2-Tone's other bands: The Beat, Madness and The Selecter

heOn songs like "Hands Off, She's Mine" (The Beat's second Top 10 hit from early 1980), the bubbling bass braid itself around the rimshot drums and the shimmering rhythm guitar.

The Beat - Hands Off, She's Mine 1980

"Mirror in the Bathroom", their third single and a number 4 hit in May 1980, was even more innovative. Weirdly, its jittery guitars and sinous bass recall nothing so much as Joy Division's "Transmission", although maybe "She's Lost Control" is more apt, because "Mirror" is a glimpse in the mind of someone cracking up.

The Beat - Mirror in the Bathroom 1980

Tension, paranoia and jangled nervousness were The Beat's prime terrain, as heard on songs like "Twist and Crawl", "All out to Get You", and their third Top 10 hit of 1980, "Too Nice to Talk to" - the frantic sound of a guy paralised and tongue-tied whenever the girl of his dreams comes near. "Too Nice" added Chic-style bass and African-flavoured guitar to the speed skank, resulting in an iridescent chittering sound that suggested township disco.

The Beat - Twist and Crawl 1980


The Beat - All out to Get You 1981


The Beat - Too Nice to Talk to 1980

Behind the clowning of Madness, was an intelligence and melancholy that gradually came to the fore. Alongside early jolly-ups like "One Step Beyond" and "Night Boat to Cairo" were singles like the exquisitely rueful and confused "My Girl" (a young man who can't seem to make his girlfriend happy or get her to understand that he sometimes needs a bit of space) or the hangdog "Embarassment" (a boy who's disgraced his family).

Madness - One Step Beyond 1979


Madness - Night Boat to Cairo 1979


Madness - My Girl 1979


Madness - Embarassment 1980

The video for "Baggy Trousers" was uproarious but the song's nostalgia for schooldays came alloyed with ambivalence and regret.

Madness - Baggy Trousers 1980

By their third album, 7, Madness's humour was shadowed with the pathos and bathos of English life. 

"Cardiac Arrest" was a deceptively jaunty ditty about a stressed middle manager who's late for work and suffers a coronary in mid-commute.

Madness - Cardiac Arrest 1981

"Grey Day" was as harrowing as anything on The Specials, and this time the music itself took a turn to the tragi-comic, with bells tolling for all those condemned to a living death of meaningless routine. 'The sky outside is wet and grey/So begins another weary day', singer Suggs McPherson intones mournfully, 'I wish I could sink without a trace'. Amazingly, this portrait of terminal despondency, underpinned by an ominous dubsway of reggae rimshots and heavy bass, reached number 4 in the charts in the spring of 1981.

Madness - Grey Day 1981

The Selecter hit big with the herky-jerky "On My Radio" (a protest against the airwaves being one long 'same old show') but never quite won the public's affection - despite having a charismatic singer, Pauline Black - one of the few women in the 2-Tone stable.

The Selecter - On My Radio 1979

Madness's number 1 hit "House of Fun" - a song about going to buy your first packet of condoms at the chemist's - made sexual awakening seem like a fall from grace into a world of sordid grotesquerie.

Madness - House of Fun 1982

With the exception of Madness, who hid their sadness behing a light-hearted exterior, what's immediately striking when you look at the key figures of 2-Tone and the whole mod renaissance is the sexless intensity of their zeal, a polarized vision ardour that divides the world into the righteous and the square. The Jam's Paul Weller captures the attitude best in "Start!" when he rejoices at meeting a soul-brother who, just like himself, 'loves with a passion called hate'.

The Jam - Start! 1980

The Specials, Madness and the beginning of the ska revival

Just as "Death Disco" started sliding down the UK charts in July 1979, another single shot in like a rocket: "Gangsters". The Specials' debut shares a surprising amount with PiL's single: a bassline that pounds against your ribcage like a heart full of fear, baleful vocals (singer Terry Hall modelled his glowering persona on Johnny Rotten), and a sinuous, snake-charmer melody that's almost like a cartoon version of Lydon's muezzin wail. 'Cartoon' is the key word, though. For all the lyrics' conjuring of menace and corruption ('we're living in real gangster times'), the Specials' manic exuberance made "Gangsters" pure pop.

The Specials - Gangsters 1979

Where Metal Box's featureless packaging refused image, The Specials' selftitled debut album revelled in it - the cover shows the seven members of the band looking super cool in pork-pie hats, thin ties and sharp sixties suits. PiL's matt-grey canister was starkly functional, a pointed exercise in demystification. But The Specials' black-and-white sleeve harked back to an older glamour: the monochrome period feel of the early sixties.

Despite The Specials' outward appearance of boisterous fun, their songs' worldview is strikingly cheerless. In "Nite Klub", the wage slaves piss away their pay packets with beer that already tastes like piss.

The Specials - Nite Klub 1979

"Too Much Too Young" starts as a taunting diatribe against an ex-girlfriend who's lost her youth to premature motherhood ('Try wearing a cap', jeers Hall), then turns rueful and almost compassionate for the lives they've both lost: 'You done too much, much too young/Now you're married with a son when you should be having fun with me'.

The Specials - Too Much Too Young 1979

"Stupid Marriage" is a marginally more jaunty take on the same scenario: Hall as the jilted boyfriend spying on his ex and her husband, then lobbing a brick through the bedroom window. This grim vision of matrimony as death trap - 'She's got him where she wanted and forgot to take her pill/And he thinks that she'll be happy when she's hanging out the nappies/If that's a happy marriage I'd prefer to be unhappy' - recalls The Who's "A Legal Matter" and kitchen-sink dramas like Up the Junction.

The Specials - Stupid Marriage 1979


The Who - A Legal Matter 1965

The song "Concrete Jungle", like PiL's "Chant" and Fatal Microbes' "Violence Grows", takes a snapshot of street life in 1979: a record year for racial attacks and muggings. Embellished with sound effects of breaking glass, "Concrete Jungle" is driven by a disco-style walking bassline that periodically accelerates to a panicked sprint, the protagonist gibbering, 'Animals are after me' and, 'Leave me alone, leave me alone'.

The Specials - Concrete Jungle 1979

Singer/producer Prince Buster was even bigger in Britain than he was in Jamaica: he released more than six hundred singles in the UK between 1962 and 1967, and toured frequenly, often escorted between gigs by a phalanx of scooter-riding mods. The Special upheld the mod tradition of worshipping Buster. "Gangsters" was loosely based on his "Al Capone", replacing the original lyrics with all-new words about the record business's sharks and shysters, but 'sampling' the skidding car-chase tyres from the original.

Prince Buster - Al Capone 1967

"Stupid Marriage" stole its courtroom scenario - The Specials' resident rude boy Neville Staple as Judge Roughneck meting out harsh sentences to rude boys - from Buster's "Judge Dread" hit of 1967.

Prince Buster - Judge Dread 1967

"Message to You Rudy", the Dandy Livingstone classic covered by The Specials, wasn't written from a 'conscious' standpoint, but it did counsel the rude boy to mend his ways: 'better think of your future'.

The Specials - A Message to You, Rudy 1979


Dandy Livingstone - Rudy A Message to You 1967

Madness outdid all the other ska revivalists with their debut single - their sole release for 2-Tone Records. On one side, a version of Buster's "Madness" made for an instant manifesto.

Prince Buster - Madness 1967

On the other, "The Prince" paid luminous tribute. 'A ghost dance is preparing', announces singer Suggs McPherson, a nod to "Ghost Dance", Buster's own homage to the sound system operators of his youth. "This may not be uptown Jamaica", sings Suggs, conceding that, 'although I'll keep on running, I'll never get to Orange Street' - a reference to the boulevard that was both Buster's birthplace and the centre of Kingston's music biz. "The Prince" sounds joyous, but its lyrics capture the poignant pathos of the mod dream - escaping the impasses of England through a massive projection towards black music and black style.

Madness - The Prince 1979


Prince Buster - Ghost Dance 1967