Oh what fun he had: Jupitus was inspired by the American artist Evan Dorkin
for his comic strip. It was created on no sleep, and he asks that you enjoy
the grammatical errors
First
Night: the reunion review
You have to love Newcastle. Last time I saw a gig here, Paul Weller was at the
Metro Arena. At the end of That’s Entertainment 10,000 Geordie
voices continued to sing the vocal refrain. As the minutes slipped by and
they grew even louder, the usually taciturn Modfather crossed his arms,
stood at the lip of the stage and stared at them, a huge grin on his face.
Last night at the town’s smaller O2 Academy I was grinning before the
Specials even came onstage while 2,000 bouncing Geordies sang along as the
DJ played the looping bass melody of Toots and the Maytals’ 54-46
Was My Number. This was definitely going to be a good night.
The re-formation of the Specials has a ring of familiarity to it. The band
emerged from Coventry during the recession of the late 1970s. It seems that
another recession has brought them back. That being the case, I owe Sir Fred
Goodwin an apology. The band rose to the top of the charts with songs about
a Britain fundamentally flawed.
After two spectacular albums and a near suicidal touring and recording
schedule, they imploded, seemingly for good. Hitherto I counted myself lucky
to have seen them twice during their heyday, but now I have the opportunity
to reawaken some old feelings.
Before that, let’s go back seven months, to Bestival on the Isle of Wight. Six
members of the Specials played a kind of “toe-in-the-water” reunion show to
see how they felt about the possibility of re-forming. As a lifelong fan I
was completely overjoyed to hear this news and struggled through the thick
mud towards a rendezvous with my musical past.
The rain became torrential as the band took to the stage, but the crowd grew
and grew as word got out that it really was them. They were one of the
greatest British dance bands ever, so the audience gyrated frantically, an
audience who coincidentally were also wearing fancy dress. The theme that
year was 20,000 Freaks Under the Sea, so I was in the surreal
position of being surrounded by an array of sharks, mermaids, scuba divers,
pirates and starfish. I however, clung doggedly to the barrier and watched
in awe, taking care to absorb every single moment just in case it never
happened again.
Eventually, during the song Little Bitch, I could contain myself no
longer and thrashed wildly into the crowd behind me. Now, you may have
observed that I’m a somewhat large and ungainly fellow. My dance skills are
limited at best but I what I lack in technique I more than make up for in
enthusiasm. I instantly slammed into someone who lost half of his pint
because of my random moshing. He responded by throwing the remainder of the
beverage over my head, which I barely noticed as I had been rained on for
six hours. “What are you f***ing doing?” he barked. In a slightly hurt tone
I said that I was dancing. “You spilt my f***ing pint!” he screamed, leaning
right in to my face. The prospect of genuine physical unpleasantness between
myself, a 47-year-old father of two, and this powerful individual of about
22 began to raise itself. It was only at this point that I noticed the
obstreperous and potentially violent young man was dressed as a prawn.
Crisis over.
This was the first time that I truly felt like a dad at a gig. It was not a
happy realisation. Live music performance has for years been where I have
felt the happiest, a state that has existed over three decades of concert
going. As we grow older, many of us crave the sweaty intimacy of live music.
It is a direct conduit to our misspent pasts. Bands may come and bands may
go, but live gigs remain unchanged. The toilets are still too crowded, the
beer is still too expensive, the bouncers are still too facey and the music
is still too loud. The only change is that the T-shirts appear to have got
smaller. But we still love it.
So to the opening night of the Specials’ reunion tour in Newcastle. The venue
is crammed with a new cultural sub-genre I am calling the Ska Dads — men who
in the early Eighties would be found skanking at concerts by Madness, Bad
Manners, the Beat, the Selecter, the Bodysnatchers or indeed the Specials
themselves. These men have grown in girth and had children over the years.
Children whom they want to infect with the same rhythms that transported
them in their youth. In the Seventies and Eighties the only place you ever
saw dads at gigs was outside, standing next to idling Volvo estates, waiting
for their sweaty kids to emerge. Today it is customary to see smiling
parents tapping their feet at the back of a gig while the kids all head for
the mosh pit, if not to dance then certainly to escape the embarrassing
taint of their mum and dad.
I myself tried to impose ska on my daughters while driving them to junior
school. I would slip a carefully selected compilation disc into the
dashboard CD player. As soon as the chant of Phoenix City by Roland
Alphonso began, my tiny charges would roll their eyes and moan loudly:
“Daaaaaaaad, we don’t like the ska! Put on some Spice Girls!” Matters
intensified when I rashly took a box at the Albert Hall for one of the
Teenage Cancer Trust gigs where Madness were headlining. My daughters
responded to this sledgehammer attempt to impose my musical taste on them by
falling asleep during House of Fun. True story.
Some of the Ska Dads have realised that when you do get fat and lose your hair
then skinhead is a perfect default style. You just have to find enormous
Fred Perrys and Ben Shermans, huge Levis Sta-Prest, tassled brogues and you
are good to go. Fat, bald, eyeliner-wearing, middle-aged goths simply don’t
work — they look too much like Patricia Routledge. Fat mods look simply
awkward in suits, a bit like George Osborne. Fat punks resemble characters
from a bad Two Ronnies sketch. But a fat skinhead works very nicely.
However, some balding, morbidly obese middle-aged men try to pretend that
they were always skinheads by watching This Is England and buying a
Trojan box set. Even though the only gigs they actually saw in the early
Eighties were the Thompson Twins and Billy Ocean. You know who you are.
A parallel enthusiasm during my teenage years was comics. The Specials
songbook was actually published as a comic and illustrated by Nick Davies. I
was obsessed with this as a kid and would thumb through the striking images.
In later years I became a fan of an American artist called Evan Dorkin, who
created a brilliant strip called Milk and Cheese. Dorkin was a ska
obsessive and his work was littered with 2-tone iconography. Dorkin also
wrote concert reviews for fanzines in the form of comic strips. Rather than
focusing on just the gig, it would turn into a narrative about his whole
night, with the gig quite often being a small part of the whole.
The strip opposite is my own take on this unusual genre. I set myself the
ludicrous timescale of six hours to draw it, hence the absence of hands,
detail and action. Despite this shortfall, it manages to capture the high
points of an amazing day. I have to extend thanks to everybody at Viz,
especially to David Jones, who provided me with studio space and a drawing
board, and Simon Donald for making it all happen. If you were looking for a
sharp and considered review of the gig then big Steve Dalton’s your man. The
strip opposite is merely a form of inky catharsis for a man who has been
waiting nearly 30 years for this night to happen — Ska Dad Number One.
The only Specials gig on their current tour that is not yet sold out is at
Leeds Millennium Square, on May 24
