It just so happened that the “three most talented and attractive” members of the Specials remain the last members of the band, according to Terry Hall’s jokey estimation in a recent interview. Himself, bassist Horace Panter and guitarist Lynval Golding have matured into a hybrid they couldn’t have foreseen in 1979. Their ranks diminished by death and fallings out, the trio are part nostalgia act, part wrathful fighters for fairness, who walk on to a stage decorated with signs (painted by Panter and Hall) reading “Vote”, “Resist”, “Think” and, incongruously, “Listen to Sly and the Family Stone”. Having toured regularly since reuniting a decade ago, things are a little different this time: they have the authority of an unexpected No 1 album behind them. Encore, their first record with Hall since 1981, debuted at the top of the chart in February, impelled by a sense that this highly influential group had found their feet again in an era that encourages activism and increasingly reviles apathy.
As they launch the tour in Bournemouth – which has “more traffic lights than Doncaster,” says Hall, casting about for something to say about it – they face the pleasant prospect of 22 sold-out shows (of 26 in total). Yet the expectations of the audience aren’t wholly met. They’re here for the nightclub songs of their youth, as witnessed by the flailing elbows that greet the second half of the show, when the hits come one after another: A Message to You Rudy, Nite Klub, Gangsters, Ghost Town. Heard in a cluster, they’re kinetic, a picture of a time when pop and ska marshalled themselves into an effective anti-racism klaxon.
The Specials, however, are here not as curators of an archive but as a working band, promoting their take on 2019 Britain. To this end, along with other Encore material, the set features an appearance by Saffiyah Khan, a 20-year-old Brummie who, wearing a Specials T-shirt, stood up to EDL marchers in 2017. She assertively performs a rewritten version of Prince Buster’s extravagantly sexist 10 Commandments (“Thou shalt not listen to Prince Buster, or any other man offering kindly advice in matters of my own conduct”), her presence a counterpoint to the dominant (older, male) force on stage, but also proof that the Specials’ 40-year campaign against injustice resounds down the generations.
• At Portsmouth Guildhall, 16 April; Brighton Dome, 17 April; then touring until 18 May.
