that’s where it all came around, you know—it’s all back to front. I always had a vision of it being modernized, because I was very much into hip hop, and the beats, and all that, so our versions of it are more beat-oriented. But then Sun Ra invented all of that stuff anyway—he was playing hip hop thirty years before hip hop. You know, a lot of people don’t realize that the more rhythmic, funky stuff that he did, and the more African-based… he was very much taken up by the European kind of avant-garde, but there’s a lot of really funky, African stuff in there.

It was quite funny, because after one gig I came home and I was feeling a bit guilty, you know, should we be playing this guy’s music, and I came home and Jason and the Argonauts was on, Bernard Hermann, and I heard a couple of echoes there as well. You know, he was influenced by everything, and unashamedly, and that’s great. But watching Jason and the Argonauts, I said, “I know that bass line!” That’s a great soundtrack, Bernard Hermann, Jason and the Argonauts, it could be Sun Ra almost.

SINCLAIR: So what are some of the tunes that you are doing?

DAMMERS: There’s one called Soul Vibrations Of Man, which I found on a very obscure album. He had an album called Languidity in the seventies, which is very funky, and it had Disco Kid on the guitar, and the bass player from Pentangle, what’s his name? Richard Thompson. Yeah, he played on that, amazingly. So that was a good starting point, because we wanted to make it quite funky and quite—some of it’s quite danceable, what we do—and there’s his Where Pathways Meet. He did a sort of adaptation of A Love Supreme called Love On A Far Planet, you know, that was a very funky one that he did. We combined that with a—see, I like mixing and matching things—we combined that with a ska tune, which is actually based on a Japanese folk song, so we put a bit of that in there.

And coming up, we’re doing a Cedric Brooks tune, and Cedric Brooks played with Sun Ra. It’s amazing how many people did play with Sun Ra. We did Space Is The Place, that’s a quite obvious one. We do a sort of mixture between Discipline 27 and Retrospect—you know, Retrospect, that’s a great tune. He does a slow version and he does a faster version. You know, we placed Alice Coltrane’s stuff in the mixture.

SINCLAIR: I saw the reviews of your concerts—they were pretty exciting, I thought. I mean, they really liked it.

DAMMERS: Yeah, we’re trying to get a tour together for next year. I’d love to do a residency, I love the idea of a residency. That’s another thing that’s being lost, you know.

SINCLAIR: I went to the Sun Ra residency in Tilburg, Holland, last September, and that was exhilarating. They played every night, and they interacted in the daytime, you know. They had the Arkestra for seven days.

DAMMERS: I saw the Arkestra in Glasgow and they were great out in front, but I also went and stood at the side of the stage where you can hear everything acoustically, and that big band sound—you just can’t beat the actual acoustic sound of it, it’s just fantastic.

SINCLAIR: So the first concerts of the Tribute to Sun Ra were so much fun that you just decided to expand the repertoire?

DAMMERS: Yeah, yeah, the first gig we did, you know, it went so well, everyone had a great time, everyone had a ball, the audience loved it, so what you get from there, we just expanded the repertoire, and we’ve done a few gigs. It’s quite hard to get the gigs, because it’s quite a big job to put it on and then you’ve gotta somehow make it pay. But we’ve just gotta find the promoter—there’s gotta be a promoter out there, and I’m sure it could do fine. I’d just really love to do a residency and find a really good venue and stick to it, and the people would come. We always try and play in really nice venues, generally. We had a gig in Dublin, but we didn’t do that in the end. Dublin was funny—he bought the band and he said, “Have you got any photos?” So I sent the photos over and he canceled the gig. [Laughs.] He didn’t know how he could promote it.

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http://www.jerrydammers.com/