How The Specials’ Ghost Town became the anthem of ‘a country falling apart’

Coventry-formed ska band The Specials wrote Ghost Town in a pressure cooker – one that you could measure as barely six-foot-high. “I’m not going to say too much because I don’t want to upset anybody,” says the track’s engineer, John Rivers, reflecting on the 11-day recording session that took place in his tiny basement studio in Leamington Spa.

Bandleader Jerry Dammers got in touch with Rivers after the band’s failed attempt to record Ghost Town themselves. Having 24 channels was “driving the band barmy”, Rivers says, so they opted instead to change tack and work with a producer who had a modest eight-channel mixer. Rivers pauses, taking his memory back to 1981.

“[Guitarist] Roddy [Radiation] kind of got a bit distraught because he was being pressured; he had a solid day of playing, and Jerry... he’s a very demanding man. He can drive people barmy.” Dammers had called Rivers out of desperation; Radiation had kicked a hole in the studio lining. “It was no big deal,” Rivers muses. “There were a lot of weird things going on in Ghost Town.”

Rivers demonstrates the dissonant vocal melody in the centre of the track: “‘Aaah-ee-a-ee-yah.’ Jerry has an interesting kind of voice,” he laughs. “When he started singing what he wanted, everybody had thought he’d finally flipped! I remember the band looking at him in blank amazement. But he was absolutely right – and the record came together.”

Rivers was anxious to get the recording down perfectly. “With [recording onto] tape there's no going back. If you get it wrong, that’s it.” At times, he added, he “had two pieces of kitchen paper under my chin because I was sweating so much.”

While the session had its ups and downs, Rivers savours the experience. “One of the greatest joys of my life was when I was watching Lyvnal and his beautiful fingers [were] just palm muting on the guitar. John Bradbury could destroy a set of drum pads in one session – he played so hard, but the sound he got [in Ghost Town] was amazing,” says Rivers. “Everyone thinks that Jerry [the band’s founding member] used a Yamaha organ; he actually used a Hammond. The Specials had great musicians. Everyone forgets that Jerry was a very competent jazz pianist - much more competent than he ever let on.”

What resulted from that recording session, alongside the tracks Friday Night, Saturday Morning and Why?, was potentially Dammer’s magnum opus. Ghost Town’s Frankenstein-ish chords, dissonant vocals and famously macabre lyrics made it sound like no other hit song before it. The reggae bop and punk thwacks on the drums were part of the quintessential two-tone sound – but this time, it was wonky, wavy and sinister. They were reflecting the sour realities that were unfolding across Britain at the time.

Racial tensions were razor sharp across the UK in 1981, with high unemployment, urban decay and austerity pierced by riots in corners of Bristol, Liverpool, London, and Manchester. In Coventry – the band’s hometown – the threat to life was visible. Temples were introducing judo and karate lessons. A young Asian woman told TV reporter Keith Wootton that “no one feels safe going out.”

Coventry once boasted a shiny city centre, rebuilt from rubble after the second world war. However, it had become a derelict and threatening precinct: a ghost town. Head to the Lady Godiva statue in the early 1980s and you would have found a cluster of young white Coventrians who aspired to the National Front and the British Movement. The people were getting angry.

Before recording, the band had just wrapped up their exhausting More Specials tour, where fights had broken out at various gigs from Newcastle and Leeds to Cambridge. Rivers recounts one of the band’s shows in Leamington Spa. “There was a full-on fight at the back of the hall – that gig was pretty scary. I mean, a guy went through a glass window and ended up like nearly dying - there was blood pumping out of his thigh. It wasn’t reported much in the press; I think people might have been a bit too scared or something, I don't know.”

Dammers reflected on the scenes he’d witnessed on tour in a Guardian interview in 2002: “The country was falling apart. In Liverpool, all the shops were shuttered up, everything was closing down... In Glasgow, there were these little old ladies on the streets, selling their household goods... [Thatcher] was closing down all the industries, throwing millions of people on the dole. It was clear that something was very, very wrong.”

On what was almost to the day that The Specials began laying down Ghost Town, violence struck in Coventry’s precinct. In the shadows of a shopping centre car park, 20-year-old student Satnam Singh Gill was stabbed to death. He was walking through town with his white girlfriend in broad daylight.

A series of further racial attacks followed in the city, while the band were recording just 12 miles south. A West Indian carnival queen was forced to take part in the procession in a car, because of stoning threats. Arson attempts were made on a Krishna Temple and on an Indian and Commonwealth Club premises. A bus driver was attacked with a broken bottle, and a 50-year-old woman was stabbed while shopping. Newly formed groups campaigned for racial unity, including the Coventry Committee Against Racism (CCAR) and the Committee for Anti-Racist Defence Squads (CARDS).

Six weeks before the single’s release, 8,000 people marched through the city, chanting, in an anti-racism demonstration. However, by the time they reached Broadgate, far Right extremists began to hurl missiles and give Nazi salutes, drowning out the marchers’ drums with declarations of “Sieg Heil”. By the time the march arrived at Cathedral Square, mounted police were ducking from rocks, sticks and bottles; 74 arrests were made that day, and 11 police officers were injured.

Weeks after the brawl, there were more attacks on the Asian community. Dr Amal Dharry was a volunteer for a night shelter and was known for his efforts to promote racial harmony in the city. On what would have been an ordinary evening for him, he was stabbed leaving a chip shop by a 17-year-old white man - who was allegedly acting on a dare. There was outrage and a collective grief amongst Coventry’s campaigners for anti-racism. But it was The Specials who provided the loudest soapbox moment.

“The Specials got together because we wanted to show the National Front that black, white – whatever nationality you are – we could get on,” says Neville Staple, who was a vocalist and lyricist on Ghost Town. “It was easy to write; we were reflecting what was happening in Coventry and other cities.” Staple married his wife Christine aka Sugary Staple after they met on tour. “I’m mixed race,” she says. “I was going through an identity crisis as a child and then in my teens - it was at a time when racial tensions were massively high. I grew up with punk and reggae, mods and skinheads and rude boys. The Specials blended everything together.”

The band, in an effort to encourage racial harmony in Coventry, announced an anti-racism gig at the Butt’s Stadium.

“What do I remember about the Butt’s gig?” ponders guitarist Staple. “The National Front was in town. Someone came up to us outside the gig. They wanted to stop it but we still went on.”

Pete Chambers is a music historian and founder of Coventry Music Museum. “I saw them every time they played in Coventry – and yes, I was at the Butts,” says Chambers. “It was a crazy sort of day. There was a National Front march at the same time. It wasn’t the nicest thing to do with Dr Dharry and everything else that was going on in the city at the time.”

The Specials shelled out more than ￡13,000 to put on the event, with other Midlands acts sharing the bill, including Hazel O’Connor, the Bureau, Reluctant Stereotypes, and The People. They all agreed to play for free. Their band’s investment into the gig was huge – it equated to two averagely priced houses at the time.

However, despite an imposed ban on the National Front’s march – which was subsequently ignored – it seems many of their fans had been spooked by rumours circulating of planned violence. That, alongside the fact that the admission price of ￡3.50 could have been too steep for a town with an unemployment rate of 14 per cent, meant that the Butts was only a quarter full. The fans who could afford entry were bubbly and defiant to the National Front members who were marching and yelling outside. United by shared values of racial harmony and good music, those fans wore a uniform of two-tone checkered garments, as they watched, skanked and napped under the sun.

“No jobs, no entertainment – and not much money around either,” summed up Mike Reid when he introduced the week’s number one chart entry on Top of the Pops. Incidentally, it was just after the band came off stage that its line-up would dissolve. Moments after celebrating Ghost Town’s chart-topping success, guitarist Lynval Golding and vocalists Terry Hall and Neville Staple announced to the rest of the band that they were leaving to form Fun Boy Three.

The deadpan malaise of Ghost Town and its journaling of racial tensions and austerity still strike a chord today, 40 years after its release. “Not much has changed in the UK since The Specials started,” sighs Staple. “It’s like we’ve gone round in a circle, because youth clubs have been closed down... No jobs. Racism is still there.”

Coventry – which is this year’s City of Culture – is marking the track’s anniversary. Coventry Music Museum will be hosting Ghost Town 2 Host Town, where visitors have the chance to ride in the music video’s car. The Herbert Gallery has an exhibition on the history of two-tone and, just out of town, there’s talk of a blue plaque gracing the front of engineer John Rivers’ home.

The Specials are touring this year, marking the song’s milestone and performing tracks from their 2019 album, Encore – and they’re still using music as a soapbox for racial unity and social values. On their latest album is a song called 10 Commandments, which they proclaim to be “an all-out f--k-you” that addresses rape culture, misogyny, self-worth and alt-right “pseudo-intellectuals on the internet”. It features a guest vocal from 20-year-old Saffiyah Khan, who was photographed in 2017 confronting a member of the English Defence League. She was wearing a beaming smile – and a Specials T-shirt.