Gangsters was the first single for the label and the band continued with A Message To You Rudy and the number 1 Too Much Too Young. 2Tone skyrocketed between 19 with The Specials contributing most of the hits. The Specials blended in just the right ingredient with their punk attitude, a style that came to be known as 2Tone, the name of the record label formed by band founder, keyboard player and main composer Jerry Dammers.
But Ska alone was too tame a style for that moment in history. The specials were an integrated and socially-conscious group with deep respect and knowledge of Ska, the music style that originated in 1950s Jamaica, a precursor to Reggae.
No better band in the UK was positioned to epitomize these times in a single song. Government leaving the youth on the shelf The mantra-like chanting of the phrase ghost town and the lyrics perfectly captured in real-time the essence of the times and the overall mood that descended the country.: On the evening of July the 10th the Specials song Ghost Town went to number 1 in the singles chart. In July riots started again and on the 8th of the month expanded to other London suburbs and over 20 cities across the UK. After the police began Operation Swamp (named after Thatcher’s phrase) in the beginning of April to reduce crime, violence erupted in the form of turned police cars and fires that lasted a few days and ended with 280 police officers injured and hundreds arrested. Police officers were encouraged by the sus (short for suspected) laws that authorized policemen to stop and search anyone to their discretion.
Under the surface tensions were brewing for a while, as half of the black men were jobless and being on the street they were subjected to harsh police treatment. Things came to a head in the spring of 1981 at Brixton in south London. Thatcher continued disregard to folks at the lower range of the economic scale, many of them immigrants, did not help matters after she took office. Back in 1978 and before she won the election, Thatcher commented about immigration in an interview for Granada TV: “people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture and, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in”. The discontent of the minor communities in the UK started way before 1981. It also had a soundtrack in a perfectly timed and appropriately named number 1 hit by the Specials, their creative peak – Ghost Town. What is now known as the 1981 Summer of Riots came to symbolize the disillusion of British youth with anything that smelled like government and authority. Hit the hardest were people from the African-Caribbean community, as not only their odds of landing a job were slim, but racial tensions and discriminatory police tactics threw them into a violent spiral in the streets. No less than one million people became unemployed between 19, bringing the total folks looking for a job to a staggering 2.5 million, the highest in UK recorded history at that point. Two years after the conservative party won the election with Margaret Thatcher at the helm, the aggressive economic policy of increasing interest rates and taxes reduced the inflation, but had a negative impact on the man on the street. If you were a young man in the summer of 1981 and you lived in one of Britain’s urban areas, you had, as the title of UB40’s song, a one in ten chance of being on the dole.
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