Get Out More.........................Gig Review

THE SPECIALS (Birmingham Academy, Saturday)

27-04-2009

One of the West Midlands finest pop acts returned to Birmingham on Saturday – Philip Parkin was among the ecstatic and sweat soaked crowd.

It’s been over 25 years since The Specials last played Birmingham, and they returned to a heroes’ welcome on Saturday, playing an unforgettable gig in front of an ecstatic, and hugely appreciative, Academy crowd.

This is a band revered in the Midlands, and they were always guaranteed a warm reception on this, their 30th anniversary tour, but I’ve never been to a gig where virtually the entire crowd danced with such abandon from start to finish.

From the opening ‘Do the Dog’ to the mass singalong of ‘Enjoy Yourself’ the band were carried along on a wave of goodwill from the crowd. The beauty of seeing a band with such a short recording history, of course, consisting as it does of essentially two albums and two EPs, is that they can effortlessly put in a ‘greatest hits’ gig.

So we got ‘Gangsters’, ‘Rat Race’, ‘Concrete Jungle’ and ‘Too Much Too Young’ and at times the word perfect singing of the crowd threatened to drown out the band. The Specials split in the ‘80s, mainly on account of personal and musical ‘differences’, and Jerry Dammers, keyboard player and driving force, has refused to participate in this tour.

But the band were also eclipsed by events, their songs about unemployment and inner city decay becoming increasingly incongruous in the ‘get rich’ ‘80s.

It’s a sign of the times, then, that songs like ‘Ghost Town’ and ‘Do Nothing’ now seem relevant again, as the country experiences its most severe recession in over 60 years. And as the crowd spilled out onto Dale End after the gig, many of them in Fred Perry shirts and wearing pork pie hats, it was hard to escape the feeling that history was repeating itself.

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