Tag: ska

INTERVIEW: Pauline Black On Why The Selecter Is Still Relevant Today

“I don’t really think that history repeats itself perfectly,” says The Selecter front woman Pauline Black on a call from Monterrey, Mexico, where the band was on tour. Instead, she notes, “history rhymes,” adding, “I think that we’re definitely very much in a kind of rhyming situation right now.”

In May of 1979, the same month that Margaret Thatcher become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, The Selecter first appeared with a self-titled track on a split 7″ with The Specials. This release marked the inception of what would become a pivotal part of a growing movement – 2 Tone Records, founded by Jerry Dammers of The Specials. A British take on Jamaican ska that derived its name from the label itself, two tone merged energetic, bouncy rhythms with lyrics that delved into the struggles of British, working class youth, and The Selecter was at the forefront of the scene as one of the genre’s most prominent acts. “Disaffected people are normally the ones who enjoy two-tone music,” says Black, “because it actually talks about them, their concerns and possibly what the future might be if the people that run things weren’t running them quite so badly.”

At the end of the ’70s and into the early 1980s, The Selecter were an antidote to the wave of conservatism that had spread throughout their home country. “The 2 Tone label came along at the right time, at the time when somebody like Margaret Thatcher had just come into power and was deciding to wage war on people who were working class, blue collar people, who worked for a living,” says Black. “She had absolutely no time for them and wasn’t in any mood to make things better for young people at that time. Those were the issues that we decided to sing about.”

It resonated. By October, The Selecter were on Top of the Pops performing second single “On My Radio.” You can hear the beginnings of frustration and dissent in the multiple meanings of its refrain: “It’s just the same old show, on my radio.” But The Selecter wasn’t the same old, same old. For one, Black notes, their original line-up featured seven members, six of whom were black. “That immediately made us very different from all of the other bands,” she says. Moreover, Black was a rare female voice within the two-tone scene.

She points to the cover art of their debut full-length, Too Much Pressure, released in early 1980, as an aesthetic reflection of what was, and remains, the band’s message. It’s designed in black-and-white, with a checkerboard print border. “Black people, white people, women, men – that’s embodied, I feel, in that kind of iconography, using that black and white checker,” says Black. She points to the man on the cover of the album, leaning against the checkered border as if it’s a wall, his hat lying on the ground. “He’s really at rock bottom,” she says, “he’s almost in this prison of the black and white check that bounds the actual square of the record, if you’re looking at the vinyl.”

“I thought that was very emblematic of the time,” Black continues. She points out too that the checkered pattern was also used by police in the U.K., adding another layer of meaning. “You’re imprisoned in this shell of authority and those extremes, I suppose, that held you in in society,” she explains.

Their songs – like “Three Minute Hero,” “Time Hard” and “Danger” – reflected struggle, but Black notes that there are threads of hope in their work too. “There is a way forward,” she says. “But, the main thing about the way forward is actually unity and not letting all those outside forces who like to keep us in the status quo, as it were, using things like racism or sexism for their own ends to divide.” She adds, “I think all the 2 Tone bands were very much of that kind of ilk.”

Following the release of their stellar sophomore album, Celebrate the Bullet, The Selecter split. After regrouping in the 1990s, the band continued to delve into socio-political issues in albums like Cruel Britannia (1998), its title a play on the catchphrase “Cool Britannia,” and their 2017 release, Daylight.

Forty years later, and in the midst of another conservative political movement, both in the U.K. and the U.S., The Selecter, led by Black and fellow founding member Arthur “Gaps” Hendrickson, are back on the road to celebrate their anniversary. The night before our interview, the band played Mexico City, their first non-festival gig in the city. Fans brought vintage pressings of The Selecter’s releases and copies of Black’s memoir, Black by Design, with them. “It was just wonderful,” she says. On September 11, they began a jaunt through the U.S., with gigs in Europe and the U.K. continuing through fall.

The Selecter has remained active in recent years and had been touring as co-headliners with fellow two-tone outfit The Beat (known as The English Beat in the U.S.). The Beat frontman Ranking Roger fell ill and, ultimately, died in March of this year. The loss of their tour mate made this anniversary trek all the more imperative. “We just felt that we really had to celebrate this milestone, if not for us than for the memory of Roger,” says Black.

With the anniversary gigs, Black says, the goal is to take listeners through the band’s history, showing them the “narrative line” in The Selecter’s view of the world. She says, “What we were talking about then is very similar to what we’re talking about now.”

Catch The Selecter live and follow the band on Facebook for ongoing updates.

ONLY NOISE: More Specials

Tonight I’m going to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I am going listen to a record, in full, and with all of the lights off, while doing nothing else, so help me god. This is how I used to listen to music. Before I had a smart phone, or a laptop, or a job. Before I had deadlines, a.k.a. homework I actually cared about. Before I had to cook my own meals. Back in those “before” days, the best place for listening to records was my friend Daniel’s bedroom, where we’d flip off all of the lights and dive under the blankets covering his bed to listen to Pixies’ Doolittle or the new Modest Mouse record. We would listen to these albums in full, and never speak a word.

The next best spot was my bedroom. I didn’t have my own full-sized turntable back then, but I did have a funny little portable vinyl player that my dad leant me. It was a highly precarious object, as the LP itself was largely exposed. A strip of plastic held it in place down the center, but the remaining surface area of the record (I’d say a good 80%) jutted out the sides. This made for an interesting time when you listened to records through headphones, which I always did late at night to avoid waking my parents. I would clamp in the record, plug in my headphones, and gingerly lay next to the contraption, trying not to flinch or make any sudden movements on my way down. There was a constant fear of ripping my earbuds out mid-song, or worse, knocking the mini turntable over completely. I remember lying on my back, closing my eyes, and letting the jagged guitars and hissing hi-hats of AFI’s Very Proud Of Ya take me outside of my wood-paneled bedroom walls. I knew that this was the ultimate way to listen to music: alone or with a quiet companion, eyes shut and fully immersed.

It is difficult to make time for this kind of listening now. Listening requires not only attention but intention. But despite how challenging it can be to sit still and take in a record in full, I’m determined to do it more often. This week, and hopefully many more weeks to follow, I’ll pick an LP from my collection; I’ll drop the needle, sit down, shut up, and listen. Tonight, after a dreary first week of February, I’m looking for a pick-me-up, and I can’t think of a better record to do the job that the Specials’ 1980 sophomore LP More Specials.

After discovering a promotional copy of the British band’s self titled debut in my mom’s record collection, I knew the Specials were going to be an important band in my life, even if I was discovering them 25 years too late. Regardless of how much I loved that first album, it was all I knew of the 2 Tone group, and I was always a bit surprised I didn’t see more of their work in record stores. It took me two years to find More Specials, and I didn’t even know I was looking for it.

It must have been 2005 when my mom and I drove to Laguna Beach from my grandmother’s house in Huntington. At that point in time I would have assumed that Laguna would not be to my liking – surely it would resemble the television show sharing its namesake. The Orange County city surprised me, however; as I walked through the doors of Underdog Records, I knew I’d found a place just for me.

I located a vinyl copy of More Specials within minutes, and shelled out the high price of $13.99 for it (the Day-Glo orange price tag is still plastered on the upper right hand corner of the sleeve). Little did I know, the man who sold the vinyl to me was Mike Lohrman, lead singer of the Stitches, a band I would later see live and meet in Seattle, when my best friend would open for them. Underdog was his shop, but not for much longer – sadly, it closed just a year after I visited.

Record shopping in Southern California always presented a frustrating dilemma – the region had some of the best secondhand punk record stores I’d ever seen (most of them, like Underdog and Costa Mesa’s NoiseNoiseNoise, are now sadly out of business). I would make out with absolute treasures: Circle Jerks’ Wild in the Streets, Minor Threat LPs, and all the Social Distortion bootlegs a girl could ask for. Sadly, I had no place to listen to them, until I went home to Washington after visiting Grandma. The anticipation made my private listening sessions all the more exciting, however. Playing More Specials tonight brings about a sense of wonder similar to what I must have felt 13 years ago.

More Specials was never the critical darling that was 1979’s Specials, but it’s still an exceptional record. Songs like “Rat Race” and “Hey Little Rich Girl” are built for the skank floor, but rife with British snark. “Pearl’s Café” is one of the most terrifying depictions of old age, irrelevance, and loneliness, and contains one of my favorite ways to say fuck it: “It’s all a load of bollocks/And bollocks to it all.” Again, despite the song’s depressing nature, the Specials provided an exuberant, sing-along pop number. Then again, with the Go-Gos as your backing vocalists, how could you not achieve catchy perfection? The pinnacle of this sad story/sweet song dichotomy is reached during “I Can’t Stand It.” Had it been left entirely to singer Terry Hall, this song would have been glum enough – but paired with the quavering vocals of the Bodysnatchers’ Rhoda Dakar, it is nothing short of heart wrenching. It is a breakup song for the ages, and it rarely fails to make me cry a little.

It continually amazes me how many memories fit inside the sleeve of an album, even ones that haven’t been played in years. While there is constant pressure to remain current, to look to the future of music, I find it cathartic to look back occasionally – to flip through my records like a dust-coated photo album. It is a collection of memories I hope to revisit more often.

ONLY NOISE: A Message To You, Moody

thye-specials

It is likely that whenever the Specials sang “pick it up, pick it up, pick it up!” they were not talking about your disposition. Maybe they meant the beat or your beer or the change on the ground…but why not your ‘tude while you’re at it?

It is a gross understatement to say that music makes you feel things. Composers know this well.  Score writers know just when to cue in the strings to make a little tear fall, and massage therapists know which new age selection makes you relaaaaaaxxx.

But what about the other end of the emotional spectrum? What if the conductor of life’s cruel symphony is already making you cry, facilitating your craving for Duncan Hines easy-bake cake, and keeping you stuffed under innumerable layers of blankets with nothing but a bottle of Shiraz on your nightstand? How do you ‘pick it up’ then?

I’ve searched high and low for what some call a “good day record,” but often to no avail. Songs are too tied up in life events, too burdened by association to bleach away the sad or effectively spike endorphins. The C major scale can sound ecstatic on an on day, and cataclysmic on an off one. But wouldn’t a music writer have an entire fleet of mood-altering records at her disposal? 12-inch, black wax happy pills to make everything better?

No.

Both sad and true, there is only one album I’ve found in all my searching, that pinches me awake from the downward swirling hellhole of a bad mood. It’s the Specials’ 1979 self-titled debut that does it. It is my only hope, and I toss it back like a shot of bourbon after a long workday.

I’ve spoken at length about my parents’ respective record collections and the gratis therapy they have provided over the years. But of all the sleeves I’ve removed from those shelves The Specials is somehow the only album I’ve ever found that can snap me out of a bad day with Pavlovian accuracy…though I am currently taking submissions for more!

With its initial wheezes of harmonica and organ, it is a record that elicits instantaneous joy, a little cloud of dopamine in my limbic system. There are moments throughout its 14 songs that require tiny rituals of an obsessive quality. I will urgently drop a sandwich or press the phone between my ear and shoulder to catch that little snare fill in the beginning of “A Message To You Rudy.” Don’t try to stop me.

The effect this album has on me goes deeper than a “happy” sound or lyrical content. It isn’t as though the Specials only sang about the good life; there are tracks in their catalogue about everything from drunken bar brawls, to adulterous girlfriends, depressing clubs, a wasted London, and being an overall useless human being. Perhaps had I caught the 2 Tone bug later in life, that first record wouldn’t have the same beatific effect on me, but as it stands I pop it like a mood stabilizer.

I don’t focus so much on the lyrics, but rather the beat, the bounce, that crazy organ player Jerry Dammers who makes Shane Macgowan look like he has a nice set of teeth. I picture all seven members bobbing around like dancing ants in their little matching suits, black and white just like the musicians themselves. I think of horn sections, and shiny shoes, and the rhythmic absurdity that is skanking. I think of being in the kitchen as a 13-year-old, making failed attempts at baking and zine-making. Or of the time I gave my mother (partially at her request, and 100% to her boyfriend’s dismay) a Chelsea haircut. Bitch bangs and all. The Specials seemed to be a record to play amongst loved ones, or at a party, and it was never an album met with dissent.

The fact that this record came out almost 40 years ago is baffling to me. Of course it was born of a very specific, genre-heavy era in the British music scene, but it somehow remains fresh sounding-as crisp as the pleats in vocalist Terry Hall’s trousers. A lot of the credit for such timelessness can no doubt be paid to the record’s producer, the sire of cool Elvis Costello, who teamed up with the band to get everything tight in the studio.

For all of the depths I wade in the name of musical discovery, this is an album that persists with its importance. On the (very) rare occasion that I am asked what band I would be in if time wasn’t an object, I say the Specials. Are they my favorite band? No. But I can’t imagine a more fun group to be in. I turned to fellow music critics for answers; why won’t this record erode? Why, despite its birth in the nightmare of Thatcherite Britain, is it brimming with joy? Do others find it as timeless as I do?

Jo-Ann Greene of AllMusic made an interesting point: that the group’s debut LP was “a perfect moment in time captured on vinyl forever.” The website went on to say that it captured the spirit of “Britain in late 1979, an unhappy island about to explode,” and “managed to distill all the anger, disenchantment, and bitterness of the day straight into their music.”

That almost solves it for me, because what the Specials were doing on a grander, more socio-cultural level as the 1970s spilled into the ‘80s, I am attempting to do in my own mind; to take “all the anger, disenchantment, and bitterness of the day” and channel it into something more worthwhile. To “pick it up” and put it somewhere useful, like on the dance floor.

I’m not trying to write a self-help text here (though if I did it might be called Dance The Death Away). But I am trying to give credence to a phenomenon that endlessly fascinates me: that these little vibrations in our cochleae can so violently shift our emotional tide in ways that other stimuli cannot. The power of sound has been honed to such an extent that it has been weaponized for god sake, which admittedly is more to the credit of frequency than emotional response, but it certainly doesn’t undercut the impact of the aural.

A few years ago I reviewed a documentary for Film Forward called Alive Inside that discussed the effect of music on the memory of Alzheimer’s victims. The results, though perhaps not representative of a large enough study group, were pretty astonishing. It seemed that when the Alzheimer’s patients at a nursing home were played the music of their youth they were overcome with detailed memories and emotion.

Yet another study from 2011 dealt with the (proven) direct link between music and mood, citing that when subjects played their own selections of songs, they experienced “chills,” a scientific term summarizing the enormous amounts of dopamine the brain releases with such stimulation. The same reaction occurs during (good) sex, eating sweets, and injecting certain drugs.

But you don’t have to have bad sex, or spike your glycemic index, or shoot heroin. Music surely doesn’t solve all of the world’s problems, or even all of one’s own problems, but it’s a crutch I’m happy to lean on. As Morrissey once sang: “the world is full of crashing bores,” and that is true. Yet we bores are humans, and we humans have only so many things to count as true victories…is not one of them music?

We’ve figured out how to make instruments out of everything from gourds to pure vibrations in air. So in all this chaos, and mayhem, I will try to remember that in bleak Thatcher London in 1979, when people were rioting and on the dole, and race tensions were taut, this glimmering little record by The Specials burst through and made a handful of people dance. I hope we can pick it up from there.

LIVE REVIEW: Not Blood Paint/Bad Credit No Credit

Not Blood Paint live

not blood paint

 

A friend of mine has been nagging me to see Not Blood Paint almost every week for the past two months.  She lured me in with stories of their famously dramatic shows and musical dexterity.  Apparently its members have a background in theater and performance, which was nothing less than obvious the night of their show at Shea Stadium last week.  The foursome mounted the stage in greenish-gold face paint, leggings, and spray-painted tunics. Their look fell somewhere between Spinal Tap and cheap costumes for people dressing as “Satan Worshippers.”  I was skeptical of this display immediately.

Oh, here we go, some theater kids.  Just like the ones in high school who greeted every morning with a star jump and vocal exercises.  Great…  I watched with a raised eyebrow for the first few songs, confused about my feelings over what was transpiring on stage, and then I realized something: they’re fucking incredible musicians.

Truly, every single one of them is a master of their instrument.  I would be fawning over the guitar licks until I noticed the precision of the drum parts, and eventually I’d stumble all over the bass riffs.  On top of that, they can do perfect barbershop quartet style harmonies, and stretch their vocal range to that of Steve Perry.

I had heard a handful of their tracks prior but could never pinpoint their style.  Every song I listened to sounded different from the last, yet all sounded familiar at the same time.  I say this because Not Blood Paint is not a genre-defining band.  Their musical roots clearly lie in early metal, glam rock, prog rock and jazz.  Yet what they lack in innovation they make up for in pure craft, passion, and sense of humor.  Some of their live performance stunts can get a little gimmicky, but they’re the kind of guys who just like having fun and don’t give a shit what pesky writers like me say, so more power to ‘em.  They certainly know what they’re doing and I’d love to see them again.

The headlining band, Bad Credit No Credit fell under a similar category as Not Blood Paint. While the music itself was different from their predecessors’–they played their own brand of ‘90s revival ska, punk, and jazz–their set was no less theatrical, and gimmicky.  And again, despite the Christmas costumes and backup dancers, Bad Credit No Credit are a pack of damn fine musicians.  I could listen to the horn section alone and be happy.  Throw in Carrie-Ann Murphy’s Sax ‘blowin and phenomenal vocals (she must be operatically trained) and you have a pretty impressive bunch.

It was a fun show regardless of any nitpicking I’ve committed.  The crowd was dancing hard, and everyone was happy.

Just as a last nod to the overwhelming talent of Not Blood Paint, here’s a round of applause for their diversity as musicians.  Check out the difference between this:

And this:

Pretty damn impressive if you ask me.

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