One day in 1978, David Steele saw an ad in his local paper, the Newport News. It caught his eye. “Bass player needed to form a group with original songs—to shake some action.” Recognizing the subtle nod to the Flamin’ Groovies song “Shake Some Action,” the seventeen-year-old Steele responded. He was the only one. Relieved, Dave Wakeling, who had written the ad with his friend Andy Cox, commented, “David must have been the only living bass player on the Isle of Wight. Most of the people there were very rich and over fifty. There were no Jamaicans. But there was one Indian fellow who worked on the buses. And he was a novelty.”
Steele had edited a punk fanzine and witnessed the Rock Against Racism Carnival at Victoria Park featuring the Clash and Steel Pulse. He had also written two songs: “Twist and Crawl” (cowritten with his friend Dick Bradsell) and “Mirror in the Bathroom.” When he played them to Wakeling and Cox, he remembers them saying, “These are good. Maybe you should come to Birmingham and we’ll get a band together.” Emitting a hearty laugh, Steele says, “I don’t think they ever expected me to turn up.”
Working class but educated at King Edward VI Camp Hill Grammar School, Birmingham, Wakeling says he may have talked “different from the other lads in the street” but “enjoyed the ambiguity” of his mixed Birmingham accent. After befriending Andy Cox at college, the pair relocated to the Isle of Wight to build solar panels for Cox’s brother-in-law. Living in a cliff-top cottage close to the Blackgang Chine theme park, Andy taught Dave how to play guitar. In September 1978, when they moved back to Birmingham, Steele followed. To earn money they found jobs—Wakeling on a building site, Cox in a factory, and Steele as a trainee psychiatric nurse—and set about expanding the group lineup. While Cox posted an ad for a Maureen Tucker–style drummer who could play reggae, Steele asked his work colleagues at All Saints Hospital. “There’s this bloke who mends my car whose name is Everett,” one nurse told him. “I’ll send him round.”
When he was fifteen, Everett Morton left St. Kitts to live in England. He harbored ambitions to be a drummer and would practice with a rolled-up newspaper. “Drums are very noisy,” he explains, “so I’d settle the papers on my bed like a snare and tom-tom and just practice.” By day, Everett worked in a kettle-spinning factory. He did so for twelve years. By night, he played in soul and reggae bands, and once sat in on a session with Joan Armatrading. “Her family and my mother were best friends. She was playing in Handsworth and I just did one thing with her.” Meeting Cox, Steele and Wakeling, twenty-seven-year-old Everett listened as they played their songs on two acoustic guitars and a bass amplified through a little speaker. When they finished, he asked, “Are you sure it’s a reggae drummer you want?” What he thought was: They’re terrible. It’s all over the place. It’s just three guys strumming and making a lot of noise. Desperate to play drums, Everett agreed to come to a proper rehearsal the following week. It was little better. However, he had made an impression. “When I left they followed me to my Austin Maxi and said, ‘Are you going to come back? Please come back.’” He did.
By late 1978, David Steele thought punk had become “boring” and “self-indulgent,” while reggae was getting “soft” and “commercial.” “We wanted a cross between the two—the excitement plus a bit of rhythm.” Then, in December, Birmingham’s popular city center nightclub Barbarella’s closed down. It led to an increase in private parties. “People kept playing Tighten Up Volume 2,” says Dave Wakeling, “so people got to looking in secondhand shops [for ska and reggae]. It was great—there was tons of these records at five pence each. And so we started playing them.” A fan of the exhilarating noise of punk and the hypnotic quality of reggae, Wakeling imagined combining the two into something both rhythmic and danceable. “Punk and reggae worked really well together. Rock’d get people up and dancing and reggae’d keep them moving.” To this point, Wakeling, Cox, Steele and Morton had kept their strictly reggae numbers apart from their punk-influenced songs. Now the idea dawned on them to move them toward each other. In doing so, they discovered punky reggae. “The key was Everett,” insists David Steele. “We’d already got our sound. We couldn’t really change how we played so we had to find a way to stick it all together. It was an accident. Dave’s not wrong but it wasn’t so thought out.”
Practicing weekly, the quartet attempted to blend a new wave sound with Everett’s straight-four-on-the-bass-drum reggae beat. “We would have been doing ‘Whine and Grine’ and ‘Jackpot,’” says Steele. “We moved to him and he moved to us.” A month in, they decided to have a “big” sit-down talk. “Our rehearsals were half practice, half psychotherapy,” explains Steele. “For the music to come together there had to be that social coming together as well.” Frustrated by the practical lack of progress, Everett suggested doing a song that they all knew. They hit upon “The Tears of a Clown.” Originally a transatlantic number one for Smokey Robinson & the Miracles in 1970, the burst of Motown pop cemented the sound of the flowering foursome.
Soon after, Andy Cox saw a gig advertising a local band called the Dum Dum Boys. Cox contacted the group and asked if his group could open for them. After Cox was told they would have to audition, what happened next would change the course of their lives. When they arrived at the Dum Dum Boys’s rehearsal room above the Socialist Workers Bookshop next to Digbeth Civic Hall and plugged into their amps, Ranking Roger (then a drummer) recalls the four-piece playing “a loose version of ‘Mirror in the Bathroom,’ then ‘Twist and Crawl,’ ‘Best Friend’ and lastly ‘Save It for Later.’ I was like, ‘Fuck me! We don’t stand a chance!’”
Roger Charlery’s parents had emigrated to England in the fifties with a plan to work and save enough money to go back to St. Lucia. “The system never paid enough,” says Roger. “All the families I knew in our neighborhood were just hanging on.” Schooled predominantly among white children, Roger says he recalls one teacher telling him, “‘If it wasn’t for us lot you’d be still walking around in grass skirts, and you wouldn’t know how to use a knife and fork.’ I was horrified!” When Roger was thirteen, he had a dream: “I could see a small circular room and people were standing up and clapping and I could see myself bowing. I woke up and I said to myself, I’m going to be an entertainer. One day I will be famous, and I will be called Ranking Roger.” He did and he was.
By sixteen, Roger stood over six feet tall and claimed to be the first Black punk in Birmingham. Dressed in a ripped Union Jack flag, bondage trousers and with orange spiked dreadlocks, he made a name for himself on the local scene MCing over records in pubs and at Rock Against Racism events. “Reggae was saying ‘Chant Down Babylon’ and punk ‘Anarchy in the UK,’” he explains. “They shared the same attitudes.” One night when the Damned were booked to play at Barbarella’s, a group of skinheads started chanting “Sieg heil, Sieg heil” and “National Front” in front of the stage. In desperation, the DJ, Mike Horseman, turned to Roger and said, “You’ve got to say something to them.” Picking up the microphone, Roger started toasting in time with the music, “Fuck off, fuck off, de National Front. Fuck off, fuck off, de National Front.” The crowd picked up the chant. “Next thing, there was a riot: people fighting and throwing bottles, and antifascist punks attacking the National Front. Mike and I had to duck down behind the decks. After that I decided that I was going to do everything within my power to put a stop to racism.”
On March 31, 1979, Roger watched Wakeling, Cox, Steele and Morton play their first gig at the Matador supporting his band, the Dum Dum Boys. The crowd went crazy. When they played a second gig at the New Inn in Balsall Heath, Roger saw them play again. Watching them whip through a version of Prince Buster’s “Rough Rider,” Roger had a sudden and urgent desire to toast with them. “You would see Roger performing in the audience,” says Dave Wakeling. “Before I’d spoken to him, he jumped onstage, grabbed the microphone and started toasting.”
The band still had no name, so Dave looked up “music” in a thesaurus. “The first thing I saw on the other side of the page in the antonyms was ‘clash.’ I thought, This is fertile ground! Then I saw the word ‘flam’—I read it too quick and I thought it said ‘sham.’ Woah! This is really fertile: two great band names [Sham 69 and the Clash].” Looking in the antonyms under “harmony,” Dave then read the word “beat.” “We were named after the Clash,” says Roger. “In the thesaurus, ‘clash’ is to beat two things together. It was very clever.”
When the newly named Beat began a weekly residency at the Mercat Cross, behind the Digbeth bus station in the meat market, Roger, having left the Dum Dum Boys, became a regular. It was organized by John Mostyn, who had regularly attended the group’s earliest gigs and was now helping to organize “stuff.” The music agent says, “The first one we did we had about seventy people, the second one about a hundred. The third one I had to call the police! It was all word-of-mouth.” In an attempt to attract wider support, Mostyn invited the social secretary from Aston University. When she was impressed by what she saw, Mostyn seized the moment. “Wouldn’t they be great for your ball?” he asked her. “Yes,” she replied, “but no one knows who they are.” Then playing his trump card, Mostyn suggested, “‘Why not have them and a Radio 1 DJ? Like John Peel?’ When she said yes, I knew we were off!”
In May, exactly as Mostyn had hoped, the Beat supported John Peel at the university end-of-term ball. Watching the Beat perform, Peel was flabbergasted: “This has to be the greatest, the best band in the universe!” he exclaimed to anyone within earshot, before insisting that the group return to the stage and repeat their set over. Still not satisfied, Peel demanded the Beat swap their payment of £80 for his: a cool £360. “That was a special night,” smiles Mostyn. “There were five hundred students who had no idea what they were about to see, and they went completely barking. They’d heard ‘Gangsters’ and suddenly here was a band in front of them just as good as the Specials.” Flushed with excitement, the Beat invited the Radio 1 DJ to sample a balti at their favorite curry house a short trip from the city center. Belly full, Peel left the restaurant only to discover the theft of his van. “It had a load of records in it,” says Mostyn. “I remember just dying of embarrassment.”
Bad luck followed. In rehearsal, the Beat read an article in Melody Maker about 2 Tone. Throwing the paper onto the floor in disgust, Andy Cox says, “I thought our chances were ruined. Two bands—Madness and the Specials—doing exactly the same thing but already getting recognition.” Acting decisively, John Mostyn sent a demo tape to 2 Tone and invited Jerry Dammers to see the Beat play at the Mercat Cross. When Jerry saw Ranking Roger onstage, his thoughts returned to an episode at Barbarella’s a year earlier. He recalled Roger toasting over “I’m an Upstart” by the Angelic Upstarts, and the night continuing when a crowd of people had walked across town to Pollyanna’s, a nightclub on Newhall Street that was notorious for its racist door policy; Roger was refused entry. Striking up a conversation outside the venue, Roger had told Jerry about his band the Dum Dum Boys. “He said he would come to our next gig, supporting UB40 behind Digbeth Civic Hall. He came but we were terrible.”
In fact, Roger had only recently spurned an opportunity to join UB40, as he explains: “They were playing the New Inn in Moseley and I went up onstage with them and brought the house down. This was before Astro was in the band. They wanted me to come and do more with them, but I thought their music was too mellow. The Beat was more punk—more versatile and aggressive.” With two bands often sharing a bill, it was not until a meeting held in the summer that Roger chose the Beat over UB40. “They said to me, ‘You’ve been quiet. Is there anything you want to say?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve been hanging around with you guys for a while. I want to know if I’m in or if I’m out?’ They said, ‘It’s obvious! You’re in or you wouldn’t be here.’ There was a big roar of laughter and that was it. I became the fifth member of the Beat.”
Impressed by what he had seen, Jerry offered the Beat a three-week tour opening for the Selecter. Not so, says Neol Davies. When the Beat was booked to open for the Selecter at the Cascade Club in Shrewsbury, Neol says he watched them soundcheck, mouth agape. “I turned to Aitch and said, ‘This band should be on 2 Tone.’” Inviting them to come on the road, Neol cautioned, “‘We can only give you petrol money. But you can play whatever gigs you want with us.’ I then went straight to Jerry and said, ‘You’ve got to hear this band,’ before being reminded that Jerry had kept an eye on the Beat since Ranking Roger joined the lineup several months earlier.”
Over the summer, the Beat and the Selecter played together in Blackpool, Sheffield and the Midlands. On September 23, the mini-tour arrived at the Nashville Rooms in London. “It was a big thing,” recalls David Steele. “Those gigs were so fast and so amazing: the whole buzz and excitement. We’d been playing in little pubs to about twenty people and then it was fifty, then a hundred, and now it was five hundred and another five hundred people outside. I think Madness came.”
Terrified to see hundreds of skinheads shouting, “Sieg heil,” and doing Nazi salutes in the crowd, Ranking Roger says the atmosphere was similar to a football match. “I was like, ‘The first coin that’s thrown at me I’m down in that audience.’” Full of nerves and trepidation, the Beat stumbled through the first song, “Whine and Grine.” Watching from the side of the stage, Desmond Brown was fuming. When they came offstage, he cornered Andy Cox. “Don’t you ever fucking do that again. If you get scared of an audience, you can just forget about being in a group or anything.” Backstage, a contingent of skinheads came to talk to the band. “We were like, take a deep breath here then,” says Dave Wakeling. “They said, ‘We liked that: Black geezers and white geezers onstage together. It’s alright.’ We were like, ‘Oh! Well, yes, if you like it, we did it on purpose!’ In Birmingham,” Wakeling continues, “it wasn’t seen as anything special. Nobody mentioned that there were people of different color in the band.” Looking on, wide-eyed, Roger says, “We were all going, ‘London is fucking heavy.’”
Three weeks later, on October 13, the Beat supported the Selecter at the Electric Ballroom. At the end of the night, Jerry Dammers appeared backstage carrying a briefcase and a big smile on his face. “We want you to do the next 2 Tone single!” he hollered to huge whoops and cheers. “It was like a fairy story,” says David Steele. “Put a single out on the best label in the world? ‘YES, PLEASE! WE CAN DO THAT!’ Then Jerry added an unexpected condition: ‘We’ve got to do it quick. If you can do it in a week, we can get it out before Christmas.’ We were like, ‘WHAT!’”
When the Beat revealed in a television interview that they had come to fame after sending a cassette to 2 Tone headquarters, Jerry received hundreds of demos from bands desperate to sign to the country’s hot property. “There were some hilarious cassettes. There was one and they were singing, 2 Tone is terrific, it really turns me on. It was great. The chorus went, Terry and Jerry.” One serious contender was an eight-piece reggae band from Birmingham named after the unemployment benefit form for new claimants. British and multiracial, UB40 played their first gig in February 1979 and shared a mutual passion for ska, reggae and soul. Their highly original and politicized left-wing lyricism soon attracted attention from members of the Specials and the Selecter. Obtaining a copy of a three-track cassette, they auditioned UB40 on the 2 Tone tour bus. “When I heard, I’m a British subject not proud of it / While I carry the burden of shame, we got really confused,” says Lynval Golding. “We didn’t realize it was a white guy singing. It makes sense a Black British guy.” Charley Anderson was also surprised. Taking Golding to see them play at a pub in Birmingham, he says, “We realized that they were white guys and Syrians and all different kinds of nationalities, Blacks and whites. I thought that this was a real 2 Tone band, playing soft, cool reggae. So I got UB40 to support us at the Lyceum, their first major gig in London.”
Now, Jerry admits it was a mistake not signing UB40. “I thought 2 Tone should build on its slightly twisted retro-ska identity. They were more like straightforward current reggae and I thought it might confuse the identity. I was also uneasy about the lyrics to ‘King.’ It was a beautiful tune but, King, where are your people now? Chained and pacified, you tried to show them how and for that you died, was hinting that Martin Luther King’s policy of nonviolence might have been wrong, whereas it achieved a great deal.” Whether 2 Tone turned down UB40 or the group simply had other plans is still a matter of conjecture. “I know Jerry thinks he turned us down,” wrote Brian Travers on UB40’s message board, indignant after years of unsolicited connection with 2 Tone, “but we wouldn’t pass on a major label (EMI) to sign with a keyboard player (with no advance money) who was already under too much pressure. Truth is we were always going to develop our own label so needed the right deal to start with . . . and NO we would never have signed to 2 Tone. It was a complete shambles that made a few good records. We didn’t want to be bagged with the ‘ska’ thing. We had our own ideas . . . loved the 2 Tone scene for entertainment but we took our work very serious and it was obvious it was going to burn out along with all the people associated.”
Labeled in the press as one of a handful of new bands formed in the slipstream of 2 Tone, UB40 nevertheless benefited from a glut of exposure. “The whole business really pissed me off,” drummer Jim Brown told Record Mirror. “Another ska band! Another Birmingham band! Every time we played anywhere, we were advertised as being straight off the 2 Tone Tour, just lumping us in with all the rest. We all like the Specials, the Beat and all the others, good luck to them. I don’t begrudge them a thing—yet coming from the same place at the same time doesn’t mean you have to be another clone band.”
Decided by a vote, Rick Rogers says, 2 Tone was the obvious home for the Beat. “Where else would they have fitted?” he asks rhetorically. “They knew it, and as soon as we knew them, we knew it.” Similarly convinced, Juliet de Vie says, “It was a no-brainer. UB40 were more of a traditional, laconic reggae band but with very clear politics. 2 Tone was still working out its politics. The Beat had Ranking Roger jumping around all over the place: this kid who looked amazing. He absolutely summed up that youthful energy of 2 Tone. He was Black, joyous and brought a huge smile and an open heart.”
The toast of the town, the Beat accepted an invitation to record a coveted John Peel session. When they were called to the BBC studios in Maida Vale, producer Bob Sargeant recalls the group being “quite nervous.” Born in Newcastle, Sargeant had enjoyed a stint as a musician playing with Mick Abrahams (of Blodwyn Pig and Jethro Tull), before finding employment with the BBC as a freelance producer. “It was an eight-track studio and we did five songs: ‘Tears of a Clown,’ ‘Ranking Full Stop,’ ‘Big Shot,’ ‘Click Click’ and ‘Mirror in the Bathroom.’ Talk about danceability; it was a hundredfold. The rhythm section rocked: they were really solid. You had your foot tapping all of the time.” By six o’clock, and safe in the knowledge that all the tracks had been successfully recorded, the group decamped to the canteen. “John [Mostyn] bought me a cup of tea and a sticky bun,” recalls Sargeant. “Then he said, ‘We’ve got a single to do. The band seems happy with what you’ve done here today. Would you consider doing it?’ I said, ‘I’d be delighted!’”
After being told that they had “the 2 Tone sound,” any sense of complacency was shattered when Jerry then requested the Beat record “Mirror in the Bathroom” as the first single. Convinced the song was not ready, David Steele says, “The arrangement was still growing,” adding that neither guitarist, Dave nor Andy, “wanted to do a solo.” Three days before the session, the Beat found their answer: Lionel Augustus Martin. In return for his initiation into live punk, Everett Morton took three of his bandmates to the Crompton Arms in Handsworth to savor the delights of a popular local Jamaican musician. “I said, ‘Alright, now come to my den to see where my music is coming from.’” Looking on, the white trio were mesmerized by the sound coming from an aging saxophonist. Vowing that if they ever got good enough, Dave announced, “It would be amazing to have him in the band.”
Born in the parish of Clarendon, Jamaica, Lionel Augustus Martin (known to all as Saxa) was a graduate of the Alpha Boys School with Rico Rodriguez. Coming to England in the late 1950s, Saxa played in various pickup bands, touring with the likes of Desmond Dekker and Laurel Aitken and, as he frequently boasted, jamming with a budding Beatles in Liverpool at a late-night blues. With no time to waste, the group introduced themselves and asked Saxa to come and play with them at a party in Selly Oak. “I got in the van and there was this old guy sitting on the backseat wearing a floppy hat and earrings,” recalls Ranking Roger. “He was at least thirty years older than me, and somebody said, ‘This is Saxa. He’s a friend of Everett’s.’” At the soundcheck, asked if he wanted to know what key the song was in, Saxa responded, “Cha!” and kissed his lips. “You just play and me’ll blow.” Stunned by his rudeness, Roger muttered to himself, “‘Who is this loudmouth?’ He was friendly enough but he was loud and insistent: ‘Get me another drink. What time are we going on?’ He was a proper old Jamaican guy. Then he took out his saxophone and started warming up. I instantly felt my irritation melting; it was the way he blew the horn. It sounded like water drops. He had this warm, unique sound but all I could hear him saying was, ‘Get me another brandy.’”
Onstage, Saxa was in his element. “You couldn’t stop him,” continues Roger. “It sounded amazing. He was playing jazz mixed in with calypso over punky reggae and improvised riffs. We came offstage and he said, ‘You boys are the band for me. I’ve waited all my life for you boys. Me drop dead onstage with you. We’s boys’ musicians.’” Equally effusive, Dave Wakeling raved to Smash Hits about their newest member bringing a fresh feel to the sound. “Suddenly you could have a punky song and you’d get a slow mournful jazz solo played over it that really puts it in a different vein. The first time I heard ‘Mirror in the Bathroom’ with sax on it, I thought, Oh yeah! That’s what the song’s about! It clearly gave it a whole new meaning.”
Having found the missing link, the Beat readied themselves to record for 2 Tone. “We thought about doing one of our own songs but we had to be sure about the single,” said Dave Wakeling. “It had to have impact so we were confident of doing well.” Reasoning that “Tears of a Clown” better suited the 2 Tone ethos, John Mostyn adds, “We weren’t going to give them our best song [‘Mirror in the Bathroom’], nor Chrysalis the publishing rights for the next five years.” Conscious of releasing a single late in the year and by a new band, David Steele says, “We knew we wouldn’t have much time to get people to listen to the song, so we’d have to do one that they already knew, and ‘Tears of a Clown’ had already been going down well live. We’d always thought ‘Mirror in the Bathroom’ would be our single but it had quite depressing lyrics, hard lyrics, and it would have taken a few weeks for people to get into it, and right before Christmas it would probably have got lost.”
Further reasoning that Madness played “Tears of a Clown” live, Andy Cox divulged to the New Musical Express that, if not the Beat, then another 2 Tone band would surely record the song. “I mean,” he said, “the Merton Parkas have got a really terrible version and it could also be rereleased, so if we don’t do it now, we may lose our chance.” More revealing, and contrary to popular memory, Ranking Roger claimed in an interview with Record Mirror in January 1980 that another song, “Ranking Full Stop,” was to be the Beat’s first single. “We tried to record it but it just didn’t work out, so we had to put back the release date. With Christmas only a few weeks away we decided to release ‘Tears of a Clown’ because we thought it would pick up more airplay.”
Alluding to an aborted recording session at Horizon Studios, here, once again, memories are inconsistent. John Mostyn says the session was with Roger Lomas. For his part, Lomas says he cannot ever remember working with the Beat. Meanwhile, Bob Sargeant claims the session took place in the first week of November after John Mostyn said to him, “You don’t mind coming up to Coventry to record this, do you?” Adding weight to his recollection, Sargeant tells a culinary anecdote with marked attention to detail. “So I made the trip to Coventry. I stayed in a well dodgy bed-and-breakfast called the Raja Guest House. It was cheap and cheerful. Then all through the night, I could hear people going up and down corridors and doors slamming. It went on until six in the morning. I thought, What the fuck’s going on here? I went down for breakfast the next morning and a guy in a turban walked in and asked if I wanted tea or coffee. I said, ‘Coffee, please.’ He brought me a bowl that had Heinz baked beans in it, and a bowl of eggs that had been shelled and dropped into the beans, and a spoon. That was breakfast! When I went to Horizon, I hated the place. The drum kit was already set up and had a bass drum the size of a military band. It sounded terrible.”
The recording of “Ranking Full Stop” was hampered by technical inefficiency when Roger reached the last line of the song, I said stop, and the track played on repeatedly. Defeated, Bob Sargeant turned to the band and said, “I think you should come down to London. I know a studio there back to front.” “Yes!” John Mostyn cried from the back of the room. “Let’s do it straightaway!” Relocated to Sound Suite in Islington, and with sixteen-track facilities at their disposal, the Beat worked fast. On the first day, the group recorded three takes of “Tears of a Clown” and overdubbed additional guitars and vocal parts. Mixed on day two, “Tears of a Clown”—the definite article now omitted from Smokey Robinson’s title—featured a distinctly updated arrangement. Where on the original the introduction included a top line played by a piccolo and a harpsichord, complemented by oboe and bass bassoon, Andy Cox substituted the orchestration with a double-tracked guitar riff. “Keep it simple but melodic,” enthused Sargeant, before replicating the guitar figure with an ornate xylophone descant. “The music has to make sense.”
When the band turned their attention to “Ranking Full Stop,” Dave Wakeling suggested that Roger should record his vocal in the bathroom for its natural echo. Still only sixteen years old at the time, Roger now says, “It was my chance to show my light.” Freestyling at the microphone, Roger’s youthful energy imbued the song with vigor and dazzling certitude. Dismissing the title as meaningless, Roger says he saw the song more as a dance: I will really tell you and show you how to do the Ranking Full Stop: you move to your left and then move to your right. Propelled into action with a dramatic drum roll, Everett Morton likens his trademark fill to “the sound of someone falling down the stairs. I’m left-handed,” he says by way of explanation. “You’re supposed to lead with your right hand but I lead with my left hand instead. That’s what makes it so different.”
Both songs complete, the Beat forwarded alternative mixes of “Tears of a Clown” and “Ranking Full Stop” for record company approval. Midway through the 2 Tone Tour, Jerry canvassed opinion by asking the traveling entourage to vote for their favored version. “I’ve always found that incredible,” marvels Dave Wakeling. “Anybody can have their say in the running of the 2 Tone organization.” But one person not impressed was Laurel Aitken. Hearing “Ranking Full Stop,” the Jamaican singer declared it a copy of his own song “Pussy Price” and threatened to take legal action. “I said, ‘You tell me where your lyrics are on there?’” spits Ranking Roger. “It sounded nothing like our tune.” Yet, another song, “Mr. Full Stop—written by Eddy Grant and recorded by the Original Africans in 1967—shared lyrical similarities. “I’d never heard ‘Mr. Full Stop,’” remonstrates Roger. Then seemingly contradicting himself, he says that the Beat used to play “Mr. Full Stop” in their early days. “Dave said, ‘Here you go, Roger. These are the lyrics.’ I was like, ‘What do you mean, these are the lyrics? You want me to toast another man’s words. I can’t do that. I’ve got my own style.’” Insistent that the likeness was coincidental, David Steele argues, “It’s three chords, so it’s a lot of songs. We did a few cover versions like that, the Jolly Brothers’s ‘Conscious Man’ and ‘Sweet and Dandy’ by the Maytals, but they never quite worked out.”
As 2 Tone pressed ahead with its release, the reaction was instant. Only a few months earlier, the Beat had played to small audiences, grateful to the few people who danced. Abruptly, all that changed. “Everyone went mad, right from the start,” David Steele reflected after a gig at the Electric Ballroom. “Yet we were exactly the same group playing exactly the same stuff.” Dave Wakeling recalls the group going down badly on another occasion and the audience shouting. “So we announced that the next song was ‘an old mod number’ and they went crazy, dancing like fuck!”
On December 8, 1979, “Tears of a Clown”—coupled with “Ranking Full Stop”—entered the UK chart at number sixty-seven. Unconcerned by its lowly position, John Mostyn waited patiently, confident success would only be a matter of time. “We did our first Top of the Pops and two days later the record jumped to number thirty-one.” The band were ecstatic. “It was bigger than getting the vinyl,” says David Steele. “We grew up with Top of the Pops. It was surreal. It was like being on Star Trek and entering another world. We didn’t have this long period of getting the band together, touring, finding members and writing new songs. Suddenly it just went BAM! It was like a silent film speeded up.”
At the beginning of the year, Ranking Roger was a schoolboy. Nine months later, here he was on national television. “I remember the warm-up presenter saying to the audience, ‘Twenty million people will be watching when this program is broadcast . . .’ I was like, ‘Woah! That’s a third of the population!’” Introducing the band, DJ Mike Read reminded viewers of Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’s number one success with “The Tears of a Clown,” adding, “There’s a new version out which is heading in that direction by a great new group . . . it’s the Beat!” As the camera slowly zoomed in on the stage, the entire band began to dance, except one. “I didn’t know what to do,” says Roger. “Then I remembered being told by the floor manager, ‘Make sure you smile.’ All of a sudden I was grinning like a Cheshire cat!”
Soon after, the band received a telegram from Smokey Robinson. It read: “I have heard six different versions of ‘Tears of a Clown’ already this year. May I congratulate you on recording the best version.” The record-buying public seemingly agreed. Week by week, the single climbed the charts, holding its own against the rush of Christmas releases, until in the second week of January it leapfrogged over David Bowie, the Three Degrees and the Police and landed at number six. After being playlisted on BBC Radio 1, the Beat received a second invitation to appear on Top of the Pops. “The problem was getting Everett to do it because he wouldn’t quit his job at the kettle-spinning factory,” says John Mostyn. “He said to me, ‘I’ll quit when we’ve got Top of the Pops.’ When I said, ‘We’re recording Wednesday,’ he handed in his notice the next day.” Exuding confidence, Roger ditched his stage leathers and bondage trousers and stepped into the 2 Tone look. “I bought a shirt and a trilby and a secondhand green-and-purple-tinted tonic suit,” he recalls. “At the BBC, a cameraman said to me, ‘When you sing, Tears of a clown I’m going down de town, blow this party popper.’” Happy to comply, Roger danced freely onstage, prompting DJ Peter Powell to declare at the end of the performance, “They are something else!”
Excerpted from Chapter 15, “A Show of Gladness: The Beat. UB40. Tears of a Clown” from Too Much Too Young, the 2 Tone Records Story: Rude Boys, Racism, and the Soundtrack of a Generation by Daniel Rachel, courtesy of Akashic Books. Copyright ©Akashic Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Daniel Rachel is a Birmingham-born, best-selling author whose previous works include: Isle of Noises: Conversations with Great British Songwriters; Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone, and Red Wedge; Don’t Look Back in Anger: The Rise and Fall of Cool Britannia; The Lost Album of the Beatles: What If the Beatles Hadn’t Split Up?; One for the Road: The Life & Lyrics of Simon Fowler & Ocean Colour Scene; and Oasis: Knebworth: Two Nights That Will Live Forever. He is also coauthor of Ranking Roger’s autobiography, I Just Can’t Stop It: My Life in the Beat. In 2021, Rachel was a guest curator of the “2 Tone Lives & Legacies” exhibition as part of Coventry Cultural City 2021, and he curated the anniversary edition of the Selecter’s debut album, Too Much Pressure. Rachel’s latest work is Too Much Too Young.
Sarah Zupko Kondeusz
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