Another Galway summer stuffed with success!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

Buster he sold the heat … with a rock steady be-eat …” High above me, pumping out of the tannoy speakers in the warehouse roof, this booming voice announced itself by speaking Jamaican words with a white London accent. A couple of seconds later the air was filled with a sublime fusion of ska, reggae and pop, all wrapped up in cockney and Caribbean rhythms.
It was 1979 and we’d never heard anything like it. All round the warehouse blokes stopped in their tracks, smiles stretching their faces as they soaked up the exuberance of Madness.
I was 19, a middle class lad working in a world of hardened working class men.
Industrial Temping was an ancestor of today’s Gig Economy. The agency sent me off to factories and warehouses, sometimes for a day, sometimes for months. The work was hard, the pay poor, but for me it was perfect. As soon as I’d saved up enough money I was free to board the ferry to France once again, to spend a few months hitching around Europe.
That summer the sounds of 2 Tone exploded into our lives. After years of going to three gigs a week during punk, live music was then the backbone of my existence. For years Rastas and Punks had mixed at gigs and been friendly, sharing a common enemy in Skinheads, but this new driving dance music, this monster sound had its roots in ska, which had always been Skinhead music.
Amazing gigs at the Electric Ballroom and the Hammersmith Palais followed, where Black, White, Punk, Skin, Rude Boy, Mod and Rasta all danced together, unified by the joyous music.
I remember huge line-ups, with The Specials, The Selector, Madness, The Modettes, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and The Beat all performing on the same night.
2 Tone spoke our language, sometimes politically scathing, at others touchingly sympathetic to love-lorn youth.
By the time all the bands had left 2 Tone to form their own labels we’d enjoyed a bucket load of unbridled joy, and once you’ve shared the glory of a raucous gig, there can be no further animosity.
If only that had been the case at my place of work. I remember well that day I first heard Madness, because it coincided with the breaking of Tony’s mug.
With his lank long greasy hair, yellowed buckled teeth and sad weary eyes, Tony was an unlikely figure of fear, but he was the foreman, and emaciated in his faded Humble Pie T-Shirt and skull belt-buckle, he ruled that warehouse like a stoned Stalin.
During tea break I got distracted while chatting to young Jimmy about that new band we’d just heard, and my finger flipped Tony’s mug onto the concrete floor, where of course it shattered.
“Shit mate. Now you’ve done it. That’s Tony’s mug. He loves that mug.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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