Today’s Specials

It was summer 1981, and the towns and cities of Britain were alight. There had been riots in Brixton, south London, that April and on 10 July there were more — and not just in Brixton. Other parts of the city followed. And so did a long list of other places, from the unsurprising — Sheffield, Preston, Leicester — to the ones where the idea of a riot might have been expected to have disappeared with Captain Swing: Cirencester, Aldershot.

‘I was sitting in my flat watching the news, the riots happening all over the place,’ says Horace Panter, the bass player of the Specials. ‘And “Ghost Town” was No. 1.’ ‘Ghost Town’ was the Specials’ masterpiece — the one that sealed their reputation as one of the great British bands. It is a nightmarishly drunken piece of music, haunted funfair reggae that predicted the violent rage spreading through desolate British towns.