Suggs

"The film was shown at an all-nighter at the Screen On The Green at the Angel, and for teenage boys the film was great, a bit of James Dean-like rebellion… but the soundtrack, fucking hell, it’s just relentless! ‘Pressure Drop’, ‘Many Rivers To Cross’, ‘The Harder They Come’, ‘Johnny Too Bad’, on and on, every single track’s a winner. And that’s still an album I can put on, absolutely no problem, day or night. At one of our Madstocks we got Desmond Dekker and Toots (Hibbert) to come on and do ‘54-46 (Was My Number)’, and they were loving it, to the point that it’s a very hard song to end, cos it’s just a riff, so by the time we’d played it the fourteenth time, an hour and a half had gone by and they were still happily skipping around… Also, at the first Madstock, we were on the tour bus and our manager said “There’s a feller here who says he’s Prince Buster“. So we were like “Fucking hell, who knows, it might be him, let him on“, and it was! We’d got the name of our band from him, our first single was about him, we’d recorded his songs, but we’d never met him… and suddenly, at our revival in 1992, there he was! So we got him onstage to sing ‘Madness’ with us, and he was a charming man. I think for those chaps it’s a double-edged sword, because they were happy that we gave their music the oxygen of publicity, but at the same time we were making all the flippin’ dough out of it."

"In 1979, they’d finished recording their album, and ironically we ended up going into the same studio, TW in Fulham, just after them. And Elvis Costello had produced their album, and he’d left behind a few bits of tapes, out-takes. And we were trying to get the machine to play these fucking ten-second little strips of tape! All you’d hear was a snare sound or a bit of guitar, but we were trying to check out their sound! John Bradbury [Specials drummer] used to get these amazing rimshot sounds, and I remember asking him how, and he said “It’s the way I fucking play it, it wasn’t the way it was fucking recorded!” So, of course we were checking each other out. We played together a couple of times at the Nashville and somewhere else, and we were obviously in competition, very friendly competition. It was truly thrilling and exciting to know there was another band doing what we were doing. When they came to play at the Hope & Anchor, the pub we used to hang out in, it blew our minds to see these people who looked a bit like us and sounded a bit like us. They went off like a packet of crackers. I remember Neville Staple was blowing holes in the ceiling with a starter pistol! Then they stormed into ‘Gangsters’. I remember I wasn’t sure whether to feel jealous or fucking vindicated, that we were onto something after all. But they’d gone that bit further. It was turbo-charged ska, and we were still doing a bit of R&B, but The Specials gave us this revelation that the uptempo stuff was really fucking exciting. But that’s a great album, great songs, and the production is really clear. Not naïve, but not overly sophisticated."

"This was the first band I ever saw. I went to see The Who at Charlton in 1974, when I was 12 or 13, and we bunked in, and supporting The Who was Alex Harvey. And, fuck me! He had this sort of fake brick wall, and he burst through and started singing ‘Framed’ and it was just a fucking revelation. It’s funny because I’ve been looking at a bit of him on Youtube recently, interviews that he did, and what a fucking character. The bits of film that are left of him, there’s a clip of him singing ‘Framed’ at some festival, and he pours a bottle of beer over his wild curly hair and turns it into a quiff with his hand. It was only when Jerry Leiber from Leiber & Stoller died recently that I realised they wrote that song. He shocked me, with the theatricality, the fearlessness, just doing what the fuck he wanted. They had this song called ‘The Faith Healer‘, which I heard made Johnny Rotten want to be in a band. Just outrageous, but charming and intelligent too. And they did a version of the Jacques Brel song, ‘Next‘, which was just fucking brilliant. He weren’t around for very long, but I have a lifelong love of his work. Just that mixture of comedy and… terror. Perfect!"

"I wasn’t really a punk. I was about 16 when that album came out. But I was living above Maples, a carpet shop near Tottenham Court Road, and it was right by Capital Radio, and I remember suddenly these 14-foot letters appeared in spraypaint on Capital‘s windows, ‘THE CLASH’! And there was a thing in Melody Maker, where I heard about this club called The Roxy at Covent Garden, so I went down there. Me and my friends already looked a bit skinhead-y, suedehead-y, and I had this mohair suit, but the connection was that the punks had straight trousers in this world of flares and Kevin Keegan hairdos. Nobody was wearing Vivienne Westwood clothing: there was a guy in a dinner jacket painted pink, and someone else in a boiler suit they’d made themselves, and it was really DIY. The tribalism between mods and skinheads and punks hadn’t really started at that time, and it hadn‘t fractured into a million pieces yet. In 1977, if you had short hair, and you were prepared to have someone call you a fucking cunt in your ear for it, you were in. I saw a band called Eater at the Roxy, whose average age I later found out was 14. And I first heard The Clash’s ‘1977’ and ‘White Riot’ on record there. I felt like I was at the advent of something new. I liked punk, and I liked the attitude, but by 1978 we had our own thing going. But I always had a soft spot for The Clash, because they had the reggae thing, like us, and there was a bit of soul in their music, for want of a better word. Joe Strummer definitely had a bit of soul in his voice. Every fucking track on that album’s brilliant, but my favourite’s ‘London’s Burning’. And they were fucking brilliant live. And we [2 Tone bands] wouldn’t have had anywhere to play if it wasn’t for punk. You had pub rock informing punk, and punk informing us, and The Specials were a direct amalgam of punk and ska, and we realised that the faster we played, the more likely we could get the crowd jumping up and down, which was a legacy of punk. All these different movements, fracturing then coming back together. You’d need 60,000 sociologists to untangle those couple of years."