Ranking Roger still toasting to his own Beat
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Touring together again almost 38 years on is paying off for UK ska legends The Beat and The Selecter, whose co-headlining tour comes to Inverness on Thursday.
The Beat’s singer and toaster Ranking Roger said: “It’s a funny old story really. It started off as one concert last December in Coventry with The Beat and The Selecter doing a co-headline thing and that sold out instantly. People were interested so we decided we’d try another eight shows at the start of this year which became 12, then the rest of the year and now it’s also half of next year.
“We’ll be all over the place – New Zealand, Australia, America and going through Sweden and Copenhagen. We’ve just come back from Holland and Germany and we are going back there again.”
At the height of the ska movement in the UK, The Beat from Birmingham were one of the main bands alongside The Specials, Madness and The Selecter who could be found in the top 10 while also tapping into an angry youth shouting about unemployment and fighting racism.
Roger said: “It was a time to rebel and if you had something to say that was the time to say it. Compare then to nowadays – you could say what you wanted in 1960, 1970, 1980. But as soon as the 90s came in there was all this PC stuff and you had to watch what you said in case you were causing offence.
“But how can you ever be truthful without being offensive sometimes? The truth is an offence but never a sin – that is how I still look at it.
“This is what we have to weigh up nowadays when we are writing lyrics or delivering so-called social comment to people.
“Then, we didn’t think about it twice because that was what was happening on the streets and in our lives. What we were writing was a reality.
“People are coming to our gigs more now because the new lyrics are making sense of what is happening now. But our old lyrics are also making total sense of what is happening now too!
“In The Beat we never said we were right, we have just raised a lot of questions and put them out there and said to people ‘There’s a question mark on this, you decide’.”
Roger began toasting or MCing when he was 13.
By the time I was 15 I was MCing with sound systems in pubs and clubs – all the kids my age kind of did if they had enough guts to grab the mike.
“I don’t think I could help myself,” laughs Roger when you ask why him, why that. “It was like a compulsion. I had to have it.
“I wasn’t looking for fame or stardom. I just had to have the mike!
“I’d sing the counter melody to whatever the singer was singing on the track.
“My dad was a saxophone player and my mother was a dancer and my father’s family were all musicians in the Caribbean, they were from Santa Lucia.
“But when my dad came to England in the 60s he just gave up music and became a factory worker – and he shouldn’t have.”
Roger’s own journey into music began young.
“In the 70s there were these ‘shebeens’ or blues dances after the pub was closed and there were parties in people’s houses going on till five or six in the morning.
“That’s where you’d find the sound systems and you’d hear all the new cuts and Blue Beat, ska, reggae and dub. And that’s where all the MC and toasting stuff came from. I learned a lot about black history there and how to make sure that I remained a proud black man, not a stereotyped one, if you like. I became my own person.”
Roger was turned on to punk listening to the radio.
“On Radio 4 John Lydon of the Sex Pistols – Johnny Rotten – was doing some interview and he said punks should listen to reggae because they were both essentially the same types of music, they were both in a struggle against a system that they both felt oppressed by.
“By the time I was 15 and 16 I was into punk and a toasting thing to the punks. I was in a punk band called The Dom Dom Boys – the name taken from an Iggy Pop song – when I met the four-piece that was The Beat then.
“Our band had done about five or six shows and were starting to build a reputation. The Beat wanted to open up for us. We made them come to our rehearsals and played them our set and then they played theirs. And I thought ‘This is something else! This is really really good’. They went on before us and blew us offstage. But I did some toasting and they loved that and I started toasting for them. And they wanted me to join them in the end.
“To cut a long story short, I became a member and next thing I knew we were on a two-week tour with The Selecter. At the end of that there was a deal waiting with 2-Tone. There was no money in it but you could get your record out and the label was people who really cared about your music.”
The Beat were Dave Wakeling on vocals and guitar, Roger singing and toasting, guitarist Andy Cox, bassist David Steele, drummer Everett Morton and Saxa – who had played with legends Desmond Dekker and Prince Buster – on saxophone.
They released three albums in the early 1980s. I Just Can’t Stop It in 1980, 1981’s Wha’ppen? and Special Beat Service in 1982. And their singles included a cover of Smokey Robinson’s Tears Of A Clown, Mirror In The Bathroom, Too Nice to Talk To, Can’t Get Used To Losing You, Hands Off, She’s Mine and All Out to Get You.
Roger remembers being in the studio recording the first album when they got a message from Smokey Robinson about their first single, a cover of his Tears Of A Clown.
“He sent us a telegram saying that he had heard six versions of that tune that were all going to be released and our version was the best!
“It was a genuine telegram because that is what it was in those days. We loved that he liked our version. He thought that it complemented his, where the others were sounding like his. Our one was totally different and that is what he liked.”
After The Beat’s song Stand Down Margaret – about Margaret Thatcher – proved too political for the BBC which banned The Beat’s music from being played at all – they began to tour America, playing with The Pretenders, Talking Heads, The Clash and The Police.
“We had quite a big hit with Can’t Get Used To Losing You in the UK where it made three in the charts, but we split up,” Roger remembered. “We were working on new tunes and the feeling was there and that fourth album would have broken us.”
Roger feels if the band had taken a few months’ break to recover from the time in the States, they could have made it.
Instead they split into a series of bands – Fine Young Cannibals which topped the charts, The International Beat and Roger’s line-ups including General Public. Later he briefly joined Mick Jones’ post-Clash band Big Audio Dynamite and worked with The Special Beat with members of The Specials.
For Roger part of The Beat’s power is that the music isn’t simply ska.
“With The Beat everyone had their own way of dancing and dressing and in a way it was a very complex band to come out of 2-Tone,” said Roger. “We thought all the others were very uniform with their suits on!
“But we didn’t think we were a ska band. We messed with reggae and calypso and punk. So it all mished and mashed together. So a song like Mirror In The Bathroom is kind of punky reggae, in its own way.”
Roger brought out his own solo record and last year The Beat released new album The Bounce – Roger’s son Ranking Junior joins him as part of The Beat’s line-up.
“One thing I loved about The Beat is the sound,” Roger said. "The music is so happy, but if you really listen to the lyrics they are quite depressing, really.
“It’s this balance all round. Black and white, good and bad, warm and cold – there is a kind of yin and yang to the music I like and that has kept me doing it.
“I’m lucky still to be so active and I love it. The Beat’s a great thing to be part of.”
The Beat and The Selecter co-headline at the Ironworks tonight.
