"We’re not just a dance band, we’ve got things to say.” Pauline Black, lead singer with The Selecter, succinctly pins down what made the era of 2-Tone Records so important to the British music scene at the end of the 1970s.
A consortium of bands reworked Jamaican ska, calypso and reggae beats and imbued them with punk energy and their own socially conscious lyrics. In an era when the National Front stirred up racial hatred, the 2-Tone philosophy was all about mixing up young people with a multicultural agenda – two-tone in every way. And as well as black and white musicians up on stage together, there were powerful women performers among the skanking men, which signalled a revolutionary moment in the UK music industry. Watching the seven female musicians who made up The Bodysnatchers belt out Easy Life on stage, with no need for the hypersexualised posing that women artists seem obliged to deliver today, was a revelatory flash back. These rude girls, led by Rhoda Dakar, owned their right to perform with the same joyful authority as their male counterparts.
The concert film Dance Craze is a high-energy record of a series of concerts performed from Portsmouth to London and from Coventry to Liverpool, as well as in the US. It was filmed in 1980 and released in cinemas for fans of The Specials, Madness, Bad Manners, The Beat and The Bodysnatchers.
Shot on Super 35 with Steadycam allowing total mobility, it enables us to experience the concerts from the stage. We are up there with the performers rather than watching them from the perspective of static cameras safely anchored in the stalls.
It was thought lost for decades, but a 70mm print from 1981 belonging to cinematographer Joe Dunton has been given the 4K restoration treatment by the BFI and Chrysalis Records.
Among the Blu-ray extras is a neat little short that demonstrates what the battered old print looked like before restoration – the miracles worked by colour correction and painstaking digital grading. The sound has also been given a major polishing and the overall result is a visual and aural treat for those of us who remember the original gigs and treasure the 45s, mine now dusty and scratched but still bearing the secret messages of Porky's Prime Cuts. The deluxe edition of Dance Craze comes complete with a 27-track film soundtrack with different mixes for the superfans.
Director Joe Massot, an American living in the UK, had part-directed a Led Zeppelin concert film and had worked with George Harrison, but it was his son’s passion for the 2-Tone bands that led him to film the series of concerts.
Massot intercuts the bands’ live performances with nuggets of archaic 1950s newsreels, complete with cut glass-accented observations about British pop music and dance crazes. It’s an ingenious way to break up the documentary and set the 2-Tone bands in a historical framework.
The layers of archival treats on this DVD/Blu-ray release include a BBC Arena that sent NME "cub reporter" Adrian Thrills to the chaotic offices of the record label in Coventry, where Jerry Dammers, the founder of The Specials, and the rest of the band were in fine form.