Special Delivery

“Oh, god, they've made me listen to jazz funk for five minutes, it sent me to sleep,” The Specials bassist Horace Panter whines down the line from “the attic, which is kind of where I live, in my house in Coventry in England”. “Ask me some questions, wake me up!” he demands in a schoolmasterly fashion. So, what have you been up to over the last couple of days? “I visited my mother and decorated one of the walls in her living room and then… what did I do?” Panter ponders. “I went down to London today and visited Terry Hall [vocals] and John Bradbury [drummer] and it was the first time I'd met up with them this year. We were talking about what we'll be doing over the summer, which involves a trip to the antipodes I understand.” This scribe was fortunate enough to catch the band at Splendour In The Grass when they hit our shores for the very first time as part of their 30th Anniversary tour in 2009. After sharing that The Specials' set was so earth-shattering that this scribe left the festival site straight afterwards, knowing that no band could possibly top them, Panter responds, “Right, yeah, that was our first show in Australia if I remember right. Bonkers hotel. Anyway, go on ask me proper questions because you've only got 15 minutes.”

Alrighty, then! The list of female backing vocalists used on The Specials' first two studio albums makes for an interesting read. Did you guys realise the fine array of talent you were tapping into at the time? “Well, um, yeah, I think we did a show with The Pretenders,” Panter explains, “and Elvis Costello, who produced the first Specials album [Specials], I think he brought [Chrissie Hynde] in for reasons that were perhaps a little carnal. But she definitely does sing on the record. And we first met Go-Go's [who feature on second album More Specials] when we were in Los Angeles in 1980 – they supported us on this horrendous, four-night run at the Whisky A Go Go and then they later came over and played with us in England. So we kind of knew them and we wanted this sort of strange, girl chorus and they were in town, as they say. It was pretty serendipitous, I think.”

In between these two longplayers, the band released their Too Much Too Young EP (under the moniker, The Special AKA). It reached number one on the UK Singles Chart despite a lack of radio play due to the title track's supposedly contentious lyrical content, which promotes contraception as a means of avoiding teen pregnancy. Were there times when band meetings were called to discuss whether the messages that were being conveyed through song were too risqué or, alternatively, not boundary pushing enough? “No, no,” Panter insists, “because the doors had been blown off by punk rock and it was kinda of like, 'Okay!' You know? You wrote songs that had a message in their lyrics anyway – you had to almost [laughs]… It's funny 'cause I don't know if we were that aware that we were making a grand socio-political statement. I think that was the sort of thing that political commentators and music journalists stuck on afterwards. It made perfect sense to write songs with the lyrical content we [chose]. I mean, some of us were a lot more political, with a capital 'P', than others, but I think we were all aware of injustice and, you know, all the disenfranchised youth and racism and that kind of stuff.”

On whether The Specials were aware that the music they were composing during early rehearsals was important, Panter considers, “We knew it was really good – what, you mean back in 1970?” Affirmative. “I think it was an awful lot of fun, because it was exciting and it was a lot easier to pick up girls being in a pop group than it would be normally. So that was kind of interesting. But then I think, beginning of 1979, we did some recording and made this single [Gangsters] and then things started to happen and it was like, 'Wow! Yes, this is what we all had an idea that it might be like only [success happened] a little faster.' Yes, it was fabulous. I dunno, when I was twelve and I saw The Searchers on TV I thought, 'Gosh, I want to be that,' and so it was kind of a fulfilment if you like.”

This current, re-formed era of The Specials is sans founding member Jerry [Dammers, keyboard player/primary songwriter]. When asked whether there were times shortly after the band re-formed where Panter found himself looking around the stage in search of his former bandmate, the bass player quips, “No, no, we knew he wasn't onstage, that's why we were having so much fun.” He then immediately backpedals: “No, that was a nasty thing to say. No, we all had this big meeting – all seven of us – when we decided that it would be a really good idea to [re-form] and Jerry was very demonstrative that he wanted it to be exactly the way it was way back then. And I then remembered why it was that I left in the first place and it was a real shame, because if we'd have just met and gone, 'Hi, how are you?' You know, 'How's the family? How's it going? Shall we play some music?' It would've been fine. But it wasn't. And honestly, there isn't a day goes by where I don't think, 'Jerry. Damn. What a shame.' But it is the way it's worked out, you know, six out of seven ain't bad.”

Now that Panter seems willing to travel the interview path less trodden, it's time to return to the subject of how he decorated his mum's wall. “I just painted it white.” No murals then? “No, no,” he laughs. “I've got back into painting again and I painted this really nice picture of a scarecrow and my mum really likes it. So I got a print of it for her and we put it on the wall, but in order to put it up on the wall we had to take down some other stuff and, when you take down paintings, if there's a mark on the wall it's like – so, okay, in order to do this I'm gonna have to paint the wall. You want to do one small thing and it ends up being a project. So I shall probably go there again next week and think, 'Damn. Oh, the cornice looks really faded,' you know? I'll end up just redecorating the whole house.”