Ska'd for Life: A Personal Journey with The Specials

Product Information

DOGP have enjoyed good support from the very word go but neither Silky nor Top Kat have forgotten the years they spent learning the ropes with their previous bands. We enjoy having a DIY label as much as we enjoy the music side of things. It is empowering. It is inspiring to us. Listen to any of DOGP’s debut album 69 Candy Street or watch any of their slightly south of sensible videos and you can see that Madness influence burning brightly. We have a 30-day return policy, which means you have 30 days after receiving your item to request a return.

There's something -particularly charged, too, about familiar songs sung by a familiar voice, even if it's the first time song and voice have met in public. Suggs's matter-of-fact staccato is unmistakable, and a number of the songs Madness essay are standards. There's Desmond Dekker's 'Israelites', a touchstone not badly damaged here by the Madness treatment. There's Bob Marley's 'So Much Trouble in the World', more consolatory than Marley's righteous original. As bass player with the Specials, in his second-hand suit and pork pie hat, Horace Panter was a member of one of the most innovative and exciting bands to come snarling out of the punk era. Founded by Jerry Damners, their fusion of punk, reggae and ska created a new musical fashion, spearheaded by their own record label Two Tone. They stood for unity and racial harmony in a polarised society. They even got British men dancing again. Horace vividly describes his life before The Specials, the band's formation, their meteoric rise to the top of the charts, and their equally swift disintegration.I was in my previous band for 13 years and it was a gruelling apprenticeship,” said Silky. “We had a record deal but it didn’t work out and we lost money at gigs. In Ska'd for Life Horace takes the reader on a musical odyssey with the Specials from their early days on Coventry's punk circuit to chart storming success with singles like 'Too Much Too Young' and the eerily prescient 'Ghost Town', released as the race riots saw Toxteth and Brixton go up in flames. Written with wry humour, taking an affectionate look at a band whose sublime music remains influential today, this is a must for all Specials fans.

Though the band comprises just the two of them, they regularly perform as a nine-piece including a full brass section and it’s clear these guys are taking having fun very seriously indeed. It was animated and it was fun – it was like watching a musical. My younger brothers were still in nappies but we’d all be together skanking to it. I decided there and then that that was what I wanted to do.” Lots of nice photos included tho not enough discussion of the clothes (yeah, yeah, he discusses why not but still!). It's also interesting because this came out like a year before they all reunited (sort of...) and he's very generous in his evaluations of everyone's contributions and pretty forgiving of everyone's various quirks and you do kiiiind of wonder whether he'd write some of this the same way now. Overall tho, it's a fun read and a neat look at one of my cat's favourite bands. Madness were my first musical love,” he said. “I remember when I was five my dad gave me a copy of Divine Madness in VHS and from that moment I just wanted to be Suggs!

And that meant not only returning to his first musical love, ska, but also to the summer house at the bottom of his nan’s garden in Warley, Brentwood, where he wrote and rehearsed his very first songs. The result is that he and bandmate Top Kat – another Essex boy, from Ongar – have developed a sound that’s classy, brassy, fun and frisky and has grown steadily since the formation of DOGP in 2016. Interesting account of Horace's time as bass player for The Specials, from meeting Jerry Dammers in the mid 70's to playing small clubs and pubs with The Coventry Automatics and the eventual rise and fall of The Specials, one of the UK's biggest bands from 1979 to 1981.