Harry's Place Arts

This is a guest post by Ben Cohen

Last night, New York discovered what British audiences have known for some time: The Specials don’t need Jerry Dammers. I wouldn’t go so far as to disparage Dammers in the manner of the British tourist who was happily skanking next to me – “he’s just a fuckin’ keyboard player” – but his absence counts for little when weighed against the group’s extraordinary stage presence.

For two hours, a small corner on the far west side of Manhattan shook to the sound that came to Britain by way of Jamaica. This was ska, unmistakeable and unapologetic, a musical form little-known in America, yet embraced with a full-throated roar by those who were present. If there was any dissonance, it lay in recalling, a world away, the specificities of England as invoked in po-faced Terry Hall’s vocals, with currant buns for tea and, afterward, the enticing prospect of being chased by the National Front.

All told, it worked and it was fabulous. The Specials played at a venue with a dreadful PA and still managed to sweep us into their sound. The gig was marketed as something of an anthem for lost youth: “If you were 12 in 1979,” enthused the venue’s website, “The Specials were easy peasy lemon squeezy the greatest band on the planet.” And there was certainly no shortage of singalong moments as they ran through “Gangsters,” “Nite Klub,” “A Message to You, Rudy,” “Rat Race,” “Stereotype”…well, you can probably guess the set-list even if you weren’t there. Perhaps the real triumph lay in the fact that their togetherness seemed so natural. Only the wag who challenged Hall to sing “It Ain’t What You Do,” the regrettable fruit of his Fun Boy Three collaboration with Bananarama, reminded us that The Specials did actually break up.

As for me, I had a couple of minor grumbles. The trombone solo on the mournful “Do Nothing,” one of their greatest songs, was a bit lacklustre, although perhaps that’s because Rico, who played on the original, is irreplaceable. The song selections were also a little too crowd-pleasing – yeah, they did “Too Much Too Young,” but I wanted “Guns of Navarone” and I was denied. More than anything, I wanted, nay craved, “Skinhead Moonstomp,” and they didn’t oblige me on that one either. So I will just have to be content to watch this glorious performance from 1979: