Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet: The Specials

A sad drama in two parts.

The Friday before last, The Guardian's Film & Music section met the reformed Specials, who denied that Jerry Dammers had been treated badly:

"I've read Jerry's statement and I just don't get it," says Hall, for once looking like someone who might be physically incapable of smiling. "'They're trying to kick me out of the band' - not at all mate, not at all."

No, they say, Dammers wasn't ex-communicated by the other members. Golding and Bradbury both claim they spent vast amounts of time trying to convince Dammers to take part and that it was his own intransigence that caused the split. "I spoke to Jerry night after night all the way through 2008," says Bradbury, "and at the end there just wasn't a meeting of the ways. A little more give and take, a few more people skills, it could definitely have worked out better." "He wanted to do one date, in Coventry, in front of 30,000 people, at the football stadium," says Hall. 'I thought that was a bit of a Take That thing. We wanted to play 2,000- to 3,000-sized venues. I don't think he likes the idea of touring, to be honest. I think he hid that a bit in his statement. But apart from that, I have no idea why Jerry isn't doing it."

Yesterday, the paper's Op-Ed pages gave its response column over to Dammers to insist that, actually, he was treated badly:

What I actually suggested to him (at a meeting where he finally agreed that we shouldn't be considering bookings until we had all rehearsed together) was that if rehearsals went well, we could consider a very big date or series of big dates in London, followed by a date at Coventry's Ricoh Arena to celebrate the 30th anniversary. What might happen after that I left open. It was not that I "don't [like] the idea of touring", as he so simply puts it. I was anxious to preserve the status, political effectiveness and legacy of the band for the long term, including recording, rather than risk the diminishing returns of setting out as a flawed nostalgia act in small venues.

Terry appeared to generally agree, but soon after our meeting he said he wouldn't want to play the Ricoh after all. I assumed it was the size of the arena, but on 5 June he sent me another email: "I wasn't complaining about the size of the Ricoh arena (I have played at much bigger), I will not perform at a Coventry festival of who/why/when/whatever. Speaking as someone who grew up there, I don't feel I owe it anything!"

Specials reunion: Jerry Dampers

The highly-priced - sorry, highly-prized - tickets to the Specials reunion tour are selling well. But isn't it a little odd that the man who shaped the band isn't involved? No Jerry Dammers, not so Specials, surely?

Funnily enough, that's what Dammers was thinking:

According to the statement issued on his behalf: "Many people are under the impression it is the original Specials [re-forming for the reunion dates]. As was common knowledge at the time of their success, Jerry Dammers was the founder, main songwriter and driving force of the Specials. He recruited every member individually, and the musical and style direction was guided by him. He designed the 2 Tone logo and formed the 2 Tone record label. Jerry has a duty to inform anybody who may be interested, of the true situation, which is that he was not invited to take part in this proposed tour, or even told about it."

In November this year, the band announced their reunion but Dammers claims he wasn't properly considered. Or, in his words, "The prodigal sons came home, kicked me out, and have left the door open, great."

According to the statement, members of the Specials have said that "the door is still open to [Dammers]," but they "fail to mention that Jerry has been driven out every time he has attempted to get involved over the last year. He also wonders why this appears in the newspaper when former bandmates have his phone number".

It continues: "These seem to be part of a wider attempt to rewrite the whole history of the band, in order to try and justify what is currently going on. Jerry does not wish to go into too much detail at this point, except to say that for over 25 years he had dreamed that his former bandmates might come back one day, and was deeply shocked to find that when they did, for some of them, it was apparently to kick him out."

The statement also claims that Dammers turned up uninvited to a meeting about the reunion and received a "severe dressing down" for suggesting they should engage in lengthy rehearsals.

The statement concludes: "Jerry does not believe it represents what the real Specials stood for, politically, or in terms of creativity, imagination or forwardness of ideas, and he does not think the proposed venues would really be appropriate to a band of the status of the real Specials."

So, effectively, what people are currently lashing out for is closer to a Fun Boy Three reunion tour than the Specials jaunt it's being marketed as.

Sunday at the Mill: The Colourfield

A slightly late start with the 'record' button for Thinking Of You, perhaps; and then daytime pulling out all its stylistic tricks for Castles In The Air. You can see why Terry Hall almost smiled:



[Part of Sunday At The Mill]

Lock, stock and barrel and Waterman

Given that Pete Waterman has done some incredible pop-related things, it's surprising that he still also feels the need to cast a Jimmy Saville style net of invention over things he was only tangentially involved with. For example, in today's Guardian, he claims ownership of black and white checks, pork pie hats, and amusing hitch-hiking cameos in videos:

[E]verybody forgets I have done some quite ground-breaking music. I managed the Specials, started that whole 2 Tone movement, but I don't worry about it.

And, it's true - up to a point - he did manage the Specials for a while. But did he "start" the whole movement? The exhaustive 2-Tone.info website describes his involvement with the Specials as "mercifully brief" and quotes him as saying:

Terry Hall taught me an important lesson as a record producer; Terry can't sing. But what he does have is an unusual voice and the public love an unusual voice.

In other words, The Specials' debt to Waterman is perhaps less than Waterman's to the Specials.

Apparently, Cliff has problems with Waterman being on his CV:

Cliff Richard once told me that he has defended working with me more than he's defended his belief in God.

That could be, though, because although Christianity has caused war, carnage, suffering and pain; division, distrust and disgust; and demanded faith at the point of a sword and upon pain of an eternal damnation, Christianity has never, yet, been responsible for the career of Sonia.

[Thanks to James M for the link]

Specials re-brew

There's every chance that The Specials could reform, according to Terry Hall. He's not entirely sure, though:

"Well we're still trying to put dates together, but hopefully September/ October time. We need to spend the Summer rehearsing... I think it's taken me 30 years to realise we could do it really well."

It's thought that, ideally, they'd like Nelson Mandela to go back into prison, although to be honest it doesn't look like Jerry Dammers is going to be around for this one. But it's not going to be a Fun Boy Three reunion, whatever it might look like, okay?

Broadsheet round-up: The last knockings

This is an emergency message: Christopher Howse, are you alright? The Telegraph's virgin-in-a-tie last posted just after lunch yesterday, and hasn't been heard of since. We fear he may have been sacrificed in a distant corner of Worthy Farm. Or, worse, succumbed to the spirit and is, even now, heading onto the next festival in a camper van, naked except for daubings. And his tie.

In the Telegraph proper, Tom Horan suggests that Babyshambles were "compelling" (perhaps you had to be there), the Klaxons "all outfits and no content was about the sum of it".

It's a measure of how much stuff goes on at Glastonbury that even with the breadth of the internet, you still miss stuff. Horan, for example, tells us that Lily Allen sprung a surprise:

Her bright and breezy ska sound and acerbic delivery were a treat, and to top it all she produced Terry Hall and Lynval Golding, two of the founder members of Coventry band the Specials, who had not played together since the 1980s. They did their timeless first single Gangsters and the hillside was transformed into a riot of silly dancing.

Good lord, bringing on the Specials? It's like Ronald McDonald giving a job in the kitchens to Mrs Beeton.

Is the spirit of the festival fighting back against the 2007 wheel-heeled attendees? The Times reports that the people who splashed over a thousand pounds to hire a teepee for the weekend ended up getting splashed themselves, as the teepees peed:

Unlike traditional tepees, which have a fire in the middle to keep the damp out, Glaston-bury’s tepee village is banned from lighting fires for safety reasons. The problem is usually overcome by placing a “rain cap” over the hole, but families who thought they had paid for a premium service were told that there were only a handful to go around the 300 tents.

Kevin Stockton, 49, a water maintenance consultant, also found that most tents were not fitted with waterproof groundsheets, so he was soaked not only from above but from the soggy ground beneath. “We’ve been flooded out every time it has rained,” he told The Times. “About 5 or 10 per cent of tepees have rain caps. When we asked reception why they couldn’t give us one, they said that they didn’t predict the weather was going to be so bad.”

It's hard to feel sympathy for someone who would pay so much for a posh tent. The irony is that a thirty quid job from Millets would probably have kept everyone nice and dry.

Over in the Guardian, Alexis Petridis weighs the weekend's peformances:

Saturday night's headliners offer an intriguing study in opposites. The Killers offer pyrotechnics, ruthlessly efficient mainstream indie rock hits and the steely, unwavering professionalism of a band abundantly aware of how a successful Glastonbury headlining slot can affect album sales in the next financial quarter.

Over on the Other Stage, meanwhile, havoc reigns. Whether or not Iggy And The Stooges really fit with the Glastonbury ethos is a matter of some debate. The reconstituted punk pioneers are rightly legendary, but the violence and glowering negativity of their music seems at odds with the Glastonbury vibe of bucolic togetherness and abundant good cheer.

TVobit: Terry Hall

The death of Terry Hall has been announced. The ventriloquist, not the one out of The Specials.

It's hard to remember now, but puppetry used to be a staple of pop television - presumably a byproduct of an age when television companies were managed by forces who saw pop as "kid's stuff" and thought that a few raggy puppets were about the mark for presentation. So it was that Lenny The Lion was one of the first TV presenters to welcome the Beatles to his studio; such were the times that Hall and his sidekick would also replicate the Beatles' trip across the Atlantic to appear on the Ed Sullivan show.

Various internet sites - none, we note, carrying the blogger's code of sober reflection of facts - report that David Bowie was a huge fan of Lenny, so much so that his father became the secretary of the Lenny The Lion fan club; however, these are the sort of sites that also claim that Charles Manson auditioned for the Monkees, despite having been way too old and in prison at the time of the try-outs.

Hall suffered as ventriloquism started to look more old-fashioned; after ruling pop TV briefly at the BBC, he packed up his cat puppet to spend several years attempting to teach children to read on ITV (back when ITV had education programmes, and things for children). As TV Cream observes:

Lion famously couldn't pronounce his 'r's (conveniently enough for Terry), so fat lot of fucking good that was in the classroom.

Hall was 80; he had been ill for some time.