The British mod resurgence of 1979 effectively tried to regress to 1966, arresting pop history at that point just before
Sgt. Pepper’s
and the ensuing boom of album-oriented, nondanceable progressive music. In the late sixties, those original mods who didn’t go the psychedelic/progressive route instead turned into ska-loving skinheads or Motown-fetishizing Northern soul fans. “We’re just continuing the line…from the mods and the skinheads,” Jerry Dammers declared. In one 1975 feature on Northern soul, a fan scorns “progressive” as nonsense noise for stoned weirdos: “You talk to someone who likes progressive music and they’ll say they listen to it just to
listen
toit…. I like music to
dance
to, not to listen to.” You can imagine the 2-Tone fans and neomods of 1979 having the same baffled and derisive response to PiL or Cabaret Voltaire. Postpunk was dub-spacious, heard at its best on twelve-inch records (hence
Metal Box
and the Cabs’
2X45
album) and hi-fi stereos. In contrast, the 2-Tone bands and the new mod groups made seven-inch music. Brisk, punchy, near mono, and designed for transistor radios, it flashed back to the midsixties golden age of the single.
One thing the mod resurgence—including 2-Tone—did share with the postpunk bands, though, was a snobbish attitude toward rock as passé and undignified. Screeching, self-indulgent guitars were replaced by taut, punchy horns as the lead instrument, a lone trombone or trumpet in 2-Tone’s case, but full-blown brass sections with sixties-soul-inspired bands such as Dexys Midnight Runners. “Kids are starting to get interested in playing brass rather than wanting to be a guitar hero,” noted Dexys’ member JB approvingly. Keyboards came next in the hierarchy, not synthesizers but electric organs such as the Hammond, which could supply a choppy, rhythmic pulse or be played in a pianistic style for rollicking, rinky-dink embellishments. With a few exceptions (notably the Jam itself), guitar was restricted to a rhythmic role, a scratchy presence low in the mix, and rarely allowed to emit anything that resembled a solo.
Along with an aversion to guitar heroics, the main thing the new mods and the ska revivalists had in common was a love of dressing sharp. “The clothes are almost as important as the music as far as I’m concerned,” Terry Hall declared. The 2-Tone look jumbled up elements from all phases of mod and skin fashion: Fred Perry and Ben Sherman sport shirts, mohair suits, black slip-on loafers, Sta-Prest trousers, porkpie hats, white socks, suspenders. Like the music, the fashion was adapted from black style. “It was a thing young black kids did for years,” says Staple. “Go to tailors and get measured up for tonic suits, mohairs, Prince of Wales, and pay money down on the suits every week in installments. That was how they used to do it in Jamaica, too, white shirt and slim pencil ties, a nice slick look.”
The 2-Tone label’s defining stylistic motif was what Staple calls “the check,” the alternation of black and white, which not only looked great but symbolized the movement’s ideals of racial harmony and musical hybridity. This imagery, along with the mixed-race lineup of the leading 2-Tone bands and interview comments such as Dammers’s description of racism as “like some kind of mental illness, like fear of spiders,” probably did more for the antiracism cause than a thousand Anti Nazi League speeches.
The thoroughly modern multicultural resonance of its black-and-white music and clothes gave 2-Tone an edge over the empty nostalgia of straightforwardly mod revivalist bands such as Secret Affair. By the fall of 1979, 2-Tone mania ruled Britain. On November 8, Madness, the Specials, and the Selecter appeared on the same edition of
Top of the Pops
playing their Top 20 hits. Later that month, the Beat’s debut single, a remake of Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a Clown,” was the 2-Tone label’s fifth single, and its fifth hit. Dammers’s dream of 2-Tone as a modern Motown—an invincible hit factory with a diverse roster united by a common sound—seemed to be coming true.
When “Gangsters”—originally released independently, with Rough Trade’s support—started to take off, the Specials had been chased by every record company in London. But Dammers held out for a label deal, for 2-Tone as an entity, and got one from Chrysalis. The alliance between the major label and the Coventry independent required Chrysalis to fund the recording of fifteen 2-Tone singles a year and release at least ten. After the chart success of “Tears of a Clown,” though, the Beat jumped ship and started their own label, Go Feet, which formed a 2-Tone–like alliance with Arista. Madness also bolted from 2-Tone after just one single and signed to Stiff Records. Neither group wanted to be subsumed within Dammers’s “new Motown” vision.
The Beat—who were forced to call themselves the English Beat in America, because a domestic group had dibs on the name—originally came from Handsworth, a racially mixed area in Birmingham immortalized by the U.K. reggae band Steel Pulse with their
Handsworth Revolution
album. Like the Specials, the Beat were poster boys for integration and the Caribbean contribution to British pop life. The group’s front line was an almost too perfect blend of male beauty and political correctness, as blond singer Dave Wakeling’s dulcet croon meshed with the patois chat of Jamaican pretty boy Ranking Roger. In addition to toasting on sound systems and at Birmingham’s famous nightclub Barbarella’s, Roger had been the orange-haired drummer in a punk band, the Dum Dum Boys. As for the rest of the Beat, the scrawny, pasty-faced figures of bassist David Steele and guitarist Andy Cox contrasted with the black bulk of Saxa, a sixtysomething saxophonist recruited after the group found him playing jazz in a Handsworth pub.
Like the Specials, the Beat’s concept was punk meets reggae, “high energy with fluid movement,” as Wakeling put it. But in the Beat’s hands, the results were more like fast skank than ska. On songs such as “Hands Off, She’s Mine” (the group’s second Top 10 hit in early 1980), bubbling bass braids itself around rimshot drums and shimmering rhythm guitar. “Too Nice to Talk To” adds Chic-style bass and African-flavored guitar to the speedskank, resulting in an iridescent chittering sound that suggested Soweto township disco. “Mirror in the Bathroom,” their biggest hit, was even more original sounding. Weirdly, its jittery guitars and sinuous bass recall nothing so much as Joy Division’s “Transmission,” although maybe “She’s Lost Control” is more apt, as “Mirror” is a glimpse into the mind of someone cracking up. Tension and paranoia were the Beat’s prime terrain, as heard on songs like “Twist and Crawl” and “All Out to Get You.”
When they shifted from the personal to the political, the Beat weren’t quite so effective. The only dud in their fabulous sequence of 1980 U.K. hits was the anti-Thatcher anthem “Stand Down Margaret.” Still, all the group’s royalties from the single went to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The Beat also contributed to the antinuke benefit album
Life in the European Theatre
. Dave Wakeling confessed, “It is
embarrassing
to think that we could destroy ourselves…. You just feel a prat, for being part of a system that can’t do any better than that.” For all their brilliance—light seemed to literally dance off the surfaces of their sound—there was something just slightly too earnest about the Beat at times.
That could never be said about Madness. Initially, the North London seven-piece seemed like pure comic relief next to the somber Specials. The keyboards romped and capered, the wheezy-cheesy blare of the sax evoked a vaudevillian vulgarity, the farce of baggy trousers sliding to the ground. “The heavy heavy monster sound,” Madness called it. “Our music sounds like fairgrounds and organs,” said guitarist Chris Foreman. “It just sounds
nutty
.” Both onstage and in their peerless, groundbreaking videos, Madness lived up to the music’s antic spirit with dance moves and zany accoutrements that recalled the slapstick music hall routines of their parents’ era. Their equivalent to Ranking Roger and Neville Staple was an Irish-Cockney skinhead called Chas Smash, whose job was to shout the band’s wacky catchphrases and perform “odd robotic dances,” as critic Dick Hebdige put it, “the top half of his body…stiffas a board, all the movement taking place below the knees.”
Behind the clowning, though, was an intelligence and sadness that gradually came to the fore. What attracted singer Suggs McPherson to the song-and-dance comedians of the British music hall tradition wasn’t just the laughs, he recalled, but the hint of darkness “amongst the rosy cheeks [and] smiling face.” Alongside early jolly-ups such as “One Step Beyond” and “Night Boat to Cairo” were singles such as the exquisitely rueful and confused “My Girl” (about a young man who can’t seem to make his girlfriend happy or get her to understand that he sometimes needs a bit of space), or the hangdog “Embarrassment” (about a boy who’s disgraced his family). The video for “Baggy Trousers” was uproarious, but the song’s nostalgia for school days came alloyed with ambivalence and regret. By their third album,
7,
Madness’ humor was shadowed with the pathos and bathos of English life. “Cardiac Arrest” is a deceptively jaunty ditty about an office worker who’s late for work and suffers a coronary in midcommute. “Grey Day” is as harrowing as anything on the Specials’ debut, as the music itself takes a turn to the tragicomic, with bells tolling for all those condemned to a living death of meaningless routine. “The sky outside is wet and gray/So begins another weary day,” Suggs intones mournfully, “I wish I could sink without a trace.” Amazingly, this portrait of terminal despondency, underpinned by an ominous dubsway of reggae rimshots and heavy bass, was a massive U.K. hit in the spring of 1981.
Despite their allegiances to Jamaican music, Madness picked up a following of ska-loving but racist skins who disrupted gigs with their
Sieg Heils
. The neofascist element in the skinhead subculture fastened on Madness because they were the only 2-Tone band with no black members. Although they’d originally met the Specials at a Rock Against Racism benefit, Madness were initially reluctant to fully disown the goon squad, whom they considered more confused and ignorant than genuinely hateful. Eventually, the group bowed to pressure from the music press and made the appropriate distancing remarks. Still, it’s slightly depressing that the 2-Tone–associated band that had the biggest long-term success was the only one that was all white, while the Selecter, all black except for lead guitarist Neol Davies, were the first major 2-Tone band to fade from public view. The Selecter hit big with the herky-jerky “On My Radio” (a protest against the airwaves being one long “same old show”), but never quite won the public’s affection, despite having a charismatic singer in Pauline Black, one of the few women in the 2-Tone stable.
True to its mod origins, ska was a curiously sexless dance craze. Its twitchy energy appealed to the feet, but not the hips. Mining their most fertile seam of embarrassment, Madness’ number one hit “House of Fun”—a song about going to buy one’s first box of condoms at the drugstore—made sexual awakening seem like a fall from grace into a world of sordid grotesquerie. Reminiscing about “House of Fun,” Suggs admitted, “It’s funny really because I’m not really sexual in that way, always going on about it.” Throughout the 2-Tone realm, songs of love and lust were few and far between.
With the exception of Madness, who hid their sadness behind a lighthearted exterior, what’s immediately striking when you look at the key figures of 2-Tone and the whole mod renaissance is the chaste intensity of their zeal. Witness Dammers, the workaholic perfectionist who conjured a mass movement virtually from scratch, Secret Affair’s Ian Page with his private army of “glory boys” and his cold-eyed disdain for the dowdy straights, and Paul Weller, who during his Jam days felt like he was “on a mission.” It’s sheer mod, this amphetamined obsession with “purity” and the minutiae of style and taste, this polarized vision ardor that divides the world into the righteous and the square. Weller captured the attitude best in the Jam song “Start!” when he rejoices at meeting a soul brother who “loves with a passion called hate,” just like him.
Nobody exemplified this purist and slightly puritanical spirit more than Kevin Rowland, the singer and leader of Dexys Midnight Runners, a Birmingham group that at one point was set to sign to 2-Tone but decided they would rather start their own “young soul rebel” movement instead. All scowling fervor and mirthless dedication, Rowland was physically unprepossessing but oozed a weird charisma. His voice was neither strong nor pleasing, but by his sheer will to be soulful Rowland overcame its deficiencies, sounding a bit like Strummer gone Stax.
Rowland had been a punk, fronting a band called the Killjoys, but as the energy of 1977 petered out he sank into disillusionment. Vintage soul music pulled him out of the slough. “I was totally fed up with everything else at that time and so I started listening to all of Geno’s [Washington] old records and any other soul singles I could pick up for ten p[ence] around the markets,” he recalled. Convinced that rock was “a spent force,” Rowland began to recruit musicians to form his ideal band. At first they played mostly covers of soul classics, but gradually phased them out for new songs written by Rowland and Dexys’ other main creative force, Al Archer, all of them couched in a toughened-up version of the high-energy, horn-driven Atlantic-Stax/Volt–style soul of the midsixties.
After a year of rehearsing, Dexys had the sound to match Rowland’s “new soul vision.” They also had the look. What sold Al Archer on the band was Rowland’s concept of “a soul group with a brass section and all looking good.” Archer recalled, “At the time, everyone was looking the same. It was a bit postpunk.” According to Rowland, “we wanted to be a group that would look like something…a formed group, a project, not just random.” Dexys’ early image circa their debut single, “Dance Stance,” might have been mistaken for an ultrastylized version of council workmen, all woolly hats, donkey jackets, and leather coats, although the inspiration was actually
The Deer Hunter
and
Mean Streets
. Then Dexys switched to an athletic look: hooded tops, ponytails, boxing boots. With their staccato brass-blasts and jabbing, jousting fanfares, Dexys’ songs actually
sounded
pugilistic. Rowland also liked the vaguely monastic quality of the boxers’ hoods, which fit the music’s “religious fervor, the real proud sort of staunchness of it.”