Coventry has been nominated City of Culture. People tell me it’s changed a lot recently. I haven’t been there for 17 years, so it’s not for me to comment. The last time was for the penultimate match at the old Highfield Road stadium. Coventry beat Nottingham Forest 3-1 and two weeks later they started pulling the old place down.
“I just looked round and my youth it was sold.” Not for the first time Mark E Smith sums it up best.
I may have mentioned this on previous blogs (there have been over a hundred, so it’s easy to lose track), but Coventry at the end of the ‘seventies was grim. It was a city that had been rapidly reassembled after being flattened in the war, had managed to claw its way back to some economic prosperity in the ‘sixties, but then had fallen victim to economic trade winds. Compounding the economic anxiety was a city with a large, but largely unintegrated, ethnic community. Racial tensions were rife.
Into this maelstrom stepped The Specials, Jerry Dammers and the Two Tone label he founded. The idea was simple. Fuse the elements of ska, reggae and rocksteady from Jamaican music in the sixties with elements from new wave and punk. Fuse black group members with white. And break down barriers and suspicions in the process.
As a young store assistant in Owen Owen, I was charged with selling the new Two Tone merchandise. The elderly ladies I served with in Boyswear were bemused, but I explained the thinking and, to their credit, they bought into it. Even more so when the cash tills started ringing.
The movement remains charged with great cultural significance. It showed that young people were not divided, given the right catalyst. That hatred and antagonism were not inevitable. Two Tone reached its apotheosis when Ghost Town hit number one in the summer of riots that burnt through the nation.
Now there’s a Two Tone Museum in Coventry. We can talk of these things as if they were part of history, like the war itself. But the music remains vital, upbeat and infectious – here’s an episode to showcase all that was best in Two Tone and its Jamaican origins.
Setlist:
Do nothing, The Specials
Madness, Prince Buster
The prince, Madness
A message to you, Rudy, The Specials
Train to Skaville, The Ethiopians
Tears of a clown, The Beat
Street corner, The Skatalites
Missing words, The Selecter
Take it easy, Hopeton Lewis
Friday night Saturday morning, The Specials
Sea cruise, Rico
Ruder than you, The Bodysnatchers
Alipang, Don Drummond
Rukumbine, Bobby Aitken
Ghost town, The Specials