Perhaps the kindest thing you can say about their attitude to women – as expressed on Little Bitch, Too Much Too Young or Hey Little Rich Girl – was that it tells you a lot about men of their era, including the ostensibly right-on ones. Held up as paragons of virtue thanks to their staunch anti-racism, the original Specials were a trickier prospect than their canonisation suggests. Featuring a vocal from Saffiyah Khan – the woman photographed facing down a member of the EDL at a Birmingham demonstration, wearing a pitying smile and a Specials T-shirt – a dubby version of Prince Buster’s 10 Commandments also puts some distance between the 2019 Specials and their past. There’s something appealingly odd about the music that supports Hall’s examination of his struggles with mental health on The Life and Times.
A cover of the Equals’ Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys is a tip of the hat to Eddy Grant’s pioneering multiracial band, and unlike anything the Specials have released before, offering impressively taut funk in the place of Jamaican rhythms. And particularly when compared with the original: the early Fun Boy Three’s bleak, experimental sound still stands as a stark reminder of how weird the charts once were.Įncore is at its best when it leaves the Specials’ past behind and faces forward. You can understand the logic behind adding The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum (the debut single by Hall and Golding’s post-Specials band the Fun Boy Three) to their repertoire, but it feels strangely restrained and polite recast as a kind of dub tango. A version of the Valentines’ 1967 single Blam Blam Fever – already covered by the ersatz Specials on the largely forgotten 2000 album Skinhead Girl – is the kind of dive into the ska archives that formed the basis of the band’s early repertoire. With its mournful trombone solo and tension-ratcheting pile-up of queasy jazz chords, single Vote for Me is hardly coy in its attempts to get the listener to think of Ghost Town. If Encore scrupulously avoids the frantic ska-punk sound of their 1979 debut, there are certainly moments that feel like deliberate evocations of the band’s past. Under the circumstances, the obvious thing for Hall, guitarist Lynval Golding and bassist Horace Panter to do would be to release an album in the image of the music that made the Specials’ famous: see, it wasn’t all Jerry, we can do it without him.
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