Dexys took mod’s sexlessness to a new dimension by separating the intensity of their beloved sixties soul from its original inspiration (carnal desire). Their passion was for passion itself. There was something decidedly ascetic about Dexys. In one song, Rowland declared, “I’m going to punish my body until I believe in my soul.” Early on the group used amphetamines, which suppress sexual drive and can create messianic self-belief (Dexys very name came from “Dexedrine,” the mods’ favorite form of amphetamine). The group then switched to a more natural way of forging a collective sense of purpose, intense physical exercise (hence the athletic, hooded-top look). They worked out together and went running as a team. “It definitely helped the spirit of the group,” Rowland recalled. “The togetherness of running along together just gets…that fighting spirit going. We used to come into the rehearsal rooms in Birmingham still sweating from running, and there was all these other groups there and it just put us a million miles away from them. You realize you have absolutely nothing in common with them. It isolated us a bit more, which is what we wanted at that point.” Before gigs, the group would limber up with exercises in the dressing room, Rowland chanting phrases from James Brown’s “Sex Machine.” Preshow drinking was verboten.
When Dexys hit the scene with “Dance Stance,” they polarized public opinion. For a certain breed of young man, Rowland became an instant icon, a Mark E. Smith who’d grown up on Northern soul rather than Krautrock. Here was a working-class hero with a chip on both shoulders. Rowland was “searching for the young soul rebels,” and these idealistic boys stepped forward as eager converts. Those of less fanatical disposition found Dexys ludicrous or repugnant.
NME
’s Mark Cordery critiqued the band’s self-conception as “an elite of Pure and Dedicated men” in terms of “Emotional Fascism,” and lambasted their music as a perversion of soul that, unlike its black sources, had “no tenderness, no sex, no wit, no laughter.”
Dexys sternly dismissed pop as trivial and plastic. In one communiqué, they castigated the entirety of popular music as “shallow, conceited, foul tasting, non lasting, bubblegum.” Yet in other respects Dexys were totally pop savvy. They understood the power of image, which they serially reinvented, à la Bowie, and were quick to grasp the importance of video. There was also something characteristically pop art and postmodern about the way Dexys used metamusical references.
Searching for the Young Soul Rebels,
the debut album, starts with the sound of a radio dial being turned, as someone scours the airwaves for the next in the line of working-class savior bands. There’s a burst of the Pistols’ “Holidays in the Sun,” then a blare of the Specials’ “Rat Race,” before Rowland blurts, “For God’s sake burn it down,” and Dexys launch into their first song.
“Geno,” Dexys’ first number one single, was an homage to sixties mod hero Geno Washington. In his native United States, Washington was a second-division R&B talent, but in the U.K. he carved out a cult following. His high-octane performances fronting the Ram Jam Band appealed to the Dexedrine-gobbling mods. Rowland’s older brother took him to see Washington when Kevin was only eleven. In “Geno,” Rowland reminisces about the inspirational force of this first live-show experience, comparing Washington to the mod’s pills of choice: “That man was my bombers, my Dexys, my high.” The follow-up single, “There, There My Dear,” went even further into the realm of metamusic. It’s a vitriolic riposte to a skeptic called Robin (most likely a real person, a trend-hopping music journalist or pretentious musician) who’s had the temerity
not
to “welcome the new soul vision.”
Dexys did have some real content amid all the self-reflexive bluster. “There, There” also contains the classic class-war couplet “The only way to change things/Is to shoot men who arrange things.” “I Couldn’t Help It If I Tried” recounts Rowland’s attempt to organize a strike only to be let down by his coworkers. “Dance Stance” attacks people who tell jokes about stupid Irishmen but don’t know about Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, and the rest. The cover of
Searching
was a photo of a Belfast Catholic boy carrying his belongings after being driven from his neighborhood during the sectarian strife of 1969. Half-Irish, Rowland later recalled wanting “a picture of unrest. It could have been from anywhere but I was secretly glad that it was from Ireland.”
Still, there was a suspicious vagueness to Rowland’s rhetoric. Calling Dexys’ fan club Intense Emotions Ltd. and titling one tour the Projected Passion Revue suggested both self-parody and a certain hollowness at the heart of it all. Their mission statement seemed to be “We have a mission,” or even “We believe in the
idea
of having a mission.” Asked what the album title
Searching for the Young Soul Rebels
actually meant, Rowland admitted, “I don’t know. I just liked the sound of it, really.”
Prickly at the best of times, Dexys’ interviews in 1980 became fraught affairs as journalists probed for something tangible and Rowland got defensive. In July of that year, with “There, There My Dear” high in the charts, Dexys declared a press embargo, announcing that they’d no longer be doing interviews with “the dishonest, hippy press” but would instead pay for their own essays to be printed in the music papers as adverts. A series of pompous (if occasionally funny) communiqués followed, usually timed around the release of a single. The new embattled mood in the Dexys camp seemed to curdle the music, and this was reflected on the U.K. charts. “Plan B” was a small hit, but both “Keep It Part Two” and “Liars A to E” failed to chart at all. In early 1981, most of the band abandoned their leader to form a surrogate band called the Bureau. Only a year after topping the charts with “Geno,” Rowland and his “new soul vision” looked all washed-up.
Too much too young also had a calamitous effect on 2-Tone. Talking to
Melody Maker
in June 1980, Jerry Dammers sounded despondent: “2-Tone has become a monster.” Constant touring—including an exhausting traipse across America—put a huge and intolerable strain on relations within the Specials. Running the label pushed Dammers, who didn’t find it easy to delegate, to the point of collapse. While mixing the soundtrack for the 2-Tone live-performance movie
Dance Craze,
he had a work-induced breakdown. Meanwhile, a vast exploitation industry sprang up churning out shoddy merchandise. The back pages of the music papers teemed with ads for checked ties and badges, black-and-white modette suits, porkpie hats, and T-shirts featuring 2-Tone band and label logos. Not a penny of the proceeds reached 2-Tone’s coffers.
Ska revival clone bands swarmed across the nation. Most were unsuccessful, the exception being chart regulars Bad Manners, a comedy-ska troupe with a fatso front man called Buster Bloodvessel. Dammers accordingly felt the pressure to keep pushing things forward. “It’s time for the 2-Tone bands to begin getting experimental,” he declared. “Some of the homegrown ska has started to become a cliché. We’ve got to start all over again.” For Dammers, this meant pursuing his fascination with mood music and easy listening, background stuff intended to be ignored, but that was actually quite eerie if actively listened to. According to Neville Staple, the obsession with Muzak came about because the Specials were playing abroad all the time. “We were in airplanes too much, man, and hotels! We were hearing that kind of elevator music, those drum machine beats, everywhere we went. You soak up what surrounds you.”
In September 1980 the new Specials’ sound was unveiled with the double A-sided single “Stereotypes” and “International Jet Set,” both taken from the new album. “Stereotypes” whisked together a kitschedelic meringue of movie score and lounge music motifs—balalaikas and cossack choirs, mariachi trumpets and milky-sounding organ pulses—all gently propelled by the sibilant pitter of programmed drumbeats. The lyric revisited the leisure grindstone of “Nite Klub,” but in a more wry and distanced fashion, caricaturing a young pisshead who “drinks his age in pints,” drives while inebriated, and ends up “wrapped ’round a lamppost on Saturday night.” “International Jet Set” was even more atmospheric. Laced with Casio-type rhumba rhythms and swirling Wurlitzer organs, it’s a tale of frequent-flier paranoia, sung by Terry Hall in a high-pitched, high-strung whinny. To Hall, barely able to keep his panic in check, some jovial businessmen “seem so absurd to me/like well-dressed chimpanzees.”
Brilliantly arranged, densely layered, and tricked out with witty embellishments, “Stereotypes” and “International Jet Set” were impossible to re-create onstage. The first album documented songs that had been honed through two years’ worth of playing gigs. The record’s live-in-the-studio vibe had even been criticized in some quarters for being underproduced. But the second album,
More Specials,
veered to the other extreme: The songs were largely composed in the studio, where Dammers had fallen in love with the mixing board, reveling in the possibilities it afforded for endless overdubs and perfectionistic fine-tuning. Not everyone in the band cared for this new production-and-arrangement-dominated approach. John Bradbury and Roddy Radiation both preferred high-energy sounds (Northern soul and rockabilly, respectively). As a result,
More Specials
ended up something of a motley compromise, a mixed bag of revivalisms.
More Specials
announced the end of the black-and-white 2-Tone aesthetic with its full-color cover, a blurry snapshot of the band relaxing. The music’s sudden drop in energy left their porkpie-hatted audience bewildered. In truth, the Specials themselves seemed confused and dejected. “Do Nothing,” the next single off the album, was oddly subdued and fatalistic, a down-tempo rocksteady number about a stylish layabout who meanders through his hometown, “trying to find a future,” his only ray of sunshine being the new pair of shoes on his feet. The song seems to see right through the mod fantasy, its strategy of dressing well as a form of revenge on your social superiors. In a land where “nothing ever change,” Hall sings, “fashion is/my only culture.” But what happens, the song implicitly asks, when you stop believing in style as a magical solution, too?
To make matters worse, tensions had emerged that divided the band along class lines. “The thing about the working-class image that the Specials had when they started…well, I’m not working class, and neither is Horace,” Dammers recalled. “We were trying to fit into something and eventually it became really tense.” In the early months of 1981, rumors of a split circulated, but the band’s finest hour was yet to come. In June they released the single “Ghost Town.” Inspired equally by a trip to Kingston, Jamaica, and by witnessing the effect of Thatcher’s policies on Coventry’s economy and nightlife, “Ghost Town” sketches a sonic portrait of reindustrialization. The song starts with the desolate whistle of wind rustling through a deserted town. A wraithlike woodwind instrument drifts into earshot, soon joined by what sounds like a Wurlitzer playing in a long-derelict cinema. The lyric contrasts the gaiety of the good old days (the roaring nightlife back when workers had money to burn) with the present of idle factories and boarded-up nightclubs. “All the places we used to rehearse in and play our early gigs, they were shutting down,” says Staple. At the end, “Ghost Town” cuts from Hall’s exhausted sigh “can’t go on no more” to Staple’s baleful “people gettin’ angry.” Then the song strips down to just bass and drums as that eerie whistling sound returns, so chillingly cinematic you can almost see the wind-strewn bits of newspaper flapping along the streets.
“Ghost Town” turned out to be the most politically timely and momentous single since the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen.” The single’s three weeks at number one coincided with inner-city riots all across the U.K., verifying Staple’s warning about “people gettin’ angry.” The two superb tracks on the flip side of “Ghost Town” made the whole record a kind of concept EP, representing three angles on the British way of living death. Lynval Golding’s “Why” addressed the racist thugs who’d attacked him outside the Moonlight Club the previous year, asking plaintively, “Did you really want to kill me?” before the more belligerent Staple steps forward to shout down the fascist British Movement: “You follow like sheep inna wolf’s clothes.” Wonderfully wan and listless, Terry Hall’s “Friday Night, Saturday Morning” subverts the Easybeats’ mod classic “Friday on My Mind,” depicting a wage slave’s dismal idea of big fun, which consists of sinking pints of lager at the discotheque while watching other people get lucky, then waiting in line for a taxi in the wee hours, clutching a meat pie in his hand, one foot planted in “someone else’s spew,” and wishing “I had lipstick on my collar instead of piss stains on my shoes.”
The
Ghost Town
EP makes you wonder just how potent and unstoppable the Specials could have been if Dammers had allowed the other songwriting talent in the band to blossom. But it was too late. Golding, Hall, and Staple had been planning their departure for months before the EP’s release. In late 1981 they announced the formation of a new group, Fun Boy Three, the name bitterly ironic, says Staple, “because when we came from the Specials, we were burnt out, it wasn’t fun anymore.” With the defection of Hall, Golding, and Staple, a crucial portion of the Specials’ spirit seemed to have vanished. After the brilliant but commercially suicidal single “The Boiler” (a harrowing rape account recited by Rhoda Dakar of the Bodysnatchers, 2-Tone’s all-girl group), Dammers produced a trilogy of protest singles—“Racist Friend,” “War Crimes,” and “Nelson Mandela,” the sentiments of which were admirable but which lacked in musical execution almost everything that had made the Specials…special. Sapped by Dammers’s ruinous passion for the recording process, the third album,
In the Studio,
underwent a two-year-long gestation (hence its wry title). Its sepia-toned soundtrack-for-a-nonexistent-movie songs felt sedate and sedative. The Fun Boy Three, meanwhile, scored a series of hits that were alternately glum—the Reagan/Thatcher–inspired “The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum” and the world (affairs)–weary “The More I See the Less I Believe”—and jolly (two hit singles in partnership with the all-girl trio Bananarama). Then they, too, disintegrated.