A full 40 years after launching a cultural coup d’etat from the cold concrete streets of Coventry, the Specials - one of only a handful of British bands who can be truly classed as revolutionary - are back with new music.
With even their most recent studio effort now of legal drinking age the spectre of a toothless, gratuitous ease through the motions was always going to be lurking in the shadows. But Encore for the most part lives up to its title - a coda from the good old days, when the band hacked apart a society riven by racism and inequality by slamming together British punk rock with ska and reggae, generating a mighty spark which lit the touch paper on a ska revival still going strong today.
And although only three members of the classic lineup feature - Terry Hall, Lynval Golding and Horace Panter - for one blissful moment towards the end of the record the band get right back to where it all began, rolling decades away on the magnificent ‘Embarrassed By You’, all latent 2-Tone power and the kind of effortlessly biting lyricism that could only have come from a Specials pen.
The track’s bloodline can be traced directly back to the beer-stained social clubs of 1980s Coventry, but the same cannot necessarily be said for the opening salvo of the record, where slinky disco takes the place of muscular ska; it’s a slightly incongruous fit with Golding’s unflinching look at British racism across the decades on the autobiographical ‘B.L.M’, but one which yields an unexpected album highlight as an exercise in proud defiance.
Elsewhere the woozy fairground swing which made ‘Ghost Town’ so potent raises its head, and while there are only traces of the lurking dread which gave the 1981 single its edge, tracks like ‘Vote For Me’ and ‘The Lunatics’ make a real go of rolling back the decades. There is also a genuine curveball in the shape of ’10 Commandments’ which has Saffiyah Khan - the woman photographed calmly defying an EDL member in Birmingham while wearing a Specials t-shirt - overhauling Prince Buster’s questionable 1967 original with a blunt rebuttal of that track’s sexist messages.
There is no getting around the fact that the landscape has changed in almost every way since the Specials’ self-title debut, but although there are some bumps along the way the band (or part of it) have changed with it, turning in a commendable update to a legendary sound.
Words - Joe Ponting
The Specials