Two songs in and already the bottles were flying. “No violence – we hate violence,” Terry Hall, the lead singer of The Specials, pleaded. But the crowd crammed into the Stardust wasn’t listening. Minutes later came the first stage invasion. Punches flew. Mics were knocked over.
The English ska band, from the hard-knock city of Coventry, had never seen anything comparable to the anarchy at the 1,400-capacity nightclub – housed in a former jam factory in Artane, in north Dublin – that night of Thursday, January 15th, 1981. Not that they hung around to take it all in: Hall, the Specials songwriter Jerry Dammers, and their bandmates were soon barricaded in the dressing room, praying for the madness to subside. It never really did.
The band did a runner, and the fight carried over backstage. There was blood on the walls and broken glass on the floor
“All the pent-up frustration and boredom of living in Dublin’s roughest suburb was beginning to explode,” the reviewer wrote in Record Mirror, the British music weekly. “It’s difficult to persuade bands to play gigs in Dublin and after tonight I can see why.”
Hall’s death, on December 18th, at the age of 63, has prompted an outpouring of emotion. As the Specials frontman he was the voice of such bruised classics as Too Much Too Young and Ghost Town, a howl of anguish for a Britain riven with racist tensions and about to be plunged into the economic nuclear winter of Thatcherism.
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Ghost Town went to number one in Britain, and to number three in Ireland, in the summer of 1981, six months after The Specials’ notorious Irish tour. Of the three shows, Dublin was the undoubted lowlight. Violence erupted almost the moment the band went on stage, and the performance was finally abandoned. Accounts from people in the crowd suggest the gig was somewhere between a fracas and a fascist rally, the trouble spearheaded by shaven-headed thugs in the front row.
The violence also had an air of desperation. North Dublin was a backwater of a backwater in 1981. Any opportunity for mayhem was to be seized by the lapels. “The kids who burst through the doors at opening time at this down-at-heel ballroom were all set to have a riot,” Simon Ludgate wrote in Record Mirror. “Which is exactly what happened.”
Ironically, The Specials expected Dublin to be the calm after the storm, having kicked off their tour in Belfast, at that point more war zone than city. But Dublin would be worse – a concert that dissolved into chaos. (A month later, on February 14th, the Stardust was engulfed by a blaze in which 48 people died and more than 200 were injured. The Republic’s worst fire disaster, it has entered the Irish psyche as a byword for tragedy, of young lives cruelly snatched away. An inquest is due to open in 2023.)
The Specials hadn’t expected a smooth ride in Ireland, which they toured with their fellow ska act The Beat as support. With conflict raging in the North, British artists were generally reluctant to cross the Irish Sea. But Dammers had founded The Specials with the explicit goal of uniting divided British communities. Taking that message to Ireland seemed the logical next step.
The first gig, at the Ulster Hall, in Belfast, on Wednesday, January 14th, had been tense. National Front skinheads had taunted the audience queuing outside. (They were rebuked by punters who chanted: “Skinhead, skinhead over there / what’s it like to have no hair?”)
That afternoon two sets of skinheads came in. They told us they were ever so pleased we’d come to Belfast. They appreciated it so much that one set would stay downstairs and the other up on the balcony, so there was no fighting
“We were nervous – of course we were,” Dave Wakeling, The Beat’s lead singer, would later tell me. “That afternoon two sets of skinheads came in – clearly different sets, because they wore different uniforms.” The Beat feared the worst. But the message was that they had nothing to worry about. “They told us they were ever so pleased we’d come to Belfast, as a lot of people weren’t. They appreciated it so much that one set of them would stay downstairs and the other up on the balcony, so there was no fighting.”
He recalls feeling hugely relieved. “It was fantastic until the encore – you look up and there is a line of people standing on the balcony [urinating] over the edge.”
“I’m very proud of the fact that The Specials, along with The Beat, played in Ireland,” Horace Panter, the group’s bassist, told the Irish Examiner last year. “We played in Belfast when nobody else would.”
With Belfast behind them, The Specials and The Beat concluded that the difficult bit was over. Crossing the Border, they were off to Dublin and then Cork. What could go wrong? Lots, they realised as they took to the stage at the Stardust and were greeted by a row of skinheads who, according to Record Mirror, were giving “stiff-armed salutes”.
“We were driving to Dublin, and everyone was bright and cheery: ‘Oh, it will be dead easy now.’ It wasn’t,” Wakeling said. “Lots of skinheads got up on stage while The Specials were playing, and a fight broke out – beer was being thrown all over the place.”
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The Beat were in the dressing room when The Specials came hurtling in, followed by a hail of bottles. “The band did a runner, and the fight carried over backstage. There was blood on the walls and broken glass on the floor. We noticed all the exits at the back were chained up and padlocked,” Wakeling said. “There was no way out. So we went back into the dressing room and put up a sofa against the door until they had finished bottling each other. Later we read about the fire.”
What struck Simon Ludgate was the resentment that seethed from the audience. “Irish kids ... seem to hate everything and everyone in a big way ... An English accent was reason enough to get beaten up outside. The black guys in the bands were the only coloured people I saw the whole time I was in Dublin ... It’s not hard to be unacceptable in Ireland.”
He said Ireland but perhaps meant the capital. The gig in Cork, on January 17th, could not have been more different, according to Wakeling. When they performed at the Arcadia Ballroom – a venue, near Kent Station, that also hosted The Cure, XTC and U2, among others – the vibe was mellow and welcoming.
“In Cork there were a lot of people singing and dancing. We were very pleased,” Wakeling told me, his voice still full of relief all those years later. “It had been an odd tour.”
