Ska'd For Life - Horace Panter

SKA'D FOR LIFE – HORACE PANTER

The immediately refreshing thing about Horace Panter's book Ska'd For Life is that he doesn't spend the first half of it musing about his childhood and accidents he had on a tricycle at the age of three. Instead, it's straight bang into the music with brief descriptions of his first forays into playing in bands and then on to the Coventry Automatics and then The Specials. The reason for this is because Ska'd For Life isn't Horace Panter's autobiography but Horace Panter's story of The Specials and his part in that story as the bassist more commonly known to fans of the band as Horace Gentleman.

Horace is a man who knows what he likes and likes what he knows, who is rightly proud of The Specials but duly unimpressed by an awful lot of other things that came with the experience. A fair few bands and individuals are dismissed out of hand but respect paid where and to whom it's deserved. The Clash, for example, are praised and lauded to the skies whilst Generation X and anything related to them are shot dead.

As with a lot of people, The Clash impacted massively upon Horace, particularly with The Specials being invited by The Clash to support them on tour. Amusingly, Horace offers up two explanations as to why they were offered the support slot: the first reason being because Joe Strummer really liked them; the second because they could get Mick Jones some good sensimilla so were kept on as good herbal suppliers.

Horace highlights one of the gigs on The Clash tour as being pivotal to The Specials' proactive anti-racist stance, that being at a venue in Crawley where it's packed wall-to-wall with skinheads. The band realise that this malevolent and threatening audience being preyed upon by the extreme Right was going to be a major part of their prospective future audience as opposed to the punk audience they had previously been attracting. The times they were a-changing, or as The Specials put it: it was the dawning of a new era.

The rise of The Specials coincided with the rise of Thatcher which meant for a band such as them there was no way they would be able to avoid the fall-out from her policies even if they had wanted to. Violence that had been specific to football terraces was transferring to the concert halls and no band was safe from it, particularly those who were attracting a skinhead audience. Thatcherism had given the green light to Right-wing politics and with this the extreme Right were making hay whilst the sun shone. A lot like Trump nowadays come to think of it.

When writing about audiences and other bands, it should be said that at times Horace seems not to see the wood for the trees. An example of this is when he describes the UK Subs as 'punk cannon fodder' and their audience as being 'Neanderthal' – which is pretty discourteous, to put it mildly.

Horace may not have liked the UK Subs' music and that's fair enough but them and The Specials actually had a lot more in common than they had differences and it was the commonalities that should have been built upon not the differences exasperated. They were both strongly anti-racist for a start and in such times as those when unity was required, to dismiss fellow anti-racists is not a good move, really. To describe the UK Subs' as 'punk cannon fodder' also displays a profound misunderstanding of punk. And if the UK Subs' audience was Neanderthal then what did that make The Specials' audience? Troglodyte?

Hindsight, of course, is a wonderful thing but at the time there wasn't any clear idea of what to do about fighting at gigs. The resurgence of skinhead as a fashion meant that for a lot of those following it the whole kit and caboodle was being adopted, from the dress sense and the favoured bands right down to the perceived politics.

At the time there was no distinction between the 'real' skinheads and the boneheads inspired by the Oi! Scene. They were all just skinheads, some of them good but a lot of them right horrible bastards suddenly being allowed to be horrible as a prerequisite of the fashion they were following.

Horace mentions at one point in his book a gig where there is seig heiling during the song 'Why?', specifically at the line 'With a Nazi salute and a steel-capped boot, you follow like sheep in a wolf's clothes'. As with all dedicated fashion followers, skinheads (or a lot of them, at least) would adopt anything to bolster their identity no matter how ridiculous it might be. So, a line from a song that is explicitly anti-racist is turned around and used as a celebration of racism and of identifying with being racist. Like I said – Troglodyte.

That's not to say The Specials' audience was all like this – far from it – because their gigs were in actual fact joyous celebrations of just being young and having fun. 'Enjoy yourself', as they urged in the song of the same name 'It's later than you think'. And their fans took heed and people actually started dancing again at gigs and invading stages, much to the chagrin of Horace who whilst loving the dancing was in two minds about the stage invasions.

On reading Horace's book, I never realised The Specials played their last UK show in July of 1981 whilst Ghost Town was still at number one in the Charts. July 1981 being, of course, the time of the urban riots that erupted throughout the country to which Ghost Town was the soundtrack. You live and learn.

Ska'd For Life contains plenty of other details and anecdotes such as this to create what is a veritable treasure trove for any self-respecting Specials fan. Whether or not it's actually the best book ever written about The Specials (as has been said) is hard to say. It's good but it's not the defining book by any means but then such a book is probably never going to be written due simply to there being ten members of the group and therefore ten different perspectives. Jerry Dammers story is going to be the most interesting but it's advisable not to hold your breath while waiting for it.

For the record, my most favourite anecdote in Ska'd For Life concerns not any of The Specials but their manager in the early days, Bernie Rhodes. Bernie, as we know, was also the manager of The Clash. 'One day we were in his office' Horace writes 'He came in, picked up the phone, dialled and said “Topper! It's Bernie. Stop hanging round CBS – it cheapens the whole thing”, and put the phone down.'

Whether or not anyone was actually on the other end of the phone and Bernie was just saying it for effect – to make an impact upon The Specials – doesn't really matter, though imagining a perplexed Topper on the other end is quite amusing. It would have been a typical Bernie Rhodes thing to do but none the less brilliant for that.

For Bernie Rhodes and The Clash the image was total. And so too for The Specials...

John Serpico