Do you remember the good old days before the Ghost Town?

A very turbulent year part 12. The Specials at Number One

July 1981: Ghost Town

Reaching number one was a massive achievement in the late seventies/early eighties. The chart was announced on Tuesday just in time for Top of the Pops to get its act together by Thursday. It was one of the few programmes that would draw everyone into the TV room, not least because you were guaranteed such an eclectic range of music that something would appeal to everyone. Just looking at the number ones from the time I arrived in school through to the end of 1980, we had some spiky Jam, a bit of classic Abba (Supertrouper), Barbara Streisand singing about being in love and The Police with their ‘Don’t Stand so close to me’ instructing a student to keep their distance from a deeply conflicted teacher. I fell in love with Blondie singing ‘The Tide is high’ before John Lennon’s ‘Starting Over’ got to Christmas number one before being toppled by the mighty St Winifred’s School Choir.

It was a vintage time for the charts and it’s no surprise that Top of the Pops has been such a rich seam to mine when it comes to TV nostalgia. The mainstream still dominated, but fringe and niche could still rise to the top if it resonated. In 1981 we had everything from Motown (Smokey Robinson), post-punk (Adam and the Ants), rockabilly (Shakin Stevens) and Eurovision (our triumphant Buck’s Fizz). And then came Ghost Town by The Specials.

The Specials had been formed in Coventry in the late seventies. From the pubs and clubs of the Midlands came a whole new sound that blended punk, pop, reggae and ska. The bands that came out of this world – The Specials, The Beat, The Selector – were a mix of black and white musicians and for a brief while they were all under the same label, the appropriately named Two Tone. The Specials had already tasted chart success with ‘Much too Young’ and the brilliant ‘Friday night, Saturday morning’, but a gruelling tour had taken them to the edge. Skinheads and the National Front would often start fights at the gigs and they were frequently broken up by police. The band were exhausted and disillusioned. Partly with each other (there were a lot of strong personalities jostling for space) but partly by the deprivation and despair of the places they visited. Towns hollowed out by the new government’s no-subsidy policy, shops shuttered up, clubs folding. It was this backdrop that inspired the lyrics to Ghost Town.

The music itself felt tight but then suddenly unleashed. A bit of rocksteady, a bit of ska, a whirligig of something almost North African in the chorus. Haunting commentary and then Terry Hall’s deadpan singing vocal. The video, with the band driving through deserted streets crammed into an old sixties Vauxhall was equally wild and claustrophobic at the same time. The song came out in June and steadily climbed the charts.

But what made Ghost Town so powerful was that it seemed to predict and then echo the unrest that swept through the country over the next few weeks. The day after it made it to number one police used CS gas for the first time on protestors in Liverpool. Over the next week, whilst it was blaring out on every radio, riots broke out in over twenty cities, the very Ghost Towns described in the shop. Chaos wasn’t limited to the riots. Minutes before going onto the set to perform Ghost Town on Top of the Pops, three of the band (including Terry Hall) announced that they were leaving. The Specials were no more.

The song is still incredibly powerful. The top music papers all voted it their best song of the year. Margaret Thatcher, reputedly, hated it. It manages to be deeply depressing and musically inspiring at the same time. A song about the break-up of a band that ended up being one of the finest protest songs of all.