Former Specials songwriter and 2 Tone Records founder Jerry Dammers has revealed his desire to record new material with the reformed band played a part in him not joining his former bandmates on their current reunion tour.
Speaking in today’s Telegraph newspaper, Dammers said his fellow members were not interested in taking the band in a new direction: “Nostalgia was considered a mental illness in the Victorian era, a morbid obsession with the past. It wasn’t what I wanted to do with the reunion when I originally initiated it, before assorted businessmen got involved. I wanted to start it from a completely different angle, by recording new material. I wanted to move the old songs on a bit, add something modern to them. They weren’t interested at all.”
The remaining members of the Ska legends have been touring the UK without Dammers since 2009, receiving rave reviews at last summer’s UK festivals while performing many of the Dammers-penned hits which made them famous. They also collected the Outstanding Achievement award at the recent NME Awards, again without Dammers.
Dammers has also discussed the plans for his new project, The Spatial AKA Orchestra – an 18 piece band which is currently on a UK tour: “The concerts have a kind of apocalyptic theme,” he said. “I do believe that the human race is in a bad way, with very serious problems of poverty and disease. And jazz musicians like Sun Ra had a view of this: his line on how he and his fellow musicians were from Saturn was a way of describing how black people had been excluded from mainstream American society. But people shouldn’t worry we’re being too serious. We’ve also hung on to a trashy rock element. Although we’re also doing some of my own material – Ghost Town and Man at C&A – I’m trying to be a tribute-band purist.”
The full interview can be read here.