The Specials
From November 2009
The warm-up DJ certainly knew what he was doing last Thursday at Edinburgh's Corn Exchange. If the evening's entertainment had ended after he played A Town Called Malice by the Jam, Geno by my beloved Dexys & the Clash's London Calling I would have gone home happy.
If the evening's entertainment had ended after the Specials bounced onto the stage and raced through Do The Dog, (Dawning Of A) New Era & Gangsters I would have gone home very happy. But it didn't end there. Oh no, it didn't end there.
My memories of the Specials when they first appeared 30 years ago are a bit vague. I remember listening to Ghost Town in a damp tent near Eddleston. I remember watching them on Top Of The Pops and thinking that Terry Hall was the epitome of understated cool. I remember John Peel playing all 5 tracks of the Too Much Too Young E.P. the day it got to no. 1. (Around the same time I also remember him playing Ring My Bell by Anita Ward. I learned something that evening but that's another story for another day.) I bought some of the Specials' records but never had any inclination to see them live. Apart from anything else I wouldn't even have known where or when they were playing.
So not exactly a hardcore Specials fan but the 7-piece from Coventry must have wormed their way into my subconscious. Over the years I've kept coming back to their music and they are now synonymous with my youth. So much so that when their 30th anniversay tour kicked off in April this year I decided not to go on the basis that some things are best left as memories. Or maybe I couldn't be bothered travelling to Glasgow. Probably the latter as I wasted no time buying a ticket when it was announced that they would be playing Edinburgh in November.
The strange thing was - despite everyone in the audience knowing every word of every song that was played - Thursday night didn't feel like a trip down memory lane. Man At C&A, Nite Klub, Little Bitch & the rest kept coming with a freshness & raw energy that would shame many younger bands. Hall, Golding, Staple et al looked like they were having a ball and sent 3,000 people home with smiles on their faces. And in my case and a good few others, beer on my head. Why do people do that? A small price to pay for a 2 Tone tour de force.