An Unauthorised History of Ska

By Stuart Thomas

How does one describe a perfect moment, those instances that occur so rarely in any given human life? Surely that brief second is beyond description? The best skank pits, ones like the one I’m in now, have to come pretty close. But that’s just me placing my essentialist something-or-other-point-of-whatever on it…

I look down and realise I’ve lost a shoe. It must’ve been when I was on about the second sentence of my nonsensical, quart-fuelled introspection. Panning around, I see it held aloft in the hand of the dreadlocked hippie I call my best friend. Oh yes, he’s also been my near-constant pit companion for the last five years. As I hop toward him, his girlfriend pours her drink over some idiot trying to slam dance…

How do I go about trying to explain why ska has such a powerful hold over us, why a circle can seem like Nirvana itself? After all, the people running around in it look like they’re being jolted by powerful surges of electricity. I’m stuck in pretty much the same place as I was during my transcendental reverie.

I could go on a psychoanalytical rampage, or measure endorphin levels and calibrate my results in a rigorous scientific manner. Or, I could go down the least satisfactory path of all and start at the beginning…well, as reasonable a beginning as I can get, anyway. I don’t want to start sounding like one of those crazies who insist that the middle class ‘gangstas’ spouting rubbish about how many “ho’s” they’ve “capped” are the direct descendants of African praise poets. The other reason for choosing to start where I am will become apparent in a moment.

Our story begins in Jamaica in the middle decades of the 20th century. Ska exists, but not as we know it. This is Jamaican ska, a beast that would only be recognisable to us through a few of the moves being practised in the swinging dance halls. What this story needs is a lot of people on a lot of ships heading for a foreign land. It needs diasporas, and it’s about to get it.

In the years following the end of World War II, over half a million West Indians would leave their homes to seek a new life in Britain. Some would leave hoping to escape poverty, others were recruited to fill labour shortages in the massive public works projects taking place in postwar UK.

As with many immigrants, they weren’t given the warmest of welcomes. Given the working class fields they were going into, it was inevitable that they would come into contact with England’s
traditionally conservative working classes. Some of these contacts turned into clashes, sometimes riots. Tinged with reggae, ska started getting political.

In the 1970s this ferment began to garner the attention of musicians and writers in the punk scene. We’re still not quite at the ska we know today though…this is 2 Tone, named after 2 Tone records. Bands like ‘The Specials’ and ‘Madness’ played a significant role in exposing this music to the British mainstream. Collaborations such as those between ‘The Specials’ and ‘The Clash’ brought the two genres even closer.
By the time the 1980s rolled around, punk was retreating from the public imagination to return to its
stolen couch in whatever squat it had crawled out from. In the meantime, 2 Tone had – perhaps a little ironically – made its way back across the Atlantic. In the sunshine of California the ‘Third Wave’ of ska emerged. This is probably the most punk of the ska-punk combinations. It’s also the one that would be most recognisable to us with its fast-paced horn sections and the heavily accented offbeat (basically kept by the bassist and drummer – I can’t really explain it but I’ll point it out next time you see me at a ska show). I didn’t recognise any of the bands cited in my research for this part of the article until those that emerged in the 1990s, so I’ll list those anyway.

I won’t say that these bands represent ‘Third Wave’, but they were influenced by the important ‘Third Wave’ bands and you’re more likely to have heard of them. Bands like ‘Sublime’, ‘Save Ferris’ and ‘Reel Big Fish’ became the guardians of the California ska scene. More fundamentally, punk bands like ‘Rancid’ and ‘NOFX’ became heavily influenced by this movement.

Today ska is global, from Switzerland’s Skaladdin (Swiss Cow Rock) to our own shores, where ska has been visible for a while now. The SA Rock upsurge in the 1990s of bands like ‘BOO!’ and ‘The Springbok Nude Girls’ probably saw the influence at its most visible. Today, bands like ‘Hog Hoggidy Hog’, ‘Fuzigish’ and ‘Captain Stu and the Llamas’ have become stalwarts of the SA music scene and kept ska-punk at the forefront. If you really want to get your boots on and ‘skank it up old school’ though, there’s only one name you need to know: ‘The Rudimentals’.

“A swinging pit and ‘Radio Skaweto’ live, now that’s Nirvana”. The Hippie turns to me and asks me what planet I’m from. It’s too late to answer though, the sax and horn players have just struck up again, the drummer is swinging like a child in a park and the guitarists are just about to go crazy. Besides, someone has to make sure this is done right.