Memoir of the release of the Specials first album 19th October 1979. Rumours of an anti-racist band in Worcester
Its 45 years since the release of the Specials first LP and its fair to say that it came out of a culture but also helped to create that culture.
From September 1978 until June 1979 I was living in Worcester and Birmingham studying for a PGCE a post-graduate teaching qualification. I duly qualified as a sociology teacher but in the meantime in May 1979 Mrs Thatcher had been elected and the demand for such subjects became limited, or cancelled as would be said in 2024.
While in Worcester and Birmingham I became aware of a band called the Specials. They came from Coventry but played gigs across the West Midlands. They had a hit with a single Gangsters as the Specials aka.
The small group of Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism supporters in Worcester of which I was one wondered who they were. We gathered they were anti-racists but in the pre-interweb days information on the band was scant.
They clearly came out of the culture RAR had created- we are black, we are white we are dynamite- but they had also been an important part of the growth of that culture.
The first record underlined the point, but it’s a reminder about the informal, grassroots West Midlands culture it came out of.
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