Jerry Dammers interview: booted out of the band I founded

Published: 5:19PM GMT 03 March 2010

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Two days prior to the proceed of his new tour, Jerry Dammers, the designer of 2-Tone and non-participant in the reunion of his former organisation the Specials, has been stricken with a shaken headache.

After fumbling with a span of aspirins as though they are worry-beads for multiform minutes, he eventually posts the pills by the opening of his blank top front teeth. "Im really stressed. Has the mannequin got the rubber suit? Wheres the card box from the Ukraine? Have we got the Thai guitar?" He mocks a personal infirmity that has regularly co-existed with a unaffected fortitude.

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In a south London operation space we are deliberating his project, Dammers Spatial AKA Orchestra "My Sun Ra reverence group," as he jokingly defines the idealist 18-musician enterprise, referencing the individualist jazz soothsayer whose component creates up majority of the set. The dates proceed tonight in Coventry .

First recognised on a humour ("Before I had time to shift my mind") for the reopening of Londons Roundhouse, the beauty and quick mind of the Spatial AKA Orchestras singular prior performances piece high art statement, piece dada-ist fun have already supposing the try with mythological status.

They are a sign that universe enlightenment would have lacked copiousness but Dammerss desirous achievements: the 2-Tone tag on that the Specials galloping ska annals were expelled additionally sired Madness, the Selecter, and by organisation the Beat; Ghost Town, the Specials vivid number-one, created by Dammers in 1981 after he had noticed the mercantile corrupt that had befallen Britain; and the Free Nelson Mandela single, his majority poignant work, a hauntingly evocative strain and general anthem for the anti-apartheid movement.

Such an substantial bequest notwithstanding, however, in the operation college of music it is usually moments prior to the theme veers off from the Sun Ra attempt to the alternative organisation in Dammerss hold up the Specials. Since they began personification together again last year on a 30th-anniversary debate but him they have had substantial success. "Nostalgia was deliberate a mental seizure in the Victorian era, a dim mania with the past," he says jokingly.

"It wasnt what I longed for to do with the reunion when I creatively instituted it, prior to various businessmen got involved. I longed for to proceed it from a utterly opposite angle, by recording new material."

About 6 years ago, Dammers reveals, Specials bass-player Horace Panter, guitarist Lynval Golding, and MC Neville Staples went in to a college of music with him to jot down Victims of War, a balance he had created after the conflict of the Iraq campaign. Playing the unreleased strain to me, he describes it with a little correctness as "where Ghost Town left off". Yet it assumingly fell in to an ideological black hole in between the participants.

Dammers additionally had "a integrate of rehearsals" with the alternative 6 strange members. But he wasnt invited back. "I longed for to move the old songs on a bit, supplement something complicated to them. They werent meddlesome at all."

Effectively, he was since the foot from his own endeavor. And at a assembly with one of the benefaction reunions principal instigators, he rught away realised because the incident was impossible. "How are you?" this well-heeled particular had asked him. "Im not so good," replied Dammers. "My father died last week." "I know how you feel," pronounced Mr Moneybags. "I lost a �20,000 Rolex the alternative day."

It is an version that the 54-year-old Dammers obviously sees as a embellishment for the solitary proclivity at the back of the Specials reunion. And one that has caused the keyboards-player genuine pain: in his eyes his baby has been stolen from him, by people whose motives he questions: "The songs were about my life," he says, honestly sad. However, when his dim mood softens, he will wryly confess that he shaped the Specials usually so hed have a organisation to fool around his songs.

That anxiety to the genocide of his father, Horace, is telling. Just as Jerry helped to unleash a new prophesy of Coventry by 2-Tone Records defiantly anti-racist stance, so additionally did Horace, by a some-more approved course. Appointed in 1965 as Canon Residentiary at the newly made up Coventry Cathedral broken by German bombing in World War II the musicians father was active in the general settlement movement.

Horace Dammers, who died in 2004, was described to me by a � la mode part of of the preaching as "a really pristine man". You clarity that Jerry hereditary his genes: a former art tyro who is right away a pristine artist, for whom income could never be a projects solitary motivating factor.

With the eighteen members, after all, the Spatial AKA Orchestra is roughly determinedly uncommercial. "The concerts have a kind of baleful theme," says Dammers. "I do hold that the human competition is in a bad way, with really critical problems of misery and disease. And jazz musicians similar to Sun Ra had a perspective of this: his line on how he and his associate musicians were from Saturn was a approach of describing how black people had been released from mainstream American society.

"But people shouldnt be concerned were being as well serious. Weve additionally hung on to a tacky stone element. Although were additionally you do a little of my own component Ghost Town and Man at C&A Im perplexing to be a tribute-band purist.

"Originality is a bit old hat," he concludes gnomically. "Its been finished before. As Sun Ra said, the probable has already been done."

Jerry Dammers Spatial AKA fool around Warwick Arts Centre tonight, afterwards touring.