BRITAIN’S UNITY ROCKERS: THE ENGLISH BEAT'S SOUL SALVATION!

BRITAIN’S UNITY ROCKERS: THE ENGLISH BEAT'S SOUL SALVATION!

FEATURES

John Neilson

The first thing that grabs you about an English Beat single is, of course, the BEAT: Pulsating, snakey, sort of reggaeish only faster (but not ska—more on that later!). Then come the chiming guitars, followed by a rich vocal with a feel not unlike Elvis Costello in a good mood. Another vocalist appears, counterpointing the first with a sassy, street-smart bravado all his own, and then this bright, slinky saxophone swoops in and steals the show.

Somewhere in the midst of all this you look down and see your right foot is tapping uncontrollably. Not to be outdone, the left one soon follows suit. Da Beat a come all ovahyou tonight, Right! Go feet, go!

But wait...what was that lyric that just flew by? “Slip slowly into mental illness... you’re drowning...what a Third World War...pushes your dead body under a microscope...I can’t hang qp for much longer...”

It would seem that the English Beat are suffering from an odd case of musical schizophrenia. On the one hand, they are purveyors of one of the most insidious dance musics around—if you’re standing still at a Beat concert you’d better check for signs of rigor mortis, pal. On the other hand, their best songs display a lyrical vision that is positively bleak, probing undercurrents of anger, frustration and despair behind the music’s irresistible joy. In retrospect, it’s no surprise that the band’s first single was a rave-up cover of Smokey Robinson’s brilliant “Tears Of A Clown:”

... So don’t let my glad expression, give you the wrong impression... don’t let this smile I wear, make you think that I don’t care—

’cause really I’m sad, oh, sadder than sad...

I catch up with the Beat in Ann Arbor, roughly a week into their current sevenweek tour. Unlike previous tours, this one finds the band mostly headlining—“gathering the harvest,” as singer Dave Wakeling put it, of new fans won over on previous jaunts opening for the Talking Heads, Clash, and most recently, the Police.

More importantly, perhaps, the Beat are making it on their own now, no longer under the shadow of fellow 2-Tone Records 'stablemates the Specials, Selecter, and Madness. Although 2-Tone started the band on a dizzying climb into the English charts, the other side of the bargain involved the loss of more individual attention, although according to bassist David Steele this was hardly a bad deal.

“On the back of 2-Tone we went from playing pubs and three months later we were in the Top 10 and on television. Over the next two years you’d get everybody asking you about 2-Tone, but if it hadn’t been for 2-Tone nobody would have given a fuck where we were. We’d have been in pubs doing interviews with the local papers...”

“Would you have liked to have been on 2-Tone...” guitarist Andy Cox drawls in his best reporter-ese.

“The further you got away from the 2-Tone breeding ground,” Wakeling suggests, “the more misunderstood the aims and objectives of 2-Tone became. We joined the 2-Tone alliance because what we were trying to do was recreate the mood we generated at our house parties, where we had two decks and played reggae and punk—not necessarily one of each—with the Tamla gold hits every now and then. The reggae would make everybody kind of slinky and loose and the punk would get everybody really adrenalined, so when you went back to the reggae track again you were kind of full of energy but kind of loose as well.

“So that was how we ended up being at all connected with ska—we wanted punk and reggae and ended up with a fast reggae beat. Ska wasn’t really one of our major influences. I suppose if there was to be a running order it was pop, punk, reggae, and soul, with ska being as much an influence, really, as calypso!”

“So that’s the only cross that there is to bear,” he admits, “and that’s outweighed totally by the fact that 2-Tone achieved something socially in England that few transitory pop music movements managed. It did say something quite straightforward about racial unity. What 2-Tone did do was to a great extent defuse the very fast-growing—at the time—ultra right-wing Nazi parties: the National Front, British Movement, stuff like that. Because there were loads of 2-Tone concerts going on where the kids onstage were black and white and wore similar clothes and the audience was a real mixture—the whole thing was like a big melting pot.’ ”

Coming on the heels of a string of classic TURN TO PAGE 57 singles, the band’s stunning debut album / Just Can’t Stop It (don’t have a party without it) established the Beat as not only danceable but aware and articulate as well. The musically more relaxed follow-up Wh’appen was even more overtly political, tackling nationalism, the lures and pitfalls of capitalism, insecurity, and paranoia, while the band came out in interviews against nuclear weapons and fascist politics.

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The English music public is extraordinarily fickle, however, and media darlings the Beat found that by the spring of 1982 that popular attention had wandered off to the next passing trend. Their singles were no longer instant chart successes, ,but luckily, with the release of their latest LP Special Beat Service, the Beat have found that America is finally catching on to their music. The album has reportedly already surpassed the sales of both of its predecessors, enabling them to headline here as well as play the much-heralded Us Festival in California this past summer.

“We’ll do anything weird once,” bassist Steele remarks in referrence to the ’80s version of Woodstock. “We are compromising to a slight extent when we do things like that which are pretty awful — but your reward is getting through to a wider audience. You have to wrestle with your conscience — is getting through to those people worth playing things like that? We obviously decided it is. Otherwise we could go around playing clubs for the next six years,” he adds with a laugh, “which is even more depressing.”

Special Beat Service shows the English Beat breaking some of their old formulas and experimenting with new styles, and the result is both diverse and satisfying. Some of Wakeling’s pop songs compare very favorably with Costello’s recent work, while toastmaster Rankin’ Roger has stepped out from his usual supporting role to shine on two of the LP’s most upbeat cuts (he’s somewhat self-effacing when asked about the possibility of a solo album, but suggests that future singles are a possibility — “I get bored listening to toasting albums...”).

Other highlights include the soulful “Sole Salvation,” the exuberant “Akee 1 2 3” (taken from a couple of childrens’ games), and the single “Save It For Later.”

The latter, as it turns out, is actually amongst the voidest songs in the band’s repertoire, though it was dropped from the live shows until recently because it wasn’t fast enough for the ska-crazy dance crowds of the 2-Tone scene.

Strong as they are, many of the new songs only really make their presence felt in concert, where they mesh readily with old chestnuts from the first and (sadly under-represented) second LPs. Wakeling and Roger are the focal points of the show, with their vocal trade-offs and boyish enthusiasm, although Cox and Steele both gef an honorable mention for their lemon-lime Day-Glo socks, psychedelic t-shirts, and crazed rubber-legged dancing.

The floor turns into a boiling sea of dancers, and the band is called back for several encores before leaving at the point of exhaustion.

When asked how much difference he’s noticed in American crowds this % time around, Wakeling remarked that he had seen an increase both in the awareness of the reggae background of their sound and the topical side of their lyrics.

“You people are a bit more angry,” he notes, “a bit more embarrassed at having a maniac at the helm. (Reagan) always reminds me of the guy who does the voiceovers on those Disney wildlife things. You know...‘Charlie was a cougar, but he was no ordinary cougar..

One second laughing and cracking jokes, the next second making grim pronouncements on the state of our respective countries, Wakeling proved to be a fascinating talker. Don’t take my word for it, though—judge for yourself:

ON POLITICAL SYSTEMS “I don’t know to what lengths they’re willing to go to keep pretending the system we operate under can work—they’re just getting more and more extreme trying to hold it up. It obviously doesn’t fit, burthey don’t want to admit that they’ve got any mistakes in case the Commies start laughing.

“And it’s just as bad on the other side.” ON APATHY

“We get what we deserve, generally. If

we don’t care enough about things then we deserve to go up in flames. I mean, if you wanted to you’ve got everything here that you’d need to save the world.”

ON SOCIALISM

“All the people who are the building blocks of society don’t really go for socialism.” Laughing, “it’s a very difficult thing to market!” Feigns bewilderment. “ ‘Share? SHARE?! You mean I’ve got to give him something.. .and he’s not going to gimme anything backPF So they screw it up. Anytime anything remotely socialist gets into government in England all these little gnomes from Zurich take away all the money and say ‘OK, be socialist — with nottin’.”

“And after; four years they say, ‘See, told you it wouldn’t work!” ■

ON RACISM

“I think racism is much more institutionalized in America. I mean it see;ms sometimes like it’s more open in England, so it seems like it’s more of a problem, but I also think it’s more openly discussed. It seems like the American system has been designed so that you don’f have to like each other — you don’t even have to tolerate each other or meet each other — you just live in parallel societies. It’s when the two clash that you get huge riots or something;”

ON OPTIMISM/ PESSIMISM “It’s OK railing against the Empire, but you still have to live with it — we still have to get up in the morning. I find it very difficult, because I’m not much of an optimist, but things like ‘Sole Salvation’ and ‘Ackee 12 3’ try to point towards the light at the end of the tunnel. ”

POLITICS A LA THE CLASH “It’s a deadly trap to feel you’re obliged to write political songs, because they turn out to be empty anthems, which really spoils it for me. There is the thing where if you say the word El Salvador that that’s actually a political comment. It’s not— you’ve got to have something to say about El Salvador.”

POLITICS AND POP “I think the only time pop music does affect society is, say, like the Beatles are affecting society now and have been for the last five years or so probably more than they did when they came out. The people who are buying records are teenagers, or at least people without social responsibilities so they can afford to be rebels. I mean it’s dead easy to say this is black and this is white when you don’t have grey areas like mortgages and families, impending operations or whatever. ,,

“But I think the people who grew up with the Beatles — well, quite a lot of them, I suppose — were intelligent people who’ve been absorbed into society and ended up in the media, local government...They’ve got relative positions' of power now, and the way they look at the world is influenced by the questions the Beatles’ lyrics set up in their minds whilst they were growing up.

POLITICS AND THE BEAT “It'may be, if we get another 15 years out of this little old planet, then perhaps there might be people in government who were influenced by the Beat. Maybe, I dunno...” . W