The English Beat: Special Beat Service

Hyacinth, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Famed poet Ocean Vuong recently addressed the double edge of “cringe culture” resulting in young people performing cynicism. Like a type of self-imposed surveillance based on the perception that demonstrating effort is shameful. While not new, performing detachment has increased every decade of my life where I choose to resist flamboyantly with both sharp skepticism and unabashed enthusiasm.

Moving into increasingly uncertain times, The English Beat’s catalogue continues to resonate with its attempt at earnest expression. Their uncontainable vitality provides a source of refuge with forceful buoyancy while managing to meditate on the darkness of the world. And for the band's ska influences that are too often deemed "cringe", the Beat do not use ska as a candy-coated prop for their sound but as a powerful source that can remain upbeat while channelling a sense of doom in having to be “on the right side of things (“Rotating Head”) during an oppressive regime like Margaret Thatcher’s. No different from Trump's fascist politics when the “rights and wrongs don’t get much wronger” in order to protect power. Where “we know where our hearts are — right behind our wallets” (“Sugar and Stress”).

The original lineup of the Beat (as known in Europe) was multigenerational and racially diverse — each talented musician with a unique approach that drove the audience to dance to their propulsive rhythms. The core members of the Beat were Dave Wakeling (vocals, guitar), “Ranking” Roger Charlery (vocals, toasting), Saxa (saxophone), David “Shuffle” Steele (bass), Andy Cox (guitar), and Everett Morton (drums).

That sometimes Roger and Walkeling’s vocals were indecipherable from each other was reflective of their democratic approach as a band. Members shared earnings equally six ways, often shared songwriting duties, and made creative decisions together, despite Roger and Wakeling’s image as the face of the band.

In a recent interview on KUTX, Wakeling marvels:

So everybody we met was the only person we met, the first bass player, the first drummer, the first toaster, the first saxophonist. It seemed sort of enchanted, in a way.

Wakeling often played his guitar upside-down and wrote enigmatic, subversive lyrics with depth and clever wordplay. Roger (co-vocals, toasting, scatting, and percussion) had a tremendously energetic style and, along with his peers at the time, brought reggae into the mainstream. Cox (guitar) and Steele (bass) were critically lauded for their key contributions to the band’s uncompromising sound that unified the Beat’s chimerical influences, from ska and punk to Motown.

Also celebrated was Morton’s singular reggae drumming style, and Saxa— the idiosyncratic, wise elder of the group — on sax. The band had an authentic fusion of influences emerging from members with roots in St. Lucia, St. Kitts, Jamaica, and in Birmingham, England — a culturally fertile town of fusion forms despite Thatcher’s iron-fisted government.

Major ska acts emerging from the West Midlands, including UB40, The Specials, and The Selecter, were markedly anti-racist and anti-oppression. “Stand Down Margaret” from the Beat’s first album I Just Can’t Stop It (1980) puts the band’s politics front and centre.

Of this zeitgeist, Wakeling tells The Quietus:

The ska revival was the right thing at the right time, combining the three things I needed at that exact moment: adolescent antisocial snottiness, a burning anger against social injustice, and something that made you jump up and down. It also stood for racial integration in the face of the rise of the racist National Front, and The Beat — every bit as much as their … cousins The Specials — lived it like they talked it.

The band initially decided to mix ska and punk during their infamous house parties, where they would have to alternate genres to keep people on the dancefloor. One of the parties drew Ranking Roger — then a punk drummer — to crash the stage and start toasting. From then, the band started to make sense as a ska-punk act. That is, until they outlived their mold.

The relentless pace of “Mirror in the Bathroom” (with the bass in 2/2 timing) captures the band’s relentless energy and their first album and second album Wha’ppen (1981) even prompted some dance-happy fans to ask them to slow down so they could actually dance along. I would argue when the band decided to play with alternative tempos, they made room for evolution, not that I don’t crave the frenetic charge of their first albums.

More complex than their 2-Tone contemporaries, the Beat became something greater than a mashup of genres by their sophomore album, but especially on their third album, Special Beat Service, introducing more prominent calypso, straight-up reggae, jazz, West African Highlife, and New Wave.

The Beat would tour with REM (as their opening band), Talking Heads, The Clash, The Police, and The Pretenders, playing for audiences as large as 150,0000. Despite sales that showed it would take longer to break North America, the matrix of musical influence in Special Beat Service made its future mark on audiences — well promoted by college radio — and musicians alike, especially Eddie Vedder, Pete Townsend, and Adam Duritz.

Special Beat Service strikes me from the opening bars of “I Confess” with spaciousness. As a deliberate revision process, the band were staying together in a house in London and would work on (revising) three songs a day. The breezy piano chords in “I Confess” and scoring for the strings in “Save It for Later” introduced another Dave to the band — “Blockhead” as Saxa would call him to separate all the Daves. While the members had impeccable musicianship and were notoriously tight live, Dave Blockhead added a refined element to the album’s overall sound that still gives Special Beat Service a more timeless feeling.

Frequently cited as an under-appreciated band, The English Beat’s third and final album has been celebrated as an overlooked gem. The many critics who loved it knew it would go over people’s heads. Marc Wasserman’s Soul Salvation: A Gen X Love Letter to the English Beat (DiWulf Publishing, 2024) dedicates most of its pages to Special Beat Service, entwined with coming-of-age memoir set during Regan-era America.

To Wasserman, the Beat’s appeal struck him in the band’s balance of oppression and joy:

Wakeling’s lyrics looked inside an increasingly dark and complicated world of inequality, racism, sexism, misunderstanding, anger, and betrayal. At the same time, those songs cultivated ideas about perseverance, forgiveness, tolerance and acceptance. (pg 23)

While Special Beat Service is less political than the first two albums, the songs tackle difficult themes of infidelity and narcissism (“I Confess”, with the video doubling as a parody of The New Romantics), the bewilderment of adulthood (in the double entendre “Save It for Later”), domestic abuse (“She’s Gone”), and surveillance culture (“Rotating Head”). And with that, moments of joy in “Sole Salvation” and childhood games and fleeting happiness (“Ackee 123”), friendship (“Pato and Roger” and “Spar wid Me”).

Geoffrey Himes noted in The Baltimore Sun:

Three years of playing together have paid off on the new album in a new sound that is so well unified that it sounds distinctively like the English Beat and no one else. The overt Carribean and new wave influences have blended together around their common ancestor: American soul. (Wasserman, 141)

The banjo in the reggae-forward “Spar wid Me” or the ska-meets-accordion stylings of “Jeanette” likewise highlight the strength of Special Beat Service in harmonizing tone and influence. If formidable critic Robert Christgau — who scored all the Beat’s Albums within the A range— was correct in contending the band was always pop, it is pop with complex harmonies from the quirky contributions of each member.

If the Beat were doing pop, it was the thinking type of pop — askew from the mainstream and refreshingly without the erudition of, say, Elvis Costello, who nonetheless admired the album, as Walkeling admired Costello.

At their zenith, just after being invited to do more shows with David Bowie, the band dissolved. The contention between band members resulting from total burnout is well-publicized. The band had been touring nonstop, producing three albums in as many years. Breaking America nearly broke them. Walkeling and Roger wanted to earn enough to support their new families, but Cox — and especially Steele — had become publicly contemptful, wanting a two-year break. The band’s gift of compromise was weakened. Transcendent pop tracks like “Save It for Later” were repeatedly turned down by Steele until the label forced it on their album, resulting in a third of their catalogue’s earnings.

The label grew impatient, and Roger and Wakeling had a new single at the ready, which launched General Public. A year later, Cox and Steele would form Fine Young Cannibals.

Walkeling recently told Noel Murray at AV Club:

Sadly, that went down in history as me having split the group up, but to be honest, the group had been split up months before then. I was just the one with the balls to pull the plug. And so “Tenderness” became the beginning of General Public’s career.

In 2004, the band was featured in VH1’s Bands Reunited, and it was sad to see how much Ranking Roger regretted that decision. However, it was heartening that he was still jamming with Saxa and Morton, maintaining an admirably stoic attitude. The band came together and exchanged a few tender moments, then played a local Birmingham stage, expectedly without Cox and Steele.

Two different versions of the same band would perform for a number of years on opposite sides of the Atlantic, but we lost Saxa in 2017 at 87, and, heartbreakingly, Everett Morton in 2019 at age 71 of the same cancer as Ranking Roger — age 56 — in 2019. Roger’s warmth and loveliness melts me to the core. I am now working my way through his autobiography, I Just Can’t Stop It: My Life in the Beat (with Daniel Rachel, Omnibus Press, 2019). I think of Roger with the heavy heart of a lost relative.

I don’t think Wakeling takes the Beat’s impact on their fans and countless musicians for granted. He now has a reputation for being approachable and gives generous interviews with lots of tales. And for whatever sense of loss or regret, the music buoys us. And thanks to the producers who heavily discouraged novel sounds of the synthesizers ubiquitous in the ’80s, their sound holds up so so well. With the release of Special Beat Service in America, the band also minted a new, vital indie label, I.R.S., with a top 40 hit.

Many experts contend ska has never died. Despite clearly demarcated waves of popularity (1st wave in ‘60s Jamaica, 2nd wave in post-punk England) ska has been there. On my musical journey, ska has not been marred by the bands vomited up on the shores of California. The whole genre is not “cringe” if we are going to commit to an open-minded concept of genre, enjoying ska classics — and new bands that BrooklynVegan is often quick to review. Listening to ska shouldn’t make the listener a white fratboy apologist or complicit in the gross appropriations of artists like Gwen Stefani, who has and always will be simpering, affectatious, and vile.

I am still grateful for the third wave, which brought The Specials back into rotation at clubs. I was only a few years old when the Beat emerged, and I had records and cassettes of General Public and Fine Young Cannibals. But I have to thank that third wave for making its way into the goth community here in Vancouver, where — of all places — I first learned to skank to Madness in my late teens.

Musical influences can travel anywhere — like language — and while we want to respect its origins, genre — like language — is a living thing that evolves and migrates.

Special Beat Service is the album you intentionally pull out several times a year. It is a rock. It is a place to return.

---

Jessica Lee McMillan © 2025