Today’s Specials

It was summer 1981, and the towns and cities of Britain were alight. There had been riots in Brixton, south London, that April and on 10 July there were more — and not just in Brixton. Other parts of the city followed. And so did a long list of other places, from the unsurprising — Sheffield, Preston, Leicester — to the ones where the idea of a riot might have been expected to have disappeared with Captain Swing: Cirencester, Aldershot.

‘I was sitting in my flat watching the news, the riots happening all over the place,’ says Horace Panter, the bass player of the Specials. ‘And “Ghost Town” was No. 1.’ ‘Ghost Town’ was the Specials’ masterpiece — the one that sealed their reputation as one of the great British bands. It is a nightmarishly drunken piece of music, haunted funfair reggae that predicted the violent rage spreading through desolate British towns.

Encore, their latest and the first album Hall has made with the Specials in 38 years, emerges at a barely less febrile time, when once again, as ‘Ghost Town’ noted, ‘the people getting angry’. It’s unlikely that it will soundtrack the times as the Specials did from 1979 to 1981, when a string of singles managed to be both gloriously danceable and grimly realistic about how crappy the world was, especially if you lived in Coventry. But it’s no less engaged with the world, despite its makers’ disgust with that world.

‘I still feel politically engaged,’ Hall says. ‘But engaged in confusion, really. I come from a very strong Labour background, and in the past 20 years my love of the Labour party has dropped and dropped. And now, especially, it’s really dropped. And so I question my vote. Because I would have blindly voted Labour when I was 22, but now I wouldn’t.