Ska'd for Life: A Personal Journey with The Specials

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Horace vividly describes his life before The Specials, the band's formation, their meteoric rise to the top of the charts, and their equally swift disintegration. We have a 30-day return policy, which means you have 30 days after receiving your item to request a return. The internet gives us more opportunities so we are trying to use it to build relationships with our fans, and I run the record label from my one-bedroom flat. One of the lessons they’ve learned is that the evolution of technology and the shifting patterns of making and receiving music mean more opportunities for bands like DOGP. When both our bands imploded we got together. I wanted to do something more British and his songwriting has a real British style.”

It was animated and it was fun – it was like watching a musical. My younger brothers were still in nappies but we’d all be together skanking to it. I decided there and then that that was what I wanted to do.” There's something -particularly charged, too, about familiar songs sung by a familiar voice, even if it's the first time song and voice have met in public. Suggs's matter-of-fact staccato is unmistakable, and a number of the songs Madness essay are standards. There's Desmond Dekker's 'Israelites', a touchstone not badly damaged here by the Madness treatment. There's Bob Marley's 'So Much Trouble in the World', more consolatory than Marley's righteous original. Fast forward five years, and a bevy of rising bands are busy stealing the tension, genial blokeishness and ska homages that Madness, the Specials et al traded in at the cusp of the Eighties. There's the Ordinary Boys, beloved by Morrissey, and a gang of their fans, the Ordinary Army, born well after Madness's heyday. There's Hard-Fi, who, arguably, owe a greater debt to the Specials than Madness. But Hard-Fi have proved once again that this particularly British double helix of cheer and unease, one shared by many of the home-grown bands of the early Eighties, makes for peculiarly successful pop music.

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Interesting account of Horace's time as bass player for The Specials, from meeting Jerry Dammers in the mid 70's to playing small clubs and pubs with The Coventry Automatics and the eventual rise and fall of The Specials, one of the UK's biggest bands from 1979 to 1981. It’s a rite of passage for any aspiring musician but with Death of Guitar Pop we have been able to taste the fruits of our hard labour.” Read More Related Articles

The band plan to release their second album next year, with plans for an online fan club and a UK tour – hopefully with an Essex gig included – coming together.As I said, in my previous band we had a record deal that didn’t work out. You’re signing over your career to someone else and you are not in control.” Though the band comprises just the two of them, they regularly perform as a nine-piece including a full brass section and it’s clear these guys are taking having fun very seriously indeed. The result is that he and bandmate Top Kat – another Essex boy, from Ongar – have developed a sound that’s classy, brassy, fun and frisky and has grown steadily since the formation of DOGP in 2016.