Special brew

MAYBE you had to be there, but Gangsters really was one of those singles which just stopped you dead in your tracks the first time you heard it.

I remember the circumstances well. A friend of ours, a headmaster's son, had given himself the style makeover of all time and was now rather magnificently insisting upon being called Makka Splaff, after the Steel Pulse track of the same name.

In due course he became "Big Makkus" and was always a reassuring presence with his gentle, drily witty demeanour, wrapped up tightly against the Scottish elements in his infamous red, green and gold rasta scarf.

His attic bedroom, dimly lit with an orange bulb which gave off about as much illumination as a blush, was not just a dangerously toxic tip but also a repository of arcane art, where Charles Mingus albums and Jack Kerouac novels rubbed shoulders among the ordure.

Makkus had arguably the most fully-functioning radar out of the lot of us, and had picked up on the existence of The Specials (or The Special AKA as they were then) long before everyone else. A bunch of us - possibly, I couldn't really see who else was there - trooped round one afternoon and watched Makkus, with due ceremony, fumbling his way to the stereo in Braille and placing Gangsters on the turntable.

A galvanising moment. Nowadays, ska and punk are as indivisible and inevitable a combination as superglue and fingers, but back then we'd never heard anything like it, and it just sounded like the coolest thing on earth and in all probability beyond.

With its monochromatic label and no-nonsense paper sleeve, brusquely stamped with the bare minimum of detail, the artefact itself seemed to echo the lean hunger and interracial integrity of the band, and the feeling that something pure and pertinent was pushing through the concrete was inescapable and thrilling.

This truly was lightning in a bottle, and the amazing thing is that The Specials went on to capture it again, in 1981, when the gaunt, funereal Ghost Town went to number 1. What a shame it is that they were so rapidly consumed by inner tensions and petty rivalries: the woods may be full of ska/punk bands these days, but we'll never see the likes of The Specials again.