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The Specials: Ghost Town video analysis The video combines eerie shots of a deserted East End of London with the band in a 1962 Vauxhall Cresta lip syncing. I can remember walking out of a rehearsal in total despair because Neville would not try the ideas. [20], "Ghost Town: The song that defined an era turns 30", The Specials: How Ghost Town defined an era, "Ghost Town - The Specials | Listen, Appearances, Song Review", "The Specials 'Ghost Town' – Classic Tracks", "Ghost Town/Why?/Friday Night Saturday Morning", "The Specials' 'Ghost Town' Finds New Life Amid U.K. Lockdown", "2 Tone Records - Ghost Town - CHS TT12 17", "2 Tone Records - Ghost Town (revisited) - CHS TT30", "Specials, The / Special Productions - Ghost Town Revisited (Vinyl) at Discogs", The Irish Charts – Search Results – Ghost Town", Dutchcharts.nl – The Specials – Ghost Town", Norwegiancharts.com – The Specials – Ghost Town", A page about the single on a 2 Tone Records fansite, An interview about the song with John Collins, the producer, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ghost_Town_(Specials_song)&oldid=983980052, Pages using infobox song with unknown parameters, Singlechart usages for Belgium (Flanders), Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 17 October 2020, at 12:35. ghost town phrase. But, as a consequence, Specials gigs began to attract the hostile presence of groups like the National Front and the British Movement. You could see that frustration and anger in the audience. [1] The song spent three weeks at number one and 10 weeks in total in the top 40 of the UK Singles Chart. We danced and sang and the music played in the boom town. Published October 2, 2020. Dammers took a year to write "Ghost Town" and "begged" his bandmates to record it to his specifications. But Les Back, professor of sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, who has studied the 2 Tone phenomenon, is not surprised that the track has endured, regardless of the political context. He's a singer and an actor, but as a songwriter Paul helped make Kermit a cultured frog, turned a bank commercial into a huge hit and made love both "exciting and new" and "soft as an easy chair. the video is shot in colour though. "Ghost Town was a rough time for the band members," recalls Bradbury. "Ghost Town" is a song by the British two-tone band the Specials, released on 12 June 1981. The Specials are a Ska/2 tone band from Coventry, England and were at the height of their success between 1977 and 1984. When people rush to either condemn or condone a riot rather than taking time to understand it they are merely assuming their usual positions, like commentators after 9/11 who, wrote Greil Marcus, "stepped forward to deny that anything had been done that required any rethinking of anything at all. If the band's ability to articulate the mood of the era can be traced anywhere, it is surely in Coventry, where they were based. Pop music was a completely different thing then. The video, directed by Barney Bubbles, consists of bass player Panter driving the band around London in a 1961 Vauxhall Cresta, intercut with views of streets and buildings filmed from the moving vehicle, and ends with a shot of the band standing on the banks of the River Thames at low tide. When the riots did break out, the Specials found the experience frightening rather than vindicating. The video's locations include driving through the Rotherhithe Tunnel and around semi-derelict areas of the East End before ending up in the financial district of the City of London in the early hours of daylight on Sunday morning, where the streets were deserted as it was the weekend. The site is now the city library. [4][5][6], The tour for the group's More Specials album in autumn 1980 had been a fraught experience: already tired from a long touring schedule and with several band members at odds with keyboardist and band leader Jerry Dammers over his decision to incorporate "muzak" keyboard sounds on the album, several of the gigs descended into audience violence. What does ghost town expression mean? I remember Lynval rushing into the control room while they were doing it going, 'No, no, no, it sounds wrong! However, the song was hailed by the contemporary UK music press as a major piece of popular social commentary,[2][3] and all three of the major UK music magazines of the time awarded "Ghost Town" the accolade of "Single of the Year" for 1981. I wanted the drums in mono on one track, the bass in mono on another and the rhythm – that shuffle organ and Lynval's DI'd guitar – on another. The Kate Bush song "Running Up That Hill" is about making a deal with God to switch lives with your partner so there would be no more misunderstandings. It's hard to explain how powerful it sounded. It tends to be sonically of the moment ("NOW music," Widgery added) and to embody the crisis in the music itself rather than the lyrics. "We were more or less at each other's throats. spoke mechanically of "mindless" violence. As the global economy shudders, that kind of angst is not a localised phenomenon and this will not be the only explosion. The region's mayor calls on Boris Johnson to negotiate with him over stricter Covid-19 curbs. [4][5][6] AllMusic's review of the original single argued that the song was the band's "crowning achievement". "So it's a combination of the personal and the universal. Crisis music is a subset of protest music that is not always perceived as such because it captures a mood of anxiety and imminent collapse, and offers no solutions. In its nauseous fatalism Ghost Town expresses how I've felt watching the chaos on London streets over the past few days. In the case of this promotional video, i think the aim is purely to promote the band and their message (which i will come to later) and get it out to people rather than tell a story or entertain people. An interview with Frankie Valli, who talks about why his songs - both solo and with The Four Seasons - have endured, and reflects on his time as Rusty Millio on The Sopranos. Using just eight tracks limited Collins' recording possibilities, but as a reggae producer he decided to use the common reggae method of recording everything in mono: "As we were recording eight-track, I did go with a track plan. What's it like to work in Trump's White House? 'Ghost Town' wasn't a free-for-all jam session. The lyric, "All the clubs have been closed down," refers to the Locarno in Coventry. [10], As it had not been decided where exactly the backing vocals would be used, Terry Hall, Staple, Golding and Dammers sang a full backing vocal track throughout the song, which Collins used to his advantage as the lyric "this town is coming like a ghost town" had become like a "hypnotic chant" by the end of the song. Collins wanted the song to sound more like a Sly and Robbie roots reggae track, so he brought a copy of a Sly and Robbie-produced single, "What a Feeling" by Gregory Isaacs, to the studio so that drummer John Bradbury could mimic the drum sound. Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town? Wrong!'"[3]. If you are planning ahead, Ghost Town would make a … I can't help notice that a common newspaper headline echoes the title of a Clash crisis song, London's Burning, but the one most mentioned over the last few days is Ghost Town by the Specials. In the US, the 1967 Detroit riot hastened the city's decline and was one of the events that fostered a rightwing backlash during the Nixon years. We had almost been written off and then "Ghost Town" came out of the blue. The city's car industry had brought prosperity and attracted incomers from across the UK and the Commonwealth, meaning the future Specials grew up in the 1960s listening to a mixture of British and American pop and Jamaican ska. The video focuses on the band all driving in one car, around an empty city, which fits with the title of the song. [16][17] Although initial reviews of the single in the UK music press were lukewarm, by the end of the year the song had won over the critics to be named "Single of the Year" in Melody Maker, NME and Sounds, the UK's top three weekly music magazines at the time. This is an analysis of the music video for their song ". If it became a ghost town with everybody moving from the violence and lack of jobs, it's now a hideous Frankestein's monster of relics from a bygone age mixed with attempts at … Apart from UB40's Don't Let It Pass You By and the Jam's Funeral Pyre, no other songs in the top 40 at the time spoke to what was going on in Britain's inner cities, unless I missed some coded messages in Body Talk. Certain genres are aflame with crisis music: late-60s rock, mid-70s reggae, punk, early-90s hip-hop, the bleaker end of grime and dubstep. In an interview in 2011, Dammers explained how witnessing this event inspired his composition: The overall sense I wanted to convey was impending doom. I was 11 when it was released and I don't remember going, 'What's this?' I can't say the Daily Mail has ever disappointed me.). Ghost Town by the Specials is 30 years old. [2], The song experienced a thematic resurgence on music streaming platforms in 2020, after lockdown orders were placed following the COVID-19 pandemic. That definitely makes you play in a certain way.". The song was influenced by scenes noted during the band's UK tour. "But at the same time it's timelessly resonant. "It was clear that something was very, very, wrong," the song's writer, Jerry Dammers, has said. But the immediate outcome makes the lives of residents – many of whom are every bit as deprived as the rioters – even worse than they were last week and opens the door to an authoritarian response.

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