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6 years 2 months ago
- Posts: 709
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Who remembers The Specials, which was a two-tone ska revival band that had hits in the U.K. from 1979 to 1982, such as "A Message to You, Rudy" (a cover of a Dandy Livingstone number) and "Ghost Town"?
Its noted members, who would defect from the group in 1981 to form Fun Boy Three, were vocalists Terry Hall (co-writer of The Go-Go's 1981 hit "Our Lips Are Sealed"; for which he would then re-record and release in 1983 while with FB3) and Jamaicans Neville Staples and Lynval Golding.
The group, when it first formed in 1977 in Coventry, England, by vocalist Golding with Jerry Dammers and Horace Panter, was originally known as The (Coventry) Automatics. Terry Hall and Roddy Radiation joined in 1978, and the group changed its name to The Special AKA Coventry Automatics, and then to just Special AKA. The group adopted the name The Specials in 1979, at which point their three-year streak of seven Top 10 hits had begun, leading off with the single "Gangsters."
While Hall, Golding and Staples were playing together as FB3, Jerry Dammers revived the name Special AKA in 1983, and added vocalists Stan Campbell and Rhoda Dakar; but the revival didn't last, and Dammers broke up the band by 1985, after which the single "Nelson Mandela" was released to promote anti-apartheid in South Africa.
~Ben
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