Having spent the last week or so working from home, trying to marshal the troops via Zoom, a few days before the lockdown I walked into the office to pick up some material I needed for a project we had just successfully moved to the autumn. In the end I spent most of the day there, doing emails, making more video calls and – mostly – cancelling things. After a brief trip to the Pret at the top of our square (egg sandwich on white bread, a Diet Coke and a banana, eaten in that order), I finished up and started to walk home. But, compelled by the inactivity around me, I took the long way, turning right instead of left, striding along Regent Street on my way down to Piccadilly Circus, where I was going to dart right, along Piccadilly itself, and stroll home via Hyde Park Corner.
And the faster I started to walk, the slower I became. I found myself being transfixed by the silence, alone in the vast city, padding around my own private video game. It certainly didn’t feel empowering, as the sensation of being alone was intensified by being in the city. It was as though I’d been walking around at night and someone had suddenly turned the lights on.
Weird, just weird.
The first thing I felt was guilt, being outside when I probably should have been indoors, but as I was completely alone this was a pretty futile emotion. The streets weren’t just empty of people, they were empty of life. As I walked south, I may as well have been self-isolating, because I was completely, completely alone. I felt as though I’d stepped out of one of those British TV science fiction programmes they made in the 1960s – back in a land of bowler hats, umbrellas and red phone boxes – those austere black and white ones when London had been the target of a neutron bomb, the ones that killed all the people but left the buildings intact. For a short while, I felt as though I could have been the last person in the capital, the last person alive, last man standing.
I’d felt like this before, intermittently, in the early summer of 1981, when, after days of rising tension and years of social deprivation, relations between the Metropolitan Police and the local community resulted in the Brixton riots. The first major Brixton riot, on 11 April, resulted in 450 injuries, the destruction or burning of more than 200 vehicles and 150 damaged buildings. Even though the police’s stop and search powers were about to be curtailed by a government who could see that they weren’t working, many in the force had become almost institutionalised, especially in their attitudes towards black youth. This situation was particularly fraught in the London borough of Lambeth, where over a quarter of the population were black, while 40 per cent of those were under 19. So the levels of anger were huge.
Although there were only 80 arrests during the first riot, more than 5,000 people were involved, a massive groundswell of anger. One policeman said it “looked like World War III. Cars blazing, people running everywhere”, while another said it was “like Beirut, not London. It was like another country.” At one point a double decker bus found itself weaving into the rioters; its conductor was quickly assaulted, its driver dismissed and, having been commandeered, was then driven at speed right into the police line.
Then, a few weeks later, in Toxteth, came the predictable sequel, followed by copycat riots in Southall, Moss Side, St Pauls, Handsworth and Chapeltown, in Leeds. Accustomed to low-level civil unrest, nothing had prepared the police for confrontations involving rioters using axes, sledgehammers and even cars as weapons. All of a sudden the country appeared to be spiralling into an endless cycle of violence, framing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as the villain.
In the days after the first riot, Brixton was a binary postcode: furious and violent at night and completely empty and silent during the day. When we all woke, to survey the damage, most people quickly squirrelled back to their homes, appalled and embarrassed by the carnage they saw all around them and by lunchtime the streets were empty again. Completely. It felt as though everyone had been shipped out to the country, as the city shimmered with silence.
And breaking that silence wasn’t just the sound of petrol bombs and broken glass, it was the sound of “Ghost Town” by the architects of the recent two-tone revolution, The Specials. Not only was this one of the most important records of the early 1980s, it remains one of the most evocative, provocative singles of all time, a prime piece of agitprop that still has the power to shock. With its melancholic wailing, its hypnotic lope, its ominous organs and “The people getting angry” chant, there is no better mirror to the societal privations of 1981, a year that often felt on the brink of collapse. It’s one of the most baleful records to ever make No1. While punk was largely a cultural insurrection, repeatedly using thematic working-class imagery – the brutalist modern tower block being the most obvious manifestation of this, a symbol of post-war progress that very quickly became a totem of social deprivation – “Ghost Town” was a direct response to the urban distress that The Specials’ leader, Jerry Dammers, saw around him. The band had already had huge success as the standard-bearers of the multiracial 2 Tone organisation (which included the likes of Madness, The Selector and The Beat) and had had hits with “Gangsters”, “A Message To You Rudy” and “Rat Race”, among others. Inspired by punk, they had their own grudges to articulate and they were doing it through the medium of ska.
“Britain was falling apart,” said Dammers. “The car industry was closing down in Coventry. We were touring, so we saw a lot of it. Glasgow were particularly bad.” In Liverpool he saw shops closing down, more beggars on the streets, little old ladies selling their cups and saucers on tables outside their homes and he started to see the frustration and anger in the young faces of those who came out to see his band. He felt that there was something very, very wrong affecting the country. “The overall sense I wanted to convey was impending doom. There were weird, diminished chords: certain members of the band resented the song and wanted the simple chords they were used to playing on the first album, It’s hard to explain how powerful it sounded. We had almost been written off and then ‘Ghost Town’ came out of the blue.”
The Specials were advocates of late-1970s postmodern ska, the inventors of two-tone and – for the briefest of times – quite simply one of the coolest, most important British bands of the post-punk period. They were a gang – five white men, two black – who dressed well, spoke sharply and didn’t look like they wanted to be messed with. In the space of just two years, from 1979 to 1981, the original Specials managed to embody the new decade’s violent energies, morals and conflicts – though always with an ironic and often sardonic detachment that kept the band cool as the 1980s grew increasingly hot. Their records defined a slice of a generation who weren’t sure they wanted to be defined in the first place. They were slightly yobby – the NME called their debut album “a speed and beer-crazed ska loon” – but they had an underlying social conscience. They would turn out to be temporal, but they left their mark in the same way The Clash did, or The Undertones, by connecting. Sure, the band were earnest, but they were studiedly sarcastic, too, which endeared them to everyone from ageing punks to their younger siblings. Not only that, but they came from Coventry, Britain’s very own answer to Detroit, the epitome of the post-war urban wasteland, the quintessential concrete jungle, and felt they had a right to bleat about anything they wanted to, especially the determined onslaught of Thatcherism.
Nineteen-eighty-one was a desperate year in the UK. Youth unemployment was rife as the country felt the bite of Thatcher’s cuts and riots were erupting all over the country, riots that appeared, with eerie synchronicity, at the same time as “Ghost Town”. It even felt like a riot, or rather how a riot felt just before it kicked off, or maybe just after it, when all the dust had settled. Dammers’ record was an apocalyptic portrait of inner-city oppression set to a loping beat offset by an unsettling and vaguely Middle Eastern motif: “Government leaving the youth on the shelf… No job to be found in this country…” The single sounded like the fairground ride from hell, a snake charmer of a song, complete with strident brass, madhouse wailing and dub-style breaks. The video was just as bleak, featuring a road trip through some of the least salubrious streets of Central London. The week after the song was released – bingo! – there were riots and civil disobedience all over the country.
The genesis of the song started back in 1980, after Dammers had witnessed the St Pauls riots in Bristol. For most of the 1970s, St Pauls – a predominantly black and white working-class area – had been the victim of deteriorating housing, poor education services and an increasingly strong police presence. Racial tension was high, as the Afro-Caribbean community felt victimised. Although the exact cause remains unclear, in early April, a riot erupted, involving nearly 2,000 people. It was this event that started Dammers thinking of “Ghost Town”, a song that would go on to define him, his band, and two-tone in general.
“St Pauls was the first riot, so I was aware of the situation,” he says today. “I was aware that things were deteriorating. ‘Ghost Town’ was obviously referencing the situation. Unemployment was heading for three million and it was a very worrying time.”
“It wasn’t a surprise when it went to No1 – most things two-tone became hits,” said Pauline Black, the lead singer of fellow 2 Tone band, The Selector. “‘Ghost Town’ epitomised the two-tone idea that black and white can operate in the same unit and speak to the youth. And its sense of melancholy spoke clearly: there was the ‘sus’ laws [the informal term for the stop and search law that enabled the police to stop, search and potentially arrest suspects], inner cities not functioning, racism dividing the working class. There was fighting at our gigs; there were lots of National Front people around. There was frustration about two-tone falling apart. We were 1970s bands in a time of two-man synth bands. The record companies were happy to leave two-tone’s problems behind.”
Weren’t they just. Surrounded by a burgeoning new romantic movement, two-tone felt very council estate, very rough and very monochromatic.
“Ghost Town”, though, felt properly revolutionary, the kind of record that no one had the right to expect anymore. The riots themselves felt contemporary and weirdly particular. These were domestic experiences, the kind that visitors to the UK just wouldn’t understand.
“Seventeen months separate The Specials' two No1 singles and a million musical miles,” wrote Simon Price of the Independent On Sunday. “Their first, a live recording of ‘Too Much Too Young’, was essentially The Sex Pistols’ ‘Bodies’ gone ska, but the intervening year saw The Specials ditch that punky-reggae template. Jerry Dammers experimented with lounge-noir on their second album, causing intra-band friction. ‘Ghost Town’ initiated a strand of spooked British pop that has lived on in Tricky and Portishead’s trip-hop and the dubstep of Burial and James Blake.”
Realism? This was urban decay writ large, accompanied by a kick drum and a muted horn. The kaleidoscopic “Ghost Town” didn’t offer balm for a world-weary pop-culture; rather it was a political exhortation. “For those of us who were not part of Thatcherism’s good life, for those of us who were excluded, then ‘Ghost Town’ spoke to our bruised hearts,” says Tony Parsons, who was still writing for the NME at the time.
The song was as much about the dissolution of the band as much as deindustrialisation and the toxicity of the streets. There had been internal fights within the group almost from the off, as Dammers was always trying to push the band in an experimental fashion. The recording of “Ghost Town”, which was the last time the original band were in a studio together, was so fraught and so obviously frustrating, that the guitarist Roddy Byers tried to kick a hole in the wall. As the studio was so small, each band member recorded their part separately, adding to the sense of separateness; and when they were together, there was bickering, scowling. It was this tense environment that produced the extraordinary sound of “Ghost Town”.
“The aural landscape is so vast that each member sounds disconnected from the next,” says Dorian Lynskey, in his history of protest songs, 33 Revolutions Per Minute. “[Terry] Hall’s chirpy memories of the ‘good old days’, Rico Rodriguez’s long elegiac trombone solo and that ghastly chorus of taunting wraiths. The record does not so much end as lose the will to go on, sinking back into the fog. Like all great records about social collapse, it seems to both fear and relish calamity. The ghost town is theirs to haunt.”
“When I think about ‘Ghost Town’ I think about Coventry,” said the band’s drummer, John Bradbury, who grew up in the city. “I saw it develop from a boom town, my family doing very well, through to the collapse of the industry and the bottom falling out of family life. Your economy is destroyed and, to me, that’s what ‘Ghost Town’ is all about.”
The riots would eventually end, although not before The Specials themselves collapsed. As they were due to appear on Top Of The Pops to promote the record, Terry Hall, Lynval Golding and Neville Staples told Dammers they were going to leave, appearing a few months later as Fun Boy Three (weren’t they just) with their debut single, “The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum”, a record that owed much to the lyrics and orchestration of “Ghost Town”.
In some respects 1981 was defined by the riots as much as by the music they inadvertently inspired. Yes, there was a royal wedding, in sharp juxtaposition to inner-city decay, a wedding that would produce a genuine royal superstar, yet the riots – the worst for a century – would resonate throughout the country for years. Motivated by racial tension, a perception of inner city deprivation and heat, the defining factor was the ongoing war of attrition between the black community and the police. The four main riots occurred in Brixton in London, Handsworth in Birmingham, Chapeltown in Leeds and Toxteth in Liverpool, although there were disturbances in at least 20 other towns and cities, including Derby, Bristol and, almost unbelievably, High Wycombe.
The worst were in Brixton, on 10-12 April. Dubbed “Bloody Saturday” by Time, the main riot took place on 11 April, and resulted in a mass confrontation between the mob and the Metropolitan Police. There were 45 injuries to members of the public and nearly 300 to the police; more than 5,000 rioters were involved, many of who had simply come out to fight, as they had nothing better to do and nowhere better to do it.
“We were watching a live TV broadcast of the Brixton riots and saw this bloke smash a camera shop window and grab the biggest camera he could find, which looked like a Nikon with a motor drive,” says my friend Chris Sullivan, the former owner of the Wag Club. “He ran off with it, but then as soon as he passed an off licence, he stopped, turned around and then threw it through the window. He nicked as many bottles of booze as he could carry. He then ran away, leaving the camera behind. The camera was probably worth two grand, while the booze probably wasn’t worth more than £100 tops. That summed it up for me. It was a boys’ jolly.”
In Toxteth, eye-witnesses recalled the “brazen calmness” of the looters, who were almost using the rioters as a human shield. They turned up with supermarket trolleys, safe in the knowledge they would never be caught. “Refrigerators, dryers, you name it,” said one observer.” I even saw one lady hold up a piece of carpet and ask if anyone knew whether it was 6ft by 4ft.”
The riots were more than a collection of urban disturbances, they were a media flashpoint that drew international attention to the huge rift in ideologies between the left and the right in the country, as well as the gap between perception and reality in terms of how the government were coping with the economy. There was also a growing sense that the Tories had no understanding of, and no pastoral interest in, the have-nots under their care, those who hadn’t wouldn’t benefit from financial deregulation, privatisation or Thatcher’s changes to the welfare state. While she would always say that she was empowering those who had previously been beholden to the state, Thatcher was criticised most often for having no idea what to do with communities when the safety net had been withdrawn. Especially as she was the one who had withdrawn them. The resulting report into the riots concluded that they were due to complex political, social and economic factors that had created “a disposition towards violent protest” due to racial disadvantage, inner-city struggles and the attrition between the local communities and the police.
The forgotten riot is the one in Brixton that started on 28 September 1985. It was sparked by the shooting of Dorothy “Cherry” Groce by the police, while they were looking for her son Michael Croce in relation to a suspected firearms offence. They thought Groce was hiding in his mother’s home, raided it and accidentally shot Mrs Groce, paralysing her from the waist down. As news of the attack spread, so hostilities began and the police lost control of the area for two days, during which time dozens of fires were started and shops looted, photojournalist David Hodge died a few days later, after a gang of looters he was trying to photograph attacked and beat him. The Broadwater Farm riot in Tottenham, in North London, a week later, was dominated by two deaths. During a police search of her home on 5 October, an Afro-Caribbean woman called Cynthia Jarrett died of heart failure, triggering a sequence of events that resulted in a full-scale riot on the Broadwater Farm council estate, involving youths throwing bricks, stones and Molotov cocktails, as well as using firearms. At 9.30pm police constable Keith Blakelock was trapped by a gang of local balaclava-clad boys, blowing whistles and ringing bells, who tried to decapitate him using knives and machetes. He was butchered to death. According to a man watching from his second-floor flat, the mob was relentless, like “vultures tearing at his body”. When he was examined later Blakelock had 42 different wounds. Winston Silcott, Engin Raghip and Mark Braithwaite were convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, although all three were cleared by the court of appeal in 1991 after it emerged evidence had been tampered with (Silcott remained in prison for the separate murder of another man, Tony Smith, finally being released in 2003).
I spent the years between 1981 and 1987 knocking about in South London, living in various housing association flats in Brixton, Peckham, Herne Hill and The Oval. The 1981 riots happened just a quarter of a mile from where I lived in The Oval, while the 1985 riot happened right outside my front door. That year, 28 September was a Saturday and having just come back from a trip abroad, I had spent the whole day indoors, transcribing tapes, writing, listening to music and cleaning the flat, not bothering to go outside for a paper or turn on the radio or TV. The flat was right behind the Ritzy cinema, just off Coldharbour Lane, a first-floor, two-bedroomed housing association flat that backed on to a small courtyard and faced Brixton’s Front Line. The first I knew something was up was around five o’clock in the afternoon, when I started to hear screaming, windows being smashed and the sound of accelerated running past the window. I looked through the vast, seven-foot-wide venetian blind that faced the street and I saw dozens of local residents – almost exclusively young black men – running by my window carrying record players, televisions, CD players, radios, amplifiers, microwaves, small fridges, speaker systems, anything they could carry. They’d been looting in and around the shops in Brixton market and in a second I realised I was in the middle of a full-scale riot.
Now I was attuned to everything, including the sound of looters breaking in through the front door of our building. They streamed into the four ground-floor flats and took anything they wanted that they could carry (again, audio equipment, vinyl, TVs). I had already barricaded our own front door with various pieces of random furniture, although this was largely to try to appease my girlfriend, as I knew that any concerted push from the other side would have caused them to come tumbling down the corridor as the door flew open. The looters (even though they were ostensibly rioting, all they were really doing was stealing) did actually run up to the first floor, although they immediately headed back down again as the sound of sirens approached. Police ran into our building, but by then most of the looters had run off in the direction of Railton Road and safe havens.
These were small gangs, little groups of boys who had grown up together, becoming disenfranchised together. When I rang my friend Robin, who lived up the road on Brixton Hill, and told him about the dozens and dozens of people still running by my window with enough stereo equipment to start their own branch of Curry’s, he laughed and rather unhelpfully suggested that I nip out and find something for myself (“Don’t you need a new stereo?”). We had both lived in Brixton for some time and had become almost immune to the attritional nature of the place. It was our version of gallows' humour, as we were no longer surprised by break-ins, muggings or harassment from the locals.
The next morning, Brixton looked as though it had been turned inside out, as everything that was usually inside someone’s house appeared to be outside, all the household detritus that looks so pathetic and parochial when removed from its natural habitat. And it wasn’t quiet, so much as mute. No noise. No sound. Nothing. The area soon went back to normal, although the fact that there were even more boarded-up windows in the market and along the high street just made you think that whatever forms of gentrification were taking place, Brixton was never going to get any better as, every time it did, there would always be those who would find a way to destroy it (most of whom lived there).
As we eventually moved out – shipping out to Shepherd’s Bush, in West London – so others took our place and a gentrification of sorts did occur, the kind that increasingly appealed to those who couldn’t afford to get onto the housing ladder anywhere else. By the end of the 1980s, those pockets of gentrification that had started to pop up around Central London would become so oversubscribed that those on the bottom rungs were pushed farther and farther out, so those previously out-of-bound areas east of the city villages that promised the sort of luxurious loft-living the young bankers in Docklands had been promised a decade before. Some thought this was progress, although what was rarely advertised in the Sunday Times’ Home section was the fact that most of these new developments were nothing less than gated communities. They didn’t need to say anything, as it was implicit. The gentrification of London was continuing at an unusually fast pace, one that reflected the new money swirling around and rushing into the city and the way in which it was being used as an architectural hothouse; but what was rarely discussed was the divisive way in which we were all now being forced to live, the rich rubbing up against the poor and neither of them appreciating it very much.
London wouldn’t experience riots again for another 26 years, when the looters couldn’t even be bothered to swathe their frustration with their own plight with anything tangible; the looting in 2011 was simply an excuse to steal some new trainers. The gangs were bigger, more organised, more vicious, more resigned to living outside of society; no explanations or excuses were needed nor offered. Compared to the two-speed society of the tweenies (as economists are still trying to describe the second decade of the 21st century) 1985 seemed almost quaint.
The 1980s riots were devoured so much by the international media that the burning oil drum became as much a part of modern British iconography as the white suits in the 1981 television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited – and for a while seemed to appear in any film about the British underclass, surrounded by a gang of Rada-trained professional cockneys and a smattering of generic gangsters, drug dealers and punky fishnets molls. To the outside world it looked as though rioting was what any youth cult worth their salt did when they’d grown tired of posing for style magazines or making bad pop records.
Living in London you certainly got the feeling you were somehow living under siege. In South London, conflict gave an edge to every transaction in a corner shop, every late-night walk home from the Underground. Walk into a Brixton pub and you felt eyes upon you. Television coverage of the riots painted them clearly as battles between residents and the police force, although what they really did was create even more racial tension between blacks and whites on the street, between neighbours of different ethnic backgrounds, between people who knew each other and of course those who didn’t. I had a friend who was chased down Gresham Road near Brixton Police Station by some of his black neighbours just because he happened to be white at the wrong time of day. He sought refuge in a (black) neighbour’s house, who promptly called out to the gang chasing him, who ran in and kicked the living daylights out of him. Police aggression made everyone paranoid, and made people who had previously lived quite happily side by side turn against each other because it seemed like the safest thing to do.
The morning after the first 1981 riot was almost as bad as the riot itself, as the mess and the devastation made you feel as though you were living in a place that was never going to improve, that was only ever going to get worse. And so you started treating the place with the same disdain; what was the point of throwing an empty cigarette packet in a bin if the bin was going to be thrown through the off-licence window later in the day? Back in 1981, walking around Electric Avenue and Atlantic Road after the first night’s disturbance was nothing if not surreal. You couldn't quite believe that things would ever return to normal, what with the broken glass, the boarded-up windows, the dozens of overturned cars, the smoke billowing from the shops in the market like some trashy post-apocalyptic movie. The carpet shop always seemed to suffer, not that any of the stock was ever taken. What had the rioters got against carpet shops? The looters concentrated on the electrical shops, on the ghetto blasters, television sets and radios. Coldharbour Lane always looked like a fairly unforgiving place at the best of times, but for weeks after the riots it felt as though it has been transported directly from some post-apoc wasteland, a tunnel of terror. Walking down the Lane at night you felt a little like Orpheus walking out of the underworld, too anxious to turn around and see what might be behind you. Everywhere there was tension. One afternoon that autumn, a few months after the 1981 riots, I had walked from a squat in Peckham up to The Oval and was just about to enter the Underground when I was approached by a gang of about a dozen skinheads. They were all over the place at the time, although they tended to leave Brixton and its immediate environs alone, so whenever you saw them in the area you suspected there might be trouble. I assumed that my dyed hair, red bandana and Chinese slippers had probably caused my shorn-haired friends to think I was a lily-livered liberal with a penchant for Afro-Caribbean culture, so as soon as I saw one of them reach into his pocket for his knife as he mentioned something I was meant to have said to his “sister”, I turned on my slippered heels and ran. All the way to Brixton. And, unlike Orpheus, without looking back.
The late summer of 1981 was a wake-up call for so many people I knew, as we had all finished college and were experiencing the inevitability of life on the dole, looking for work while juggling the day-to-day existence of a life without structure or a support network. For me and for so many others at the time, my support network was the black economy, acting as a cocktail barman at Brixton’s chi-chi nightclub The Fridge one minute and bunking the tube the next. On Tuesdays doing the door at a West End nightclub (where essentially you let in your friends for free and drank the profits) and on Wednesdays waking up with enough time to sign on. Odd jobs were essential to supplement what you got from the government: film extra work, a spot of photography, retail conference stewarding, modelling for friends who couldn’t find anyone else. DJing, drumming in bands who were never going to get signed, running a Sunday market stall in Camden Lock having spent the early hours buying up bric-a-brac in Brick Lane. Anything for cash. Seriously, what have you got? This was the time of Only Fools And Horses, of Minder, of Boys From The Blackstuff, of the nefarious and the naughty, the secondhand and the underhand. In our world, the economy was driven by nightclubs, as this was a completely cash economy. Club owners, club runners, DJs, bands, doormen, barmen, waitresses, bouncers and obviously the drug dealers. Everything was based on cash, as there was no other currency. Having no safety net meant we encouraged each other to be more entrepreneurial than perhaps we would have been otherwise, although none of us were the kind of people who would have pursued jobs for life.
Urban deprivation for us was a backdrop to a new world, one in which we knew we were going to have to fend for ourselves.
When Mrs Thatcher first arrived in Downing Street in 1979, there were many who thought she would become as much a prisoner of the Whitehall machine as her predecessor, Edward Heath, yet she quickly used abrasiveness to slap down the mandarins. “She gives the civil servants hell,” said one observer soon after she became prime minister. “She writes these brusque, caustic notes accusing them of woolly thinking and they are absolutely terrified of her.” The cabinet were terrified too, as her treatment of her colleagues was appalling. There would be no woolly thinking in Mrs Thatcher’s government. Elected against a background of rotting refuse and unburied bodies following the Winter Of Discontent, she took her mandate for governing as a mandate for change.
No woolly thinking.
Thatcher had a habit of invoking the pernicious legacy of the so-called “permissive society” whenever she was confronted with something she didn’t understand. It was easier for her to stand back, aghast. Equally, Thatcher dismissed the idea that racism, heavy-handed police tactics and unemployment were behind the Brixton disturbances – even though police brutality and continual harassment of young black men has been one of the prime motivators behind the riots – saying “Nothing, but nothing, justifies what happened… What aggravated the riots into a virtual saturnalia was the impression gained by the rioters that they could enjoy a fiesta of crime, looting and rioting in the guise of social protest. They felt they had been absolved in advance.” She was criticised for this outburst, but she wasn’t entirely wrong. She was, though, when she claimed that money couldn’t buy either trust or racial harmony. What many forgot about the peace process in Northern Ireland was that it was as much to do with prosperity as political and sectarian will. Of course large-scale investments would have helped Brixton, although the more disquiet there was, the more unlikely any investment seemed. However, it was to come sooner than anyone thought, as Tesco bought a site on Acre Lane the day after the 1985 riots. Gentrification eventually came to Brixton, inadvertently moving it upmarket – not by much, but by enough. Pride followed prosperity and in the summer of 2011, when opportunistic revellers attending a street party used the excuse of the riot in Tottenham a few days earlier to loot and burn a string of shops in Brixton, local residents were incensed, calling the thugs “pathetic… It’s just an excuse for the young ones to come and rob shops. We are going to get people blaming the economy and what happened last week but that’s not the real reason this happened. This is costly for our community reputation.” It would have been difficult to imagine the residents displaying the same sentiments in 1981 or indeed in 1985.
Brixton would change over the next 30 years or so, especially after the millennium. From 2001 to 2012, the Afro-Caribbean population of Lambeth, the borough that houses Brixton, fell by eight per cent, even though the borough’s overall population rose by nine per cent. As the Economist pointed out at the time, this was largely due to black flight. To escape crime and to buy bigger houses and to get their children into better schools, they fled to suburbia, specifically to the areas on the outskirts of South East London.
Gentrification continued apace, as Lambeth Council spruced up the area, preventing the conversion of houses into flats to attract middle-class house buyers and transforming the old covered market into a shopping mall with upmarket cafes and restaurants. A year after Brixton Village opened in 2011, just as the 2000s ended, house prices had risen by as much as 20 per cent, in a market where residential property was largely flat.
Around the same time, if you had been reading the small ads in the arts pages of your favourite national newspaper, you would have seen that revival tours were all the rage. The Human League, The Who, Lloyd Cole, Ultravox, Deep Purple, The Eagles, Golden Earring and Simply Red were all treading the boards again, seemingly regardless of how these opportunistic outings would ultimately affect their legacies. And who could blame them? They were gigs, after all. People at the time would pay good money to see bands they enjoyed in their youth, sometimes regardless of how many original members they contained. That weird little band from 1983 whose only hit you once devoured as though it were the essence of life itself? Yup, well they were probably back too, playing the Shepherd’s Bush Empire the night after Joe Jackson and probably supporting Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark or The Happy Mondays. With all the original members, too, strangely – apart from the drummer, who had no doubt died in a bizarre gardening accident in what the rest of the band at the time thought was a misguided, if not completely unfunny, homage to Spinal Tap.
At the time, as far as music was concerned, there was nothing quite so au courant as nostalgia.
And if you looked carefully, you would have seen that The Specials were back too, churning out the old hits as though they were a human jukebox. They were greeted with open arms by the critics and public alike, only they weren’t really The Specials at all, because the most important member, Jerry Dammers, the man who invented them, who gave the band their political edge, who wrote most of their songs and who was responsible for making them truly memorable, was not encouraged to participate in the reunion (“I founded The Specials and now they've excluded me,” said Dammers when the band first reunited, in 2008). There had always been friction between Dammers and the group’s singer – Terry Hall, one of the most (self-proclaimed) miserable men in pop – and that friction continued, obviously to the extent that they found it impossible to work together.
Dammers was the creative genius behind The Specials, the man who gave them their idiosyncratic musical tropes and who set them apart from the likes of The Selector, The Beat or Bad Manners. The Specials without Dammers were like The Doors without Jim Morrison, Queen without Freddie Mercury, or Morecambe & Wise without Morecambe or, er, Wise. I saw the reformed Specials support Blur at their gig in Hyde park in 2012 and the band looked like a bunch of fiftysomething cab drivers and sounded like the musical equivalent of a Sunday morning football match. They didn’t play “Ghost Town”, but then how could they? The man who wrote it wasn’t there.
I knew Dammers extremely well for about five years in the 1980s. I would regularly hitch up to Coventry to sit in sullen working men’s clubs with him and his extraordinary circle of friends and acquaintances, discussing socialism (we differed), the provenance of Prince Buster and the validity of Heaven 17. We went clubbing together, spent a few memorable New Year’s Eves in Bristol (where his parents were from), spent birthdays together and once DJ’d together at a miners’ benefit at the Wag Club in 1983 (he played politically correct funk while I played right-of-centre disco). I even sat through some of the tortuous recording of the 1985 album In The Studio by The Special AKA (as The Specials morphed into), containing Jerry’s defining moment, the monumentally influential “Free Nelson Mandela”. Inspired by Live Aid, this song ultimately led to the Mandela Seventieth Birthday Tribute concert at Wembley Stadium in 1988 and helped add to the groundswell of support that led to Mandela’s release from prison in February 1990.
Dammers was always a genuine bohemian and in a way it was no surprise to me the way his career panned out (DJing, production, forming various esoteric dance orchestras). However, I also thought he might turn out to be our generation’s John Barry, scoring important movies with solemn yet iconic orchestral themes, balancing Jacques Derrida with Francis Lai, Scott Walker with Dr John. To me, Dammers was the Lennon and McCartney of ska and one of the most important voices of the post-punk generation, a man who always appeared to be carrying his generation’s hopes and dreams on his shoulders, as well as his own. That he didn’t turn into John Barry was a disappointment to me, but probably not to him.
I was thinking about “Ghost Town” the other day as I walked home, lost in reverie, but oh-so-aware of everything around me. I knew the enemy was out there, just as it had been nearly 40 years ago. I couldn’t see it, couldn’t smell it, but I just knew it was coming.
Jerry Dammers is in the middle – or thereabouts – of recording a new album, down in his studio in South London. He has hours of material “in the can”, as he says, but needs time to get it into shape. With all his DJing work cancelled for the time being, he is wisely using this period to try to finalise output he’s been tinkering with for years. “I’ll get there in the end,” he says. “I’m not a perfectionist but I want this to be good. I think it is good, but I want to give it my best shot. Once and for all.” I spoke to him for this article a few days ago and he is as disconcerted by the current crisis as all of us. Up until the lockdown he had been working late most nights, regularly seeing the crazies who still stalk the streets in the early hours in these desperate times and still freaked out by the desolation. “It’s quite spooky walking about at night. I would come back from the studio in the middle of the night and worryingly there would be the odd lunatics walking the streets. It’s only the most extreme people who appear to still be out there. It’s strange times.”
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