The English Beat play Bumbershoot at 9:30 p.m. on Monday, September 6.
Between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, dance clubs all over the world pulsed with a different backbeat as a small army of British kids picked up instruments and started their own scene. The movement became known as the second wave of ska, or two-tone, and it injected reggae and soul music with the do-it-yourself spirit of punk. Bands like Madness, the Specials, and Selecter gave clubgoers an upbeat alternative to punk’s strident rebel rallying cry by serving up butt-shaking, danceable beats with sociopolitical lyrics.
Even amongst that stable of great bands, the English Beat stood out. They knew how to get a crowd moving like any good dance group, could deliver lyrics as persuasive as any Gang of Four polemic (Exhibit A for the defense: the addictive and acerbic "Stand Down, Margaret"), and produced an incredible armada of classic pop songs over the course of their three albums.
Dave Wakeling, the English Beat’s lead singer and guitarist, crooned his songs in a supple baritone that felt incongruous coming from a boyish white kid. And in addition to tackling topicality, his lyrics addressed the perils, joys, and comic absurdities of that old devil Love with disarming and welcome sophistication. If Cole Porter had grown up in Birmingham, England on a steady diet of Prince Buster and Motown, he’d have written songs like Dave Wakeling’s.
The English Beat folded in 1983, and Wakeling followed that up with a stint in the pop band General Public and various solo projects. Most recently, however, the self-described troubadour’s been on the road with a reformed English Beat for the last five years. He’s the only original member in the current stateside incarnation of the band, but he’s surrounded himself with a tight and empathetic group of young guns who help him deliver the old hits with a spark that sets the proceedings head-and-shoulders above your standard nostalgia act.
My interview with Wakeling gets off to a shaky start: An emergency with the musical equipment at his gig that day offsets our conversation by an hour, and I’m forced to call him from work (my taping equipment only works on a landline, something I no longer possess in this shiny 21st century). Even after we finally connect, his cell phone drops out about twenty minutes into our chat, and when he calls my work to get back to me, he runs afoul of our very regimented receptionist, hilariously (more on that later). But it’s well worth it. You don’t get to talk to the Paul McCartney of dance pop every day of the year.
Over the course of nearly ninety minutes, Wakeling covers everything from his old bandmates to new projects to the Seattle music scene with candor, intelligence, and an infectious sense of humor. It’s an embarrassment of riches, interview-wise, so much so that I have to edit it considerably. As for the unexpurgated interview, I figure I’ll just save it for later.
Tell me a little about your current live show. This is your second time stopping in Seattle in just a couple of months.
We like playing Seattle as much as, if not more than, most places in the country. It's one of our favorite places to play, and I think in main part it's because we don't play there very often. When you're planning tours, Seattle can sometimes get missed out, unless you can make a loop out of it in between locations like Boise and Vancouver. In some ways, it may have worked to our benefit, because there are certain places in California where we've played so often that everyone knows all the words, and most everything I'm going to say [laughs]. We tend to play to big and excited crowds in Seattle: There's a good deal of anticipation because they haven't seen us in awhile. We only tend to play Seattle once a year.
What can people expect from your Bumbershoot set that they haven't seen in the past?
Well, there'll be some of these new songs I've been showing off about. We'll probably play "How Can You Stand There," which is an up-tempo ska rocker with an African lilt in the background. We'll probably play "The Love You Give Lasts Forever," which is sort of an English Beat power-pop model. It has a fabulous clap-along aspect, and there's a timely message, I think. That seems to be going down really well.
The current incarnation of the Beat is really tight instrumentally.
They are so tight, I started to get worried—we’re not becoming all slick now, are we [laughs]? Yeah, we’ve got the hang of it by now. We changed our saxophone player in the last few months, and this chap Matt Morrish is a winner. He has Saxa’s feel and style of play, and a wide repertoire of jazz tidbits and cameos to draw from.
The English Beat’s original sax player Saxa was amazing. His were huge shoes to fill, so I’ve heard that you’re pretty hard on your sax players as a result. Is that still the case?
Unfortunately, we thought we’d always be using this crazy Jamaican guy that drank too much rum, forever. He blossomed over the course of three albums: I think his solo on "Mirror in the Bathroom" ended up in a coffee table book of the 100 Greatest Jazz Saxophone Solos of the Twentieth Century. So it is quite a job for a young fella to take on board. Plus you want them to be able to express themselves as well. I don’t want nobody coming in, just playing someone else’s parts—‘cause that won’t work. I like them to learn the parts, then forget them. The lineup now is, I feel, the best it’s ever been; and I’m glad I got the team together for for some [new] recordings.
From what I’ve heard, you’re still on good terms with the original members of the band.
We seem to be getting on great right now. It’s had its ups and downs. [The few conflicts] are usually, I’d say, first instigated by people coming in to represent one or more of us. And in order to try and impress you, they sort of tread over lines and disappoint other original members of the band. That’s usually been the start of any trouble. Of course, a group only splits up when they start to become slightly distrustful of each another anyway, which is why reforming groups sometimes to me seems like about as much fun as trying to find the first five people you’ve had sex with, inviting them all to dinner, and expecting them all to just get on great [laughs]! I think what’s happened is it’s mellowed into a warm pride in the legacy of the group; of what we managed to achieve. Plus, the songs don’t sound [like] crap. Everyone in the [original lineup] is quite surprised that the songs still seem organic, and they still made a decent point. In fact, some of the political points seem even more pointed now than they did at the time.
Your songwriting with the English Beat revealed a lot of influences outside ska and rocksteady. Obviously you guys were listening to things like Desmond Dekker, the Skatalites, and Motown soul, but what influences outside of those made the strongest impressions on you as a songwriter when you started out?
Van Morrison; The Velvet Underground; Gene Pitney; The Buzzcocks; Elvis Costello; Nick Lowe; Dave Edmunds; The Monkees; Petula Clark; Burt Bacharach; the art of the three-minute pop single that would leave you longing for more as it fades out a bit too quickly and you find yourself singing the title by yourself, and you want to hear the song again straight away. That's what I like. I like that more than anything. I like it way more than albums.
It was the punk thing that opened the doors for me, because in the early seventies it was all pomp and glory. It seemed like groups were carved out of stone. Then I heard Devo’s version of ‘Satisfaction,’ and thought it sounded like ‘Satisfaction’ mixed with ‘Cherry Oh Baby’. I was like, "My god, if you can do that and make it sound as good as that, then I want to be in a group. And there were the Buzzcocks, who could have three perfect pop singles in ten minutes. And you wanted to hear all three of them again. I was like, yep, I want to be in a group now.
One of the bedrocks of a lot of your work is a really strong dance beat, which is especially cherished by people in these times.
It's really useful. It's as good as a massage during a recession, and it's cheaper, you know? And it connects you with other people.
I've always felt more comfortable in my own skin, and more comfortable in the world, when I was dancing. What struck me when I was a teenager and going to clubs was: You'd have songs that you liked, and then you'd hear them in a club and you'd be dancing to it; and it'd catch you at just the right moment. All of a sudden you've got all of the inferences in the lyrics--some of which had passed you by before. The next time you heard it when you were sitting at home, you haven't made it up just because you were full of the fury of the club. No, you'd caught something there that the songwriter had hinted at; that he was alluding to. But I would spot that very often when I was dancing.
I'm not a particularly good dancer [laughs], either, so I had to come up with a dance beat that people like me could dance to [hearty laughter]; a universal, "How irresistible is that?" sort of mixture between pop, reggae and soul beats that--if you're an accomplished dancer--gives you many opportunities to clear a space for yourself on the floor. And if you're not that much of a dancer, you can just join along with the pulse of the crowd, and your dancing becomes more exuberant as the show goes on. That can help you get over Hump Day...
I'm really glad to be a troubadour in these awful times, and to have picked that sort of music; the sort of beats and grooves that cheer up my heart. And it also gives me the opportunity to sing about stuff that's contentious. If I had the music as contentious as the lyrics are, I'd have people taking potshots at me.
The English Beat's material was sometimes very political, but it was never at the expense of the song. Was maintaining that balance between politics and pop melody a hard one for you to maintain?
Yes. Very delicate, once you realized that you were writing songs and singing songs that people were going to buy that included your political positions on things--which of course change like the seasons. So, yeah, it is a great responsibility, and you realize in the excitement of it to start with, that it's very easy to confuse the stage with the soapbox. You can see how you can actually put more people off of your message than you would attract to it if you come at it too heavy... You learn to insinuate slightly, so somebody'll go, "Hey, what does he mean there?" And then they start thinking, "What do I think about that?" Ah, good. Gotcha!
Your lyrics have a great grasp of emotional politics as well as global politics. How do you feel your songwriting has evolved over the years?
Part of it is: Well, you're getting older, number one. You're likely to have a slightly wider overview than you did when you were younger. You might write a song with one of the basic underlying themes being that you don't understand women, but you're not surprised about it now [laughs]. Whereas, it’s quite a shocker to a young chap. I grew up in an era where equality of the sexes was very important; you didn’t quite know how to treat girls like your equal, and of course not knowing quite how that was done, you treated them like they were guys, and they hated you for it [laughs]. So those sorts of things would make you write songs like "Save it for Later," where you’re just lost. Everybody thinks you’re a grown-up ‘cause you look like one, and you feel more and more like a child. Well, it’s a bit different now, so now you have a bit more of an overview.
For better or for worse, you are who you are. I’ve got one grandchild, and one on the way this week. With some water under the bridge, you have to draw the strands of your own story together and see how it continues on. I have a sense that we’re in for some massive change… You can see now how the twentieth-century conundrums that are facing us are not responding at all well to twentieth-century solutions. So there will be changes in things, and the [new] songs reflect some of that. I think that without compassion and community, we’re not going to make it.
There’s a real emotional honesty and directness to your songwriting that seems contrary to a lot of modern music.
I always [try to] find a confessional way of meeting people square in the middle, so that the love songs incorporate—as often as I can—those awful moments when you’re watching a thoroughly ludicrous soap opera, until one of the characters starts saying something that you’ve said [laughs]! [You think] Oh, no; they’ve got cameras in my head. And of course, that’s what draws us together. That’s our common bond. It’s our foibles, so I like to have that element in the songs. If you can find something that’s that deeply personal, which includes sort of a confessional element about letting yourself down; or how it takes two to screw up; it connects to people’s hearts. I don’t even have to go looking for that. That’s the meat and potatoes of a lot of my songwriting.
I read you've been working with the Thievery Corporation recently.
Yeah, I did. I went and stayed at their studio for a few days, and it was good. It was a different way of working--completely different. Normally, I have to sit there until I have an idea that forms into a whole sort of melody and poem and usually the music starts to extrapolate out of that. Working with them, you just play little bits and have fun, and giggle together. Then the engineer...captures all the best bits that you did and sticks them together. Then all of a sudden it sounds like you all really know what you're doing and you're ever-so good at it [laughs]. And everyone's still laughing and giggling. So you get a chance to play along to that.
I'd always been a purist, I suppose; in thinking I wouldn't even pick up the guitar and play it unless I've got something that moved me to tears that I wanted to write a song about in the first place. So this was a whole revolutionary way of looking at it, and I enjoyed it.
That ties in to something else I wanted to ask you...You started out working in that old-school organic fashion. You got your instruments, you got your singers; you sat down, and you bashed it out. Technology's really changed the orbit of that.
It certainly has. We've just recorded six tracks. We learned 17 demos of songs that I'd written. Some of the band has heard [the songs] as I've been writing them; some of them were completely new to them. We've worked them all up, and then we've made demos of them. Tidied them up; we went in the studio to record our favorite few. We just did them live. And then we did the same songs in a more technological way, to a click track, all playing along. We liked bits of what we heard in both.
It was a fabulous way for me to be able to use the best of what we do do well, which is playing ensemble. We do 170 shows a year. We do have that lovely kind of ESP that you get from the 10,000 hours, like somebody will do something, and all three or four other people will react to it immediately and nobody knew we were gonna do that, and it was great and we just did it; and we got away with it. So we have those sort of moments that we can now incorporate onto the overdubbing and recording of those drum tracks, because they're solid as a rock and they're as groovy as we can possibly get them, too. So I'm really happy.
[At this point Wakeling's cell phone call drops; through a series of convoluted circumstances--him calling me back unsuccessfully, me calling him back unsuccessfully, him finally getting back through to me via my work's main switchboard--we finally reconnect. In the interim, he's been dressed down by the front desk receptionist...to his great amusement.]
When my call dropped, I just said, "I'll call the number straight away." Your dear lady friend answered the phone. And I was like, "Oh, you know what...I was phoning up for an interview. I didn't bother to check the message, or to double-check the name. Perhaps I should do that." And she said, "Well, that would be awfully handy, wouldn't it?" [hearty laughter].
I felt like my mother had just come back to life. [affecting haughty falsetto] "That would be awfully handy now, wouldn't it, David?"
Why do you think your songs hold up after all these years?
Well, I think the upbeat aspect of it counts for a great deal. That draws people’s immediate attention, ‘cause it sounds cheery. People think it’s happy music, but of course, its roots are reggae, which is survival music. You know, we’d better have a dance, because there’s no dinner. So it was a way to cheer yourself in times of deprivation. That’s always interesting to people. Then on the lyrics, I spend as much time and energy as possible trying to find the personal start of it. I try to dig down deep in myself for them. So I think the combination helps.
Were you ever bothered that the English Beat was pigeonholed as a ska band?
Oh, yes, totally. It bothered the heck out of us. We thought we’d made it very clear what we wanted to do from the start, which was to be part of the punky-reggae party. We were blending punk and reggae: I was mixing the Velvet Underground with Toots and the Maytals; and sticking Van Morrison on top of it if I could get away with it. But we signed with Two-Tone Records, and Two-Tone became a big phenomenon. The other bands [on the label] were more in line with ska anyway. So it just became a label. You get used to it, and you’re grateful that people love the songs, but after you have 100,000 people tell you that "Save it for Later" or "I Confess" is their favorite ska song of all time, you just nod resignedly.
That’s interesting because Special Beat Service sounds like a reaction to that perception. You had songs like "End of the Party," which has a Cole Porter feel; and "Save it for Later" is pure sixties pop with those chiming guitars…
[Ska] was meant to be a springboard, not a straitjacket, that’s what I always said in interviews at the time.
The English Beat and General Public were known for their strong originals, but charted big with a few covers, too. Are there any standouts amongst the artists you’ve covered? And what’s your take on some of the artists who’ve covered your songs?
I got to meet Smokey Robinson at a Grammy party; that was lovely. He knew of the version [The English Beat’s remake of "Tears of a Clown"], and we were pleased to meet each other. I told him that it was remarkable to me that I got to sing that song, to have it be my first single and launch me into the pop business, because as a kid I sang along to his records. I told him that I was convinced he had the voice of an angel, and that if I could sing anything like that, that I could be an angel, too. He gave me the biggest and longest hug… It was incredibly touching, and he looked at least twenty years younger than me [laughs]!
I got to meet Pete Townshend, too. He invited me to meet him backstage to his dressing room for a fifteen-minute audience. He said some very interesting things, all under the title, "Songwriters are the luckiest people in the world," and that I should always remember that; because it didn’t always feel like it. I was like, "Thank you…I think [laughs]…" It was great to meet him, he’d been a hero when I was a kid, and having him sing "Save it for Later" was stupendous.
And having Pearl Jam sing ["Save it for Later"], too…I got to meet Eddie Vedder just at the start of his career, and I liked him. I thought he was an incredibly genuine chap, had a lovely voice, and a heart most definitely in the right place. And it turns out I still have the same feelings about him now. He had to go through the shock-horror of superstardom, now he’s come out of the other end of that, still lending his voice and spirit to things that matter.
Did you follow the Seattle scene much in the early 1990’s?
No, not much. I mean, I was jealous because it had taken over from us [laughs]. There was also that fin de siècle, flirting with the poppy business that just seemed old-hat, really. I don’t know what it is about it; I think it’s because it’s such a great painkiller. People’s minds on opiates start to accept the grotesque as though it was normal. And life starts to take a sudden twist, and what had been fields of beautiful poppies swaying in the wind suddenly turns into somebody’s mum having to clean her son’s brains off the wall. So I never went for it, because I’d seen it all before. Most punks ended up as junkies.
How do you think you managed to sidestep that path?
Fear of needles, Tony. It’s as simple as that, mate [laughs]!
I don’t know, you’ve got to be careful out there. You can enjoy your rock and roll myths, but you’ve got to remember that they’re myths. Don’t start believing them. I was just sad because I lost lots of friends in other groups. These were people who were 24, 25 years old. The guitarist for the Pretenders…
James Honeyman-Scott…
Yeah, James. He was only 25 when he died. Then Pete [Farndon, the Pretenders’ bassist] passed on just a few weeks later. They both died just three months after we’d opened for them on our first American tour. That was a lesson right there.
I’ll be honest: I loved some of the [grunge] songs, but I refused to become too involved with the scene because it still smelled of poppies to me. And I don’t like the final results of poppies. So there was probably some fantastic music that got ignored by me because it got brushed aside. "No more heroin music about being angry about your dad [laughs]!"
Looking forward to seeing you at Bumbershoot.
I expect it’ll be fantastic. It’s a lovely crowd, and they’re so used to all sorts of different types of music, which is why we went down so well last time. We’ve got a little bit of something for everybody, and a bit of a dance to finish off the celebrations. You get what you give... How could you expect anything else with the performing arts, really? If it gets a bit too tense, I’ve always got the opportunity of hiding on the back of the bus, pretending I’m doing interviews. "Well, when’s he going to be free? We really need to make him feel bad about water…" "No, he’s doing an interview…" Or I might have a nap before the show... "Sorry, you can’t disturb him; Granddad’s having his nap [laughs]!"
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