Of all the band reunions that there have been of late, I have to say that although - or maybe because  - my feet still hurt and my legs still ached the morning after, The Specials has to be the coolest yet!

 

The fact that they were back in Coventry to do this, the final gig of the tour, made it even more ‘special’. They were back in the city where it all began for them, and the 2-Tone movement in general, somewhere that they hadn’t played for 27 years.

 

With 8,000 people packed into the Jaguar Exhibition Hall at the Ricoh Arena, it was like being at an extremely large version of my youth club in the early 1980s, but without the youth! Everyone was doing the same dance to the same music, but we were all 30 years older and somewhat larger – although I have to say, some were a lot larger than others. I kept well back from the front as I wanted to leave in one piece!

 

When I was in my early teens, the ‘skins’ were the coolest boys of all. Smart in their black crombies, with either a Fred Perry and colourful braces underneath or a crisp white shirt and thin black tie, coupled with snake hips in rolled up jeans and the obligatory DMs. Well, the DMs were still there and the jeans, but sadly in many cases the slim hips had widened and beer bellies not only poked through the straps of the braces, but fell well over the waistbands too. But the capacity to skank and simply have a good time is still there, it was just a lot sweatier and at times on Friday – as the group skilfully played a fantastic 90 minutes of classics - I genuinely feared for their health! The fittest middle-aged people in the room were definitely the ones on the stage!

 

As they seared through tracks such as Gangsters, A Message to You, Concrete Jungle, Rat Race, the whole hall leapt up and down as one and I found the skanking came back to me easily as if it had all been yesterday, even though I had been too young for the actual gigs 30 years ago and my dancing had been limited to the youth club discos!

 

I have to say though, I don’t think you can really skank properly unless you were there – as a teen or older in the 80s. My husband was about three when 2-Tone was at its height and, as a Coventry boy definitely had a good stab at it! However, he still looked a little bit like he could have walked straight out of Peter Kay’s Amarillo video until I explained to him that the look he was going for was more like the one-player jogging function on the Wii Fit – and by George – he got it! It really was an excellent work out - by the time they got to Ghost Town, Too Much Too Young and Enjoy Yourself, I didn’t feel quite so guilty about the rhubarb crumble I’d had earlier!

 

It was all just the same, but somehow different. The songs were all messages of an age of recession and unemployment that are still sadly relevant today – but gone was the anger on the faces, replaced by sheer joy of re-living a youth, even though it was a youth of some difficulties.

 

This is the classic anomaly of English nostalgia, everybody always looks back fondly – cutting out the bad bits. As for me, well, I was a young teen in a happy family, the misery of unemployment in the lyrics was something I saw on the news and not first hand. It was the music I was seduced by, the ska sound, the catchy tunes and the musicianship – something that I still relish today. And it was the fact that this music had provided a backdrop to my happy youth that merely heightened the emotion of the night for me.

 

At the end, the band told their audience that we had made a group of old men very happy. What I would say is ‘right back at you’!