The Oral History of 2 Tone

There's a scene in Alex Cox's 1986 film Sid & Nancy that foreshadows the end for the star-crossed punk lovers: One of their cohorts shows up in a trilby hat, shiny tonic suit, and skinny tie, having ditched his safety pins and leather. "I don't wanna be a punk anymore," he explains. "I wanna be a rude boy, like my dad."

Seeing no future, the new rude boys and girls sought to reinvent the past as a place where black kids and white kids could look sharp in vintage clothes and skank in harmony to a ska-punk hybrid. 2 Tone, the indie label founded by Jerry Dammers, keyboardist and chief songwriter for the Specials, was its cornerstone. In 1979, 2 Tone Records issued its first five electrifying singles (the Specials' "Gangsters" and "A Message to You Rudy," Madness' "The Prince," the Selecter's "On My Radio," and the Beat's "Tears of a Clown") and tore down the barricades of a segregated pop scene nearly a decade before Run-DMC and Aerosmith's "Walk This Way" did.

Unlike British punk, born in London's fashionable King's Road, 2 Tone came from the bleak urban counties of the West Midlands, where working-class kids of mostly Irish and West Indian backgrounds lived and worked in close quarters.

JERRY DAMMERS: I was a very young mod. The older mods at school used to like me because I brought in a copy of Mad magazine every week and let them read it. I think Mad magazine is the biggest influence in my life. At the age of ten, I decided I was going to have a band, one of the best in the country. I worked through my teenage years getting the songs together, learning music. I played in a Teddy Boy rock'n'roll band, a funk band, even in a country-western band.

DAVE WAKELING (singer-guitarist, the Beat): There'd been a West Indian community in Birmingham, where we were from, since the '50s. In postwar Britain, they sent out invitations to people living in other parts of the empire, saying, "Help rebuild England from the bombings and you can make loads of money and then go back home and build yourself a huge house." So a lot of people came over with that notion, but of course, there was never quite enough money for the boat trip home, and then people started having kids. So we grew up with the first set of those kids born in England. The first Jamenglish set, I suppose. So the early mods and the rude boys had been quite friendly [toward one another]. Both were dapper dressers.

The influx of West Indians helped popularize Jamaican music in record shops and nightclubs. "Al Capone" by Prince Buster's All Stars became a big crossover hit, and the image of the cool, shades-wearing Jamaican hard man or "rude boy" became an icon among England's youth.