Marc Wasserman is following his 2021 book Ska Boom! An American Ska & Reggae Oral History with a new book about/inspired by 2 Tone legends The English Beat, Soul Salvation: A Gen X Love Letter To The English Beat, on August 12 via DiWulf Publishing. The synopsis reads, “Part Gen X memoir, and part English Beat oral history, the book takes a detailed look at the making of, response to, and influence their third album Special Beat Service had on young American fans like Marc as well as musicians like Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Adam Duritz of Counting Crows, Elvis Costello, and Pete Townshend of the Who.”
The book also includes a foreword by I.R.S. Records co-founder Jay Bober, who released Special Beat Service in the US and helped the band achieve their breakthrough in the States, and it “features extensively researched interviews, insights and anecdotes from band members, record company executives, music critics and notable fans.” To get a taste of what to expect, we’re exclusively debuting the preface of the book right here. Read on…
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“I was never very happy, even as a kid. I was the rebellious type.”
–Dave Wakeling
I wasn’t a happy kid either. But rather than the rebellious type, I was the deadly serious type. This fact became abundantly clear to my parents early on. My father found my seriousness so concerning that his earliest advice to me was: “Put Super Glue in your toothpaste and smile more.” What he didn’t know was that I hated my smile. I had crooked teeth. But, more importantly, I hated being told that I should pretend to be happy. Much to my chagrin, this will be something that people will repeat to me throughout my childhood: just smile more. Smiling felt awkward.
Thankfully, ‘70s pop music – AM radio and then 45 singles – gave me moments of great joy and much-needed relief from the toll that everyday life was taking on my soul. I completely disappeared into the sounds emanating from my parent’s car radios and the grooves of black vinyl that undulated hypnotically on their turntable. Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally)” was an obsessive favorite and, even as a child, the line “In my hour of need I truly am indeed, alone again, naturally” resonated with me. That lyric was me in a nutshell from ages 8 to 11. I played that song over and over again.
I spent a lot of time alone. But inside my head I lived in colorful fantasy worlds that I created around music. As I listened to my growing collection of LPs and 45 singles, small movies came to life in my mind’s eye. As I grew older, certain songs just connected with that hidden part of my soul stimulated by pop music. These songs gave me a warm tingly sensation in my chest and when that happened time stopped and I absorbed the melody and rhythms with my whole being. I paid particular attention to lyrics. Not just the big choruses but the second and third verses that rounded out the stories being told. Deciphering and memorizing lyrics made me happy even if the song was sad. In fact, the sadder the song or the darker the circumstances, the better. Sad songs stimulated my brain and heart in a way that party songs never did. If a song gave me a lump in my throat, it was a hit with me.
As the ‘70s gave way to the ‘80s, the radio offered up a plethora of new sounds – punk, new wave, reggae – with angry and confrontational personal and political lyrics. Soon enough, my serious side morphed to reveal a rebellious side as well. I soon realized I was growing a rather large chip on my shoulder to rival the sizeable lump in my throat from all the sad songs I’d been listening to.
My life was forever altered by a momentous trip to the Philippines with one of my best friends and his family during the summer of 1979. During the month-long trip I came down with a virus that made me very sick. Away from my family for the first time, I was forced, at 14 years of age, to learn fortitude and resilience, and to be brave in the face of intense homesickness, physical pain, and mental anxiety. Upon my return home, transformed by the experience, and very ill and hospitalized, it was clear that everything around me had changed, including music.
In case you weren’t there, the dawn of the 80s was unnerving for a kid like me. Between the threat of nuclear war, gas shortages, and the rise of a growing conservative political movement, I innocently held out hope that kindhearted and earnest Jimmy Carter would be re-elected President and that my parents’ marriage might withstand the pressures that threatened to cause its collapse. On Tuesday November 4, 1980, I was stunned by the ferocity of the electoral landslide that put Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party into power and slammed by the harsh reality that my parents were quickly barreling towards a permanent separation.
As Reagan was being inaugurated on January 20, 1981, my father was preparing to move out of our family home. I would see him sporadically over the next ten years as he moved around the country — from Providence to Minneapolis to Denver and Cincinnati looking for steady work as a department store buyer.
It was during this time, when in dire need of some type of musical catharsis, that the English Beat and their three albums came into my life in quick succession. Each album: I Just Can’t Stop It, Wha’ppen, and Special Beat Service mirrored distinct phases of my adolescence and, as trite as it may sound, I grew in tandem with each album. I went from being a sad, sickly 15-year-old in 1980 to a politically aware and angry 16-year-old in 1981 to a burgeoning 17-year-old new romantic and would-be musician by 1982.
Much of that had to do with the lyrics and music of the English Beat. I’d argue that Dave Wakeling is a wordsmith on par with Elvis Costello and Paul Weller and parsing the word play of his lyrics became an academic sport for me. I loved the ritual and routine of taking the band’s albums out of their sleeves, placing them reverently on my turntable, and listening while I gazed at the album covers. I closed my eyes, letting my mind wander as I listened to Wakeling and Ranking Roger take me on a ride through an England that, like me, was undergoing massive changes.
While the records helped me through the day-to-day challenges of my life, it was seeing the English Beat live in 1983, just a few weeks before they would break up, that was the payoff for years of musical worship. While all three albums helped to make me the man and the musician I am today, Special Beat Service holds a special place in my heart. Its mature themes were as important to me as the range of emotions and human drama I’d been learning about reading the plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare in my 12th grade English class. Wakeling’s lyrics looked inside an increasingly dark and complicated world full of inequality, racism, sexism, misunderstanding, anger, and betrayal. At the same time, those songs cultivated ideas about perseverance, forgiveness, tolerance, and acceptance. And for that I am eternally grateful.
I’ve long felt that it was my destiny to write a book about the band. Much of that sense stems from several twists of fate that put me in touch with almost all the members of the band. And for that reason, I’ve lovingly and carefully researched the making of Special Beat Service. I’ve re-visited the band’s origin story, reviewed their impressions of one another, and researched their hopes and expectations as they prepared to write, record, and release Special Beat Service in 1982 and perform songs from it across America during 1982 and 1983.
What’s clear is that, at its heart, Special Beat Service is an experimental swan song of an album that combines pop, ska, reggae, punk, soul, new wave, and Latin music into twelve unique, stand-alone songs created by a band that was growing exhausted from the grind of trying to break America. And while grappling with the drudgery of constant touring, band members were confronted with a hard truth: they weren’t sure they wanted to be in a band with each other anymore. That ambivalence may have contributed to Special Beat Service’s go-for-broke sound, making it one of the most overlooked albums of the early ‘80s.
Amazingly, Special Beat Service remains an album many critics name check, but haven’t really considered, even retrospectively. The fact is that the album features several iconic songs of the era, some of which are the earliest examples of a nascent, early 80s indie rock sound just beginning to find its footing.
Despite fantastic songs and a stunning live show built on several years of constant touring, Special Beat Service didn’t make the artistic and sales impact it could or should have. As Simon Price passionately wrote about the album in The Quietus in 2014:
The decline in sales was sharp. Special Beat Service only reached No.23 on its release in 1982. The world wasn’t listening. And the world was a sucker because Special Beat Service is a wonderful, wonderful record. Wakeling’s songwriting had stepped up a level, mature in the best possible sense (i.e. the sense that isn’t just code for ‘fucking boring’), his lyrics showing a rare subtlety and depth. Straight-up ska-pop numbers like ‘Jeanette’ and jerky, fidgety punk-funkers like ‘Rotating Head’ were a throwback to the earlier material, but SBS was dominated by thoughtful songs about relationship break-ups, with the sort of chord changes that reach in, grab your heart in a fist, and twist. On tracks like ‘Save It For Later’ (which belatedly broke The Beat in America when MTV and college radio picked up on it), with its classic chiming guitars, the ska revival felt like a distant memory. Even jazzy piano breaks were now allowed on ‘I Confess’ and the astonishingly beautiful ‘End Of The Party.’ I played it to the point of destruction, in the full knowledge that almost nobody else was.
Like Price, I also played Special Beat Service to the point of destruction. The album arrived just as I was making the transition to young adulthood and it became a ritual for me to put it on and sit and listen to it quietly and respectfully. Sometimes at night. Sometimes in the morning. Sometimes on a cassette tape on a JC Penny knockoff Walkman while riding my bike. The lyrics soothed me and the music that accompanied them became so entrenched in my memory that distinct phrases from songs would float in and out of my consciousness at the oddest times. I listened so often and memorized the album tracking to such an extent that I could anticipate the first notes of the next song just as the previous song ended. The lyrics became a type of prayer and meditation. I would recite them in my mind or quietly mouth them to myself. And, as I did, I would imagine what it would be like to write songs that might move others the way these songs moved me. My desire for an intimate connection to and through music was so intense that I invented fake bands with logos and fake song titles.
And, for many years, I felt like I might be one of the few fans who carried a flame for the Special Beat Service. Later, others who shared my passion made it more widely known. In a retrospective review of the album for Rolling Stone Jody Rosen wrote:
…although ska was always the bedrock of their sound, they were really just a pop band, led by a great singer-songwriter, Dave Wakeling – for my money, the ne plus ultra of whimpery British white boys. My favorite is the band’s studio album, Special Beat Service (1983). Songs like ‘Sole Salvation,’ ‘End of the Party,’ and ‘I Confess’ are as catchy and as savagely witty as anything by Elvis Costello, and Wakeling is far less impressed with his own smarts than Costello.
Certainly, one of the album’s greatest creative triumphs remains “Save It For Later,” whose cultural impact may be that it has been covered by two icons of rock music: Pete Townshend of the Who and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam. Amazingly, it’s a song the band – then in the process of disintegrating — wasn’t in full agreement about recording. Members had to be pushed and cajoled by I.R.S. Records to record it.
“Save It For Later” turned out to be a minor U.S. hit, but the Velvet Underground drone meets the Byrds-like chime of it was miles away from the band’s original, angsty, punky reggae roots. But the album’s new, experimental sound showed creative growth, and when joined to lyrics that slyly allude to oral sex (“Save It For Later”), the suspicions and paranoia of secret service agents (“Rotating Heads”), and the ruminations of a sociopathic cheater who realizes too late he’s also done himself fatal, emotional harm (“I Confess”), say something profound about the push and pull of the creative process. It also illuminates the ways that bands can come together creatively, or, in the case of the English Beat, come together creatively in the act of falling apart. And, despite clear signals that the band had run its course, Wakeling urged himself and his bandmates on with the poignant lyrics in “Sole Salvation,” offering: “There’s a new dance, the tolerance, and it just might be your sole salvation.”
Though the band couldn’t hold their marriage of diverse musical influences together, Special Beat Service is historically important for capping off the initial 2 Tone ska revival, and for ushering in other notable early 80s new wave sounds that incorporated elements of reggae, R&B and soul (see Elvis Costello, the Jam, the Clash, Joe Jackson). In that sense, Special Beat Service can be seen as an important transitional album in the context of its specific musical era. Four-plus decades after its release in 1982, I believe it deserves love and respect. And now that several original members of the band have passed on, I feel a particular urgency to document how much Special Beat Service means to me and to so many others.
My homage to Special Beat Service intertwines with my own personal experiences during this critical time period, and I reflect on how the band and the album served as a totem for me, one that helped me endure trying and difficult times. And while it may be hyperbolic, I think it helped to save my life or at the very least to put me on a specific path. And, like my father did years earlier, it urged me on through the lyrics of “Ackee 1-2-3” to smile through it all:
Someone just smiled
for no special reason,
It looks like the smile’s
come back into season
It’s so easy
It doesn’t have to be a nice day,
Just the only one you’ve got
And it’s coming ready or not!
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Pick up Soul Salvation right here.