End of a revival: Madness and Dexys Midnight Runners during the '80s

A sense of place, always present in Madness's music (the cover of Absolutely, their second album, showed them outside Chalk Farm tube station) gradually intensified, climaxing with 1982's The Rise and Fall.

Here Madness shouldered past the 'new Kinks' tag and lunged for 'new Beatles' status. The front cover of the gatefold sleeve was a Magical Mystery Tour-like tableau of the band atop Parliament Hill and garbed in semi-surreal attire. 

Inside, "Our House" (another massive hit) was Madness's "Penny Lane", bittersweet nostalgia for the familiar surroundings of childhood.

Madness - Our House 1982

On "Primrose Hill" - Madness's "Strawberry Fields" - they even hired prog arranged David Bedford to write brass-band orchestration.

Madness - Primrose Hill 1982

Kevin Rowland's new 'new soul vision' was heralded in March 1982 with "The Celtic Soul Brothers", which replaced the old Dexys horn fanfares with the jaunty jangle of mandolins and boisterous folksy violins (supplied by the Emerald Express Fiddlers).

Dexys Midnight Runners - The Celtic Soul Brothers 1982

The follow-up "Come on Eileen" was a massive number 1 in the summer of 1982 - in Britain, America and around the world. Accompanied by an unexpectedly playful video, "Eileen" was an honest-to-goodness love song. Rowland archly admitted to having impure thoughts: 'You in that dress/My thoughts I confess/Verge on dirty'.

Dexys Midnight Runners - Come On Eileen 1982

Another massive hit, a cover of Van Morrison's "Jackie Wilson Said", acknowledged the heavy debts the new Dexys owed to the latter's 'Caledonian Soul' sound of Irish folk-infused R&B.

Dexys Midnight Runners - Jackie Wilson Said (I'm in Heaven When You Smile) 1982

Rowland's response to fame was the calculated career-suicide move of 1985's Don't Stand Me Down, which featured no singles, just eleven-minute songs including bizarre comic dialogues like "This Is What She's Like", rants against the English upper classes and meta-soul exercises like "The Occasional Flicker".

Dexys Midnight Runners - This Is What She's Like 1985


Dexys Midnight Runners - The Occasional Flicker 1985

On the front cover, Dexys made a final confounding image shift: they appeared wearing ties, pin-stripe suits and neatly combed hair, looking for all the world like investment bankers in a photo for a corporate prospectus. 'So clean and simple; it's a much more adult approach now', said Rowland, rationalizing what in some senses was mod logic taken to the extreme: dressing like the ruling class.

2-Tone signposted its sources and reference points with countless remakes, tribute songs and interpolations (like the 'no gimme no more pickneys' vocal lick from Lloyd Charmers' "Birth Control", borrowed on The Special's "Too Much Too Young").

Lloyd Charmers - Birth Control 1969


The Specials - Too Much Too Young 1980

Even the 2-Tone logo - a black-and-white figure representing the imaginary rude boy Walt Jabsco - was modelled on a photo of the young Peter Tosh from The Wailers.

Searching for the Young Soul Rebels: Dexys Midnight Runners

Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, Dexys Midnight Runners debut album, starts with the sound of a radio dial being turned, someone scouring the airwaves for the next working-class-saviour band. There's a burst of the Pistols' "Holidays in the Sun" and a blare of The Specials' "Rat Race" before frontman Kevin Rowland blurts, 'For God's sake, burn it down!' and Dexys launch into their first song.

Dexys Midnight Runners -  Burn It Down 1980

"Geno", Dexys first number 1 single, was pure meta-pop: a homage to sixties mod hero Geno Washington. Rowland's older brother had taken him to see Washington when he was only eleven. Rowland reminisces about the inspirational force of this first gig of his life, comparing Washington to the mod's pills of choice: 'That man was my bombers, my Dexys, my high'.

Dexys Midnight Runners - Geno 1980

The follow-up single, "There, There My Dear" went even further into the land of meta-pop: it's a vitriolic riposte to a sceptic (seemingly a real person, and most likely either a trend-hopping music journalist or a pretentious musician) who had the temerity not to 'welcome the new soul vision'. "There, There" also contains the classic class-war couplet, 'The only way to change things/Is to shoot men who arrange things'.

Dexys Midnight Runners - There, There My Dear 1980

"I Couldn't Help It If I Tried" recounts Rowland's attempt to organize a strike only to be let down by his workmates.

Dexys Midnight Runners - I Couldn't Help It If I Tried 1980

"Dance Stance" savaged people who tell jokes about stupid Irishmen but don't know about Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan and the rest.

Dexys Midnight Runners - Dance Stance 1979

The cover of Searching showed a photo of a Belfast Catholic boy carrying his belongings after being driven from his neighbourhood during the sectarian clearances of 1969. Half-Irish, Rowland explained, 'I wanted a picture of unrest. It could have been from anywhere but I was secretly glad that it was from Ireland'.

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