Music Column: Wiggly Air with Kurt Gottschalk

2-Tone in 2023. In December, the voice of the British ska revival was silenced. The wave began with the Specials in 1979, brilliantly conceived not as a band so much as a movement by Jerry Dammers, whose ouster not long after led to the splintering and eventual demise of the greatest of the 2-Tone bands. Dammers was the mastermind and architect, but Terry Hall, who died Dec. 18 at the age of 63, was the voice and face of the band. Where the punks were fueled by anger and delusions of revolution, the new ska bands played clean, infectious, upbeat Jamaican grooves while lamenting the violence around them, and the despondent and listless Hall personified the sentiment. Hall’s career didn’t end with the Specials, though. He formed the lighter but eternally endearing Fun Boy Three with fellow Specials Lynval Golding and Neville Staples for another couple albums before disbanding. A variety of projects followed, including a much-overlooked collaboration with Fun-Da-Mental’s Mushtaq. Their 2003 album The Hour of Two Lights is easily Hall’s strongest post-FB3 album. The vantage switches from Caribbean to Arabic, but the perspective remains the same: sullenly surviving in a cold, cold world. The album was released on Honest Jon’s records (founded by Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz, who also appears on the recording), and is streaming in full on the label’s Bandcamp site.

The 2-Tone movement was avowedly anti-racist and a multiracial line-up was a central tenet to what was nevertheless a male-dominated scene. The Specials, the (English) Beat, Bad Manners and Madness were all boy bands. The Selecter, with lead singer Pauline Black, stood out as the only group breaking the gender divide until Dammers’ second Specials lineup put Bodysnatchers singer Rhoda Dakar up front. The Selecter were officially the second 2^nd-wave ska band, occupying the flipside of the first single released by Dammers’ 2-Tone Records, backing the Specials’ (then the Special AKA, it gets complicated) “Gangsters.” They and the Specials were also the most politically vocal of the 2-Tone bands. The Selecter’s first album, Too Much Pressure (1980), is a key release in the fast-and-furious movement. Both bands were distributed in the States by Chrysalis, and found moderate success here, but as the Specials fell to pieces, the Selecter were all but assassinated by their second album, Celebrate the Bullet. Despite the title track and intended lead single being a lament for victims of gun violence, Chrysalis pulled back on promotion in the wake of the shootings of John Lennon and Ronald Reagan. The album sold poorly and the band fell into inactivity until 1991.

They’ve soldiered on in the three decades hence, and Bullet is now getting new life with a 3-CD reissue, out in November and Europe and Jan. 13 in the States. The remastered album, for better and worse, still packs the punch it did 40 years ago. The set comes with a disc of remixes and radio sessions as well as a full live set from 1980. The Selecter and Black, as of November an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, remain vital and worthy of celebration. And to assist in reviving the ska revival, Dance Craze—the crucial compilation of the 2-Tone era, will see rerelease in March. BFI is issuing a restoration of the concert film featuring The Selecter, The Specials, Madness, The Beat, Bad Manners and The Bodysnatchers on DVD and Blu-Ray and 2-Tone/Chrysalis is putting out, for the first time, the complete soundtrack in triple LP and triple CD formats. Maybe this time around, we’ll figure out how to dance together rather than killing each other.

RIP CMcV. There were, of course, too many notable deaths to mention in 2022—besides Terry Hall, we lost New York’s Anton Fier (Pere Ubu, the Feelies, the Lounge Lizards, Rhys Chatham, Swans), not to mention Gal Costa, Betty Davis, Meat Loaf, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ronnie Spector, and the very sound of Twin Peaks in Angelo Badalementi and Julee Cruise. The departed Keith Levene did much to create the sound of postpunk guitar during his time with Public Image Ltd., but was out before John Lydon brought the band to mainstream acceptance with a watered-down sound. And, on Nov. 30, Christine McVie exited this realm at the age of 79. In 1968, then–Christine Perfect married John McVie and took his name. The band he played in had also taken his name, and together they were the “Macs” in “Fleetwood Mac.” The McVies and drummer Mick Fleetwood saw the band through remarkable changes and remained a steadfast core when Americans Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined the band at the end of 1974. Old guard rock intelligentsia holds that this marked the band’s downfall, but rock intelligentsia loves to champion the obscure and dismiss the commercially viable. Fleetwood Mac were the jewel in the tarnished crown that was the California sound, the cocaine-laced mock intellectualism that brought us America, the Doobie Brothers and the Eagles. Being lumped with such company certainly helped their sales and, at least among some, hurt their reputation, but nobody had ever made music like Fleetwood Mac did in the ’70s. They were smart. They wrote about love and loss from a mature perspective and crafted innovative music that was complex yet easygoing. They were also a living, breathing soap opera, and that aspect of the band’s history is too easy to focus on. The drama informed the songs, but the songs were, and are, what made them great. In his 1990 memoir My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac, Mick Fleetwood wrote that Christine McVie was “the glue that held the band together.” He was referring to a near breakup, one of many, just before she joined the band, but musically at least, that could be said of her entire tenure. “Over My Head,” “Don’t Stop,” “Songbird,” “You Make Loving Fun” and “Think About Me,” all written by McVie, aren’t just central to the band’s discography, they’re integral to an era. Sometimes vox populi is right.