In the summer of 1977, a young man named Jerry Dammers was living in a chaotic flat on Albany Road in Earlsdon, a residential neighbourhood in Coventry. His rent was cheap, his furniture was barely there, and his obsession was total. He was teaching himself ska by listening to old Jamaican records, assembling a band from musicians he'd met through the local music scene, and hatching a plan that nobody around him quite understood. Within two years, the flat on Albany Road would be remembered as the place where 2 Tone Records was born.
It would not last long. But while it lasted, it was extraordinary.
The city, the moment, the idea
Coventry in the late 1970s was a city in trouble. The car factories that had made it one of the most prosperous places in post-war Britain were stuttering and closing. Unemployment was rising sharply, especially among young Black and Asian workers whose families had come to the city during the Windrush years. Margaret Thatcher had just won a general election with a campaign that included warnings about Britain being "swamped by people of a different culture." The National Front was marching. On the streets, the tension was visible.
Dammers had grown up in Coventry after spending his early childhood in India, where his father was a Church of England dean. He'd been drawn to ska since he first heard it as a teenager, the music Jamaica exported to Britain in the 1960s and that had woven its way into mod and skinhead culture long before either of those scenes acquired their later, uglier associations. The original skinhead movement was pointedly multiracial. Dammers came from that tradition.
By 1977 he had his band, eventually renamed The Specials: a group of Black and white musicians from Coventry who wore pork pie hats and two-tone shoes and played ska at punk tempos. The Clash's Joe Strummer heard them and invited them on tour in 1978. Major labels came calling. Dammers said no to all of them.
What he wanted instead was a label he controlled. Something like Motown, but in Coventry. A label where the visual identity, the politics and the music were all one thing. He borrowed £700, pressed 5,000 copies of a debut single, and released it in May 1979.
The single was "Gangsters." It reached number six in the UK.
The deal, the logo, the movement
The success of "Gangsters" changed the terms available to Dammers. Chrysalis Records had wanted to sign The Specials outright. Instead, he negotiated something unusual for a new act: 2 Tone would operate as an independent imprint, with Chrysalis handling distribution and funding up to fifteen singles a year while Dammers retained creative control. It was a more sophisticated deal than most established acts managed to secure.
The logo said everything the music was about before a note was played. Working from a sketch he'd made based on a photograph of reggae musician Peter Tosh on the cover of the Wailers' 1965 debut album, Dammers designed a black-and-white figure: a man in a sharp suit, white shirt, black tie, pork pie hat, hands in pockets. He gave it to graphic designer John "Teflon" Sims to finish. The name came from an old American bowling shirt Dammers had found in a charity shop, with "Walt Jabsco" embroidered on the chest. The name came off the shirt. The figure became Walt Jabsco.
Sims described Dammers' source material as "defiant and Jamaican and hard." That was exactly the point. Within months, Walt Jabsco was being drawn in biro on school exercise books and satchels up and down the country. He was on badges, T-shirts and posters. The label received almost no royalties from the unofficial merchandise because Dammers, running everything from a flat with no office and barely a phone number, hadn't got around to the legal side. Walt Jabsco has since found his way into another unlikely format: a 2015 update to the emoji set used the figure as the basis for what became the "levitating businessman" emoji, now on every smartphone in the world.
Too much too young
Between 1979 and 1981, 2 Tone signed a clutch of bands, and most of them left almost as quickly as they arrived. Dammers had designed the contracts that way deliberately: bands could leave after their first single if they wanted to. It was a statement of intent as much as a business decision. This wasn't a label that trapped artists.
Madness, seven young men from Camden who'd spent their early years playing in pubs for almost nothing, released "The Prince" on 2 Tone in 1979. It reached number sixteen. They promptly left for Stiff Records and began their own remarkable run of singles. The Beat, a seven-piece from Birmingham led by singer Dave Wakeling and featuring legendary saxophonist Saxa, who'd played ska in Jamaica in the 1960s, released a cover of "Tears of a Clown" on 2 Tone and took it to number six. They left for their own Go-Feet label and recorded one of the best debut albums of 1980. The Selecter, a Coventry band with Pauline Black fronting them, stayed longer and released their debut album on the label. The Bodysnatchers, an all-female ska band, had one brilliant single.
Five acts. Fifteen months. A movement.
The music shared a tempo (fast), a politics (anti-racist, angry about unemployment, confronting Thatcher's Britain head-on) and a look (suits, pork pie hats, checkerboard patterns). It was danceable and furious at the same time. The Specials were the centre of everything: The Selecter emerged directly from Coventry's music scene, and several musicians in both bands had played together in earlier groups. The B-side of the very first 2 Tone single was literally called "The Selecter" and was credited to a band that didn't yet exist.
"The Specials and their 2 Tone label put Coventry on the pop map for the first time, turning the motor city into the engine of the British music scene at the dawn of the Thatcher era."
Ghost Town
By early 1981, The Specials were falling apart. Three years of relentless touring had exhausted everyone. The recording of More Specials the previous year had been tense and fractious, with Dammers pulling the band in a stranger, more experimental direction while others wanted to stay with ska. Chrysalis were pushing them to record. Nobody was sleeping.
Dammers had been working on a new song for over a year, trying out chord after chord, unable to make it land. When the band finally convened at an 8-track studio in a house on Woodbine Street in Royal Leamington Spa, the atmosphere was terrible. Bassist Horace Panter later recalled that "everybody was stood in different parts of this huge room with their equipment, no one talking." During one session, guitarist Roddy Byers kicked a hole in the studio door in frustration, and the owner threatened to throw them all out. Dammers reportedly broke down: "No! No! This is the greatest record that's ever been made in the history of anything!"
He wasn't wrong.
"Ghost Town" was released on 20 June 1981 with a video filmed overnight in the East End of London: the band crammed into a 1962 Vauxhall Cresta, rolling through empty streets. The song was built on eerie organ, wailing voices and a beat that sounded like a funeral. It was not an obvious number one single. Dammers wrote the lyrics after touring Britain and seeing what he saw: shops shuttered in Liverpool, old women selling household goods on Glasgow streets, young men with nothing to do and nowhere to go.
Two weeks after its release, riots broke out. Brixton first, then Toxteth, Handsworth, Moss Side, and dozens of towns across the country. The Specials' video played on entertainment programmes while news channels showed the same streets burning. "Ghost Town" reached number one on 10 July, three weeks into the worst civil unrest Britain had seen since the Second World War.
Terry Hall, just 22 years old, received a gold disc for the single and felt terrible about it. "We were being told to celebrate this number one record that is about what is happening, the mess that we are in," he said later. Within days of the single hitting number one, three members of the original Specials had left. Hall, Lynval Golding and Neville Staple formed Fun Boy Three. 2 Tone's engine was gone.
After Ghost Town
When Hall, Golding and Staple walked out of the Top of the Pops dressing room and formed Fun Boy Three, Dammers was left with a name, a label, a studio debt and four remaining band members. Most people in his position would have called it. He reverted to the original name — The Special AKA — and started again.
The first release under the new name was, characteristically, the least commercial thing anyone could have imagined. "The Boiler," issued in late 1981 under the name Rhoda with the Special AKA, was a spoken-word account of a rape from the victim's perspective, written by Rhoda Dakar, who'd fronted The Bodysnatchers. It climaxed in two minutes of harrowing screaming. It grazed the top 40. Radio programmers didn't know what to do with it. Dammers later said he never once considered the career implications. "I thought the track was important," he said. "I never really considered the career implications of anything. It was a total fluke that The Specials ever got as famous as they did."
He approached UB40 about signing to 2 Tone. They turned him down. He approached Dexys Midnight Runners. They also said no. The ska moment had passed, and the two biggest acts that might have extended the label's commercial life weren't interested. Dammers signed The Higsons and The Apollinaires, both interesting, neither of them chart acts. He kept the label alive on willpower and Chrysalis's patience.
Then he started making the album that would nearly destroy him.
The ruinous album
The Special AKA's sessions for what became In the Studio began in 1981 and didn't end until 1984. Three years. A revolving cast of musicians — Horace Panter quit early, alienated by the atmosphere; Stan Campbell came in on vocals; Rhoda Dakar was a constant; John Bradbury remained. Recording moved between Woodbine Studios, Air Studios, Vineyard and Phoenix Studios for the rhythm tracks, then Wessex Studios and four others for overdubs and mixing. Dammers was a perfectionist who wasn't easily satisfied and, as it turned out, wasn't easily stopped either.
The costs climbed to a figure rumoured to be over £200,000. Chrysalis, watching the bills arrive, tried to claw back some of the investment by rushing out a compilation — This Are Two Tone — to generate cash while the album crawled toward completion. It barely helped.
When In the Studio finally came out in 1984, the reviews were strong. Critics understood what Dammers had been trying to do: a musically restless, politically serious record pulling in jazz, funk, northern soul and world music, filled with songs about alcoholism, agoraphobia, racism and war crimes. Garry Johnson in Sounds called it "sublime agit-prop, a coolly sophisticated and masterfully varied modern pop cocktail." Nobody bought it. Chrysalis, by this point, had spent approximately £9,000 on promotion. John Bradbury was characteristically dry about the figure: "After Jerry had finished recording, that's probably all the money the record company had left."
Dammers was blunt about what happened next. "After that," he said, "I was what they call 'imprisoned' to the record company for four years, because we had such a big debt." He didn't mean it metaphorically. He owed Chrysalis more money than the label could conceivably recoup, and he was contractually bound to them as a result. The label was alive in name. In practice, he had almost no ability to operate it.
Free Nelson Mandela
In July 1983, in the middle of this financial chaos, Dammers went to a concert at Alexandra Palace in north London. It was billed as the Festival of African Sounds, held to mark Nelson Mandela's 65th birthday. He picked up leaflets at the door, read them on the way home, and came away with something he hadn't had before: a specific idea.
"I knew very little about Mandela until I went to that concert," he said later. "I'd never actually heard of Nelson Mandela although I knew a lot about the anti-apartheid movement." He'd been putting up anti-apartheid stickers since he was a schoolkid in Coventry, had demonstrated against the Springboks rugby tour at 14, but the man himself had somehow remained abstract. One detail from the leaflets lodged in his head: the shoes Mandela had been given in prison were too small for his feet. He put that in the lyrics.
The song he wrote was deliberately the opposite of a protest song. It was upbeat, almost joyful, closer to a South African township sound than anything on a 2 Tone record. The chorus was three notes — simple enough for a crowd to sing back without knowing why they were singing it. The lead vocal went to Stan Campbell, who'd joined The Special AKA the previous year. Elvis Costello, who'd produced the original Specials debut and remained in Dammers' orbit, produced "Free Nelson Mandela" specifically. Backing vocals came from Lynval Golding, back as a free agent after Fun Boy Three wound down, alongside Ranking Roger and Dave Wakeling from The Beat — a reunion of sorts for 2 Tone alumni who hadn't shared a studio since the label's peak. Two girls drummer John Bradbury had met in a bar in Camden contributed backing vocals. Caron Wheeler, a session singer who handled some of the chorus parts, would appear with Soul II Soul a few years later on "Back to Life."
The single reached number nine in March 1984. Thatcher's government had branded Mandela a terrorist. Most of Britain had genuinely never heard of him. The song changed that in three minutes and forty-five seconds.
It found its way back into South Africa despite being banned, played at ANC rallies and at football matches as an act of protest. Dammers said he never knew how much impact it would have. "It's a good pop record in that it's catchy and sounds good," he said. "And you immediately know what it's about, because the first three words are 'Free Nelson Mandela.'"
The single's success briefly stabilised the label's finances. Without it, 2 Tone closes in 1983. With it, the label limped on for two more years while Dammers honoured his remaining obligations to Chrysalis. The last single issued under the 2 Tone name was "Alphabet Army" by The JB's All Stars, in 1986. Nobody remembers it. It barely charted. By that point, Chrysalis had long since stopped funding operations, and Dammers had long since stopped being able to pay for recordings.
The label closed — or simply stopped existing, depending on how you count it — sometime between 1985 and 1986. The ambiguity is fitting. There was no announcement, no farewell tour, no ceremony. It just ran out of road.
What came after
Dammers channelled the attention generated by "Free Nelson Mandela" into founding Artists Against Apartheid in 1985. The following year he organised Freedom Beat, a free anti-apartheid concert on Clapham Common attended by 200,000 people. Then, in June 1988, he helped put together the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute at Wembley Stadium: Dire Straits, George Michael, Sting, Whitney Houston, Peter Gabriel, Tracy Chapman. Broadcast to 67 countries. Watched by 600 million people worldwide. Afterwards, surveys found that 77% of people in Britain now knew who Nelson Mandela was, and 70% believed he should be released.
Mandela was freed in February 1990. He made his first public appearance in Britain at a second Wembley concert that April, and thanked the people who had campaigned for him. In 1996, speaking to both Houses of Parliament, he paid tribute to the millions of British people who had stood against apartheid. In 2014, the South African government awarded Dammers the Order of the Companions of O. R. Tambo, a national honour for his contribution to the movement.
He received it graciously. "It feels fantastic," he said. "It is a real honour. When I compare what little I did to the work of those who sacrificed their lives, I am humbled."
Seven years. One flat in Coventry. £700 borrowed to press a debut single. And then a song that helped free a man who'd been in prison for 21 years.
What to buy
The Specials — Specials (1979)
Produced by Elvis Costello, the Specials' debut was recorded live in the studio in the summer of 1979 at TW Studios in Fulham. Costello had heard the band on John Peel's radio show and wanted in. The album captures 14 songs including a cover of Jamaican trombonist Rico Rodriguez's "A Message to You Rudy" and the original "Too Much Too Young," which would go to number one in a live version the following January. It entered the UK Albums Chart at number four in October 1979. The version you want for vinyl is the original 2 Tone pressing, identifiable by the black-and-white checkerboard label and catalogue number CDL TT 5001. Later reissues are plentiful and sound decent, but the original is the one to hunt.
The Selecter — Too Much Pressure (1980)
Criminally underrated alongside its more famous stablemates, Too Much Pressure is the Selecter debut and the best argument anyone's ever made for Pauline Black as one of the most commanding frontpeople in British music. Recorded at Horizon Studios in Coventry in three weeks over December 1979 and January 1980 ("at moments everybody wanted to kill each other," producer Errol Ross recalled), the album peaked at number five in the UK. The original 2 Tone pressing came with a five-foot Walt Jabsco poster in the first 2,000 copies. Those are properly collectible now.
Madness — One Step Beyond... (1979)
Madness only released one 2 Tone single before moving to Stiff Records, but they're inseparable from the label's story and their debut belongs in any 2 Tone collection. Released on the same day as the Specials' debut in October 1979, One Step Beyond... was produced by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, who would go on to work with Elvis Costello, Morrissey and Dexys Midnight Runners. The album peaked at number two and stayed on the UK charts for over a year. Not a 2 Tone pressing, but the Stiff Records original is worth finding.
The Specials — More Specials (1980)
A stranger, more divisive record than the debut, and probably the more interesting one to revisit. Dammers had become fascinated by easy listening and muzak at the time of recording, and steered the band toward jazz, lounge and musical experimentation. Some of the band hated it. The album's cover is a deliberately out-of-focus colour photo of the band in a Leamington Spa pub bar, shot that way on Dammers' instructions: he wanted it to look like a cheap Jamaican album sleeve. The pink sticker covering the "E" in "More" on some copies wasn't an accident either — it turned the title into "MOR Specials," Dammers' private joke about the direction he was pushing them. Reached number five in the UK.
Special AKA — In the Studio (1984)
The last chapter of the 2 Tone story, and a deeply odd record in the best way: three years in the making, constantly revised, musically restless, pulling in jazz, funk, world music and northern soul. Most of it didn't chart. Then there's "Free Nelson Mandela," one of the most effective protest singles ever made, upbeat and urgent and impossible to get out of your head. Backup vocals came from Caron Wheeler, who a few years later would appear on Soul II Soul's "Back to Life." The album is uneven, but essential. And "Free Nelson Mandela" sounds enormous on a proper system.