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Nick Morgan and crew
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Concert
Review by Nick Morgan |
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| Brixton
Academy
London
May 7th 2009 |
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| It’s
a wry, wonderfully well-thought-out, and strangely
melancholic start for a set from a band noted for
their high energy and upbeat performances, although
let’s remember, that was around thirty years
ago (when half of our party hadn’t been born). |
| The
audience are in a high state of anticipation. And
we’ve all been on the edge since last night’s
opener of the five sold-out dates at the Brixton
Academy was postponed at the very last minute (leaving
punters arriving from all over the world, as we
were told, in tears). It doesn’t matter that
the reformed Specials
have been touring the UK for a few weeks, gaining
largely rave reviews in their wake. Those were just
rehearsals; warm-ups for the main event. It’s
London. And as those nice people at Ticketmaster
eventually mailed to tell us (that must be what
I’ve been paying all those huge booking fees
for all these years), the gig is going ahead. So
it’s worth the wait in the jostling queue
outside, it’s worth a strange return to the
hierarchy of the school playground as wimps like
me stand aside to let the bovver-boy bullies get
to the bar or push into the elongated line for the
loos, it’s worth the frankly uninspiring support
set from the Dub
Pistols, and the simply tedious DJ set, increasingly
reliant on calling for weary refrains of ‘Rude
Boy’ from the audience to keep their interest.
And I note from the forums, it was apparently even
worth enduring the pickpocketing binge that sadly
infected the crushed area at the front of the stage. |
| The
lights dim. The black curtain drops. And there,
caught for a few seconds in silhouette behind a
white screen, almost like a freeze-frame of Elvis’s
famous ‘Jailhouse Rock’ dance sequence,
are a group of slightly slumped middle-aged men,
playing a mournful rendition, New Orleans funeral
band tempo, of ‘Enjoy yourself’. Just
for about twenty seconds – the first verse,
and first chorus – “Enjoy yourself,
enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think”.
And then all havoc let loose as the screen rose
and the Specials exploded into ‘Do the Dog’,
at a pace which frankly seemed unsustainable for
men of their years. But what they produced was a
relentless high-energy show, even on the slow songs,
which saw them work through a remarkable back catalogue
of hits, which as you may recall, were generated
in a very short period of time. There have been
Specials revivals before but this was the real one,
the most complete: the entire band with only one
absentee being founder, inspiration and keyboard
player extraordinaire, Jerry Dammers. Apparently
the reunion was bankrolled by entrepreneur and football
club owner Simon Jordon, whose long-standing efforts
to bring them back together were frustrated by “Jerry
Dammers being away with the fairies in Middle Earth
spending the last 15 years remixing ‘Ghost
Town’”. It’s not entirely
clear what simmering resentments generated over
years of infighting led to his exclusion, but it’s
clearly the subject of much bitterness
on both parts, leading some reviewers to condemn
the whole exercise as a sham, nothing more than
a nostalgic tribute band, as I read Dammers saying
somewhere. |
| Well,
if it is a tribute act then it has to be one of
the best around. Frontmen Neville
Staples and Lynval
Golding threw back the years, and along with
Roddy ‘Radiation’
Byers on a better-than-I’d-ever-realised
guitar, injected the songs with a real sense of
energy. Drummer John Bradbury and bassist Horace
Painter were tireless. There was no going through
the motions. And the set was cleverly designed so
that when they did tire, as all fifty-plus men must,
the brass section was brought on to sustain and
build on the initial drive. In the middle of it
all was the lugubrious Terry
Hall. Not perhaps quite as menacing as thirty
years ago, but still bearing an air of perplexing
detachment from it all. And more than anyone else
it was Hall, with his deadpan and still angry delivery,
who was able to lift some, if not all, of the songs
above pastiche or self-parody to a real level of
contemporary engagement. And let’s face it,
songs like ‘Blank expression’, ‘Doesn’t
make it alright’, ‘Too much too young’
and ‘Nite klub’ (where, as Hall spits
out the words, “the beer tastes just like
piss”) don’t lose their sense of relevance:
they are timeless. ‘Ghost Town’, which
ends the main set (before they return to finale
with a breakneck rendition of ‘Enjoy yourself’)
is both a historical document, recalling the bleak
post-industrial landscape of Mrs Thatcher’s
Britain, and serving as a prescient reminder of
times that are not quite as past as we comfortably-off
middle-classes might like to think. |
Terry
Hall |
| Not
that the audience cared a jot. Downstairs was a
writhing throng of bodies of all ages and sizes,
only a few of whom provoked the anger of Neville
Staples (and the rest of the crowd) by beer-throwing
and what might have been racial baiting. Upstairs
the stewards were fighting a losing battle trying
to stop the dancing and ‘skanking’,
as my daughter colourfully described it, although
it looked more like ‘Doing the exercise machine’
to me. On our way home, we earned a proud escort
from a closely-tonsured and foul-mouthed faction
of the Knights of St George, neatly summing up,
in their stay-pressed way, the contradictions that
always surrounded the Specials, their politics and
their sometimes perplexingly diverse audiences.
So, hugely enjoyable though this evening was, if
I had to make the choice between the two (and it
wouldn’t be a difficult one), I’d go
and see Jerry
Dammers’ Spatial Aka Orchestra any day
before returning for another Specials reunion.
-
Nick Morgan (photographs by Kate) |
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