Never let it be said Dave Wakeling's lost his passion to
 right a world skewed wrong. Never you done that, no, never
 you done that. It's been nearly 30 years since the Beat
 broke the music scene with heavy social commentaries about
 dethroning then-PM Margaret Thatcher (Stand Down Margaret)
 and seeing in oneself the same National Front violence being
 rallied against (Two Swords). It's now 2008, and Dave's
 still got a strong moral compass that yet infuses itself
 into his music and his concert performances. And, as it
 happens, this interview as well.
 
 As impressive as Dave's musical career has charted, with
 top 40 hits on all sides of the Atlantic, it's equally
 impressive just how intelligent and thoughtful the man is.
 It's hard not to be impressed by a musician who has lent
 his time and talent to charitable causes since Day One. In
 fact, Dave is literally one to put his money where his mouth
 is. If you've taken in an English Beat gig in the last few
 years, you'll know a current flame he's championing is
 "The Smile Train," a charity seeking to give
 facially disfigured children in lesser developed nations a
 chance at a normal life for just $250 a smile.
 
 For all there is in the popstar public persona of Dave
 Wakeling, there is just as much to the humanistic
 "average man" side of Dave Wakeling. Adept at
 fingering a fretboard, Dave is just as proficient with his
 ever-present iPhone. The first few minutes of our
 conversation, resting on the surprisingly comfortable foam
 rubber-filled couches/beds of Dave's tour bus stateroom,
 were spent admiring his "Electrogizmo Big Boy's
 Toy." He was even messaging me from the iPhone while he
 was supposed to be in soundcheck, prior to the interview,
 the sign of a true technophile/technoslave. And if you're
 a Myspace compadre of Dave's, don't ever think he's
 playing you aside. Before we could start he had to check his
 profile mail and send off a few bulletins and blogs. 
 
 
 
 Here's a peek through the window of Dave Wakeling sans
 guitar, mike, and stage. 
 
 
Concerning his iPhone:
 
 Dave Wakeling : It's nice, you don't have a typewriter
 all the time just when you need it (yes, he said typewriter,
 as he shows me the graphic touchscreen keyboard on the
 display). It comes up...
 
Steve Bringe: How touchy is it, though?
 
 DW: Once you get the hang of it, it's great, but I got
 little fat thumbs, you know?
 
SB: Yeah, I was wondering how you reach all the frets.
 
DW: (Completely preoccupied with his iPhone). Yeah.
 
DW: I'm watching the politics religiously.
 
SB: You were around when Margaret Thatcher was around.
 
DW: Of course... (goes back to his iPhone, ignoring the TV
 - so much for watching religiously)
 
 
Concerning moving up and down the California Coast:
 
DW: So we ended up living in Malibu, but basically we were
 just sleeping in Malibu transporting the kids to and from
 play dates [and] sleepovers. We spent most of our time in
 Pacific Palisades and just crept back to Malibu to sleep. It
 was a year's experiment and we didn't like it so we
 moved out of there.
 
SB: The traffic's horrible up there, too. 
 
DW: Ah, yeah. The wife got it worse than I did.
 
SB: Were you there for the fires?
 
DW: Well, that's what finally finished it. I was doing
 shows and came back at 7 am to find they'd been evacuated,
 and the flames came within 400 yards twice.
 
SB: Crap. Yeah, that'll move you.
 
DW: So then, there's an ambulance depot down at the
 bottom of the road, and you hear the sirens pretty often,
 and my daughter, every time she'd hear the sirens, she
 thought it was a fire, and she'd start running around
 trying to grab her… I'd tell her it's not a fire.
 
 
Concerning his consummate professionalism, adhering to the
 adage "The Show Must Go On":
 
DW: I'm afraid I'm suffering from the "Tour
 Cold." Sucking Cold Eeze seems to work pretty good. And
 the Rapid Tabs.
 
SB: Yeah. Any good?
 
DW: Yes, they are. I only got them yesterday at the Walmart
 and I feel noticeably better. The smell, my nose was
 blocked. It's the hardest thing to sing... (pinches nose
 and sings what I believe was Mirror in the Bathroom).
 
SB: I don't know if you get allergies, but the juniper
 count is through the roof right now.
 
DW: Well, that's often how it started, and it never
 really ever... I used to get allergies bad in England but
 not when I moved to California. And we'd go all through
 the weeks of shows, you know, Denver, Salt Lake, Cincinnati,
 Cleveland, and all the way over to Boston, New York. It was
 snowing like crazy, everyone staying healthy. Amazing. Got
 on the bus in Boston, woke up the next day in Chapel Hill,
 walked off the bus and it was springtime. I was sneezing so
 hard my stomach was hurting. That went on for about two
 days, at Chapel Hill and Charlotte. And then we headed down
 to Florida and by that time it had turned into a real cold.
 (He still did the gigs)
 
This interview was conducted under the guise of a project
 for Madness Central, centered on Dave's association with
 Madness and the 2 Tone movement to which he and his
 songwriting was so integral. So quickly, through Dave's
 disarming nature, it became an unfiltered white light
 illuminating the man and musician.
 
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 
The Beginnings of 2 Tone and an Endorsement for a Better
 Tomorrow
 
Steve Bringe: This is Dave Wakeling…
 
Dave Wakeling: Welcome to Albuquerque!
 
SB: Right, welcome to Albuquerque.
 
DW: Thanks very much, it's a pleasure to be here.
 
SB: Yeah, thank you. Alright, here we go. It's 1978 in
 Birmingham. What was it like finding that other bands, like
 Madness, were championing the same musical stylings as the
 English Beat?
 
DW: To start with, it was a huge disappointment, I'll be
 honest. We saw a double-page spread in the Melody Maker, the
 Specials, and the bass player, David (Steele), brought the
 paper in and threw it on the floor and said, "Fuck,
 it's too late! Somebody else is doing it!"
 
But as it turned out, everybody had got a slightly
 different angle on it anyway. You know, we were trying to
 mix the energy of punk with the hypnotic vibe of reggae into
 the same three minute song. We wanted to get one sound
 going, which took us a long time.
 
And Madness had got, like, more of a mixing of ska with a
 pop kind of edge on it. Classic 60's pop is always what I
 think of for them. And the Specials had some of the punk
 side and a reggae side that lent to each a bit of flavour,
 but the songs were quite different from each other.
 
We were trying to get the Velvet Underground meets Toots
 & the Maytals with the blues down. That was the aim.
 
SB: It came out okay. You sold a few records.
 
DW: Sold a few records. Not too bad.
 
SB: Okay, here's another one. With the passing of legends
 like Desmond Dekker, it kind of hits home that the first
 generation of ska is passing from the contemporary to the
 historic. Any thoughts?
 
DW: It makes us the next ones on the conveyor belt,
 doesn't it? I suppose now we can walk around and call
 ourselves "The Kings of Ska," or the
 "Ska'dfather" as I personally prefer.
 
It's always sad when you hear of an artist that you
 really loved has died. Then again there's something of
 them that remains there forever. The records, the memories
 and stuff, and so, in a way, being a recording artist kind
 of makes you immortal. Like having a Desmond Dekker record
 on, he's right in the room with me, even though he's not
 on the earth anymore. So I hope people feel the same way
 about us one day.
 
SB: Let's not talk about that just yet. You've got
 quite a few years yet.
 
DW: I'm probably immortal anyway. I'm still not
 convinced I'm going to die.
 
SB: Is that the Buddhist in you, or…?
 
DW: I don't know. It's a sense of denial, I think.
 
SB: Alright. Geez. I wrote a paragraph here. So let's
 see. Now there's been a third wave of ska, with so many of
 these bands that cite you as a major influence in their
 sound; Save Ferris, Reel Big Fish, No Doubt, and even
 non-ska bands like the Killers give you props. Seeing as you
 were in the US and privy to what was mainly a
 California-based ska revival, what did you think of the
 up-and-comers? How did they compare to what you accomplished
 in the 70's and 80's?
 
DW: Well, now there's a fourth wave of ska as well,
 isn't there, that goes back more to the first wave, the
 original roots, things like the Aggrolites, Westbound Train,
 or in England the Dualers, or something like that…
 Pressure Cooker out of Boston, and they remind me more of
 like Hepcat, where they've got a real feel of the original
 first wave, almost… you know, somewhere between Trojan
 dirty reggae and that slightly jazz-style of the session
 guys who used to play on the ska records.
 
So now, there's a fourth wave ska, and each one of the
 waves is almost identical in as much as the ones who got the
 songs that really connect… last in people's hearts for a
 long time… and the ones that have just adopted the stance
 of ska. I mean, there was quite a lot in Orange County
 (California) during that third wave period that were bands
 that had been a heavy metal band three weeks before and now
 seen No Doubt flying and suddenly become ska bands. It's
 down to the songs. If you have a song that connects, that
 resonates with somebody's heart, then things will go well.
 If it's just ska for ska's sake, pickit-a pickit-a
 pickit-a, and nothing else about it, then it tends to just
 come and go with the passing fashion wave or the clothing.
 
There were differences. I didn't find third wave ska to
 be as overtly political as second wave ska. You know, the
 Specials and the Beat had big mouths and a lot to say
 politically, but that might have been the times. It's a
 little harder sometimes, I think, to be political and be an
 artist in America because you might lose your career
 opportunities.
 
SB: Look at the Dixie Chicks.
 
DW: Yeah, people can get real riled up about it, can't
 they? For me at the time, it seemed, how could you live in
 England in the late 70's and bring out 12 songs and not
 have politics in them? Seeing that was what everybody was
 talking about at each bus stop, everybody was talking about
 in each bar. And so to get on stage and sing a load of songs
 that didn't reflect the society you lived in seemed to me
 more a political act than just calmly mentioning what was
 going on in your own backyard.
 
Now I'm not as overtly political but I still sing about
 social politics, perhaps. Up until recently I've kept
 myself out of party politics in America, but I have to say
 that I'm so impressed with Barack Obama that I've lent
 my voice a couple of times to that. Only in as much as…
 it's interesting going back to England, depending on whom
 the president is in America, and either America is very
 cool, which it was in the last decade, or America is like
 the Great Satan, which unfortunately it seems to have become
 in English minds.
 
So I go back home now, and people say… go back home. I go
 to England. California's home… I go back to England and
 people say, "But how can you live amongst them,
 Dave?" And I'm like, "No, they're not like
 that, honestly." I think it's incredibly sad that,
 having traveled every state more times than most Americans
 in the last 30 years, I've always been touched by the
 kindness and the tolerance in American people. Like they
 live with all sorts of mixtures in their own communities and
 cultures, and yeah, we have our violent moments, but in the
 main part everybody coexists, everybody gets on pretty well.
 And it's a shame that we end up getting such a terrible
 reputation internationally, and I don't think it reflects
 the kindness of the American people, really. 
 
So I got the feeling that with Barack Obama as the
 president, America would start to be respected for the good
 things that it had done, and we'd be able to be a light,
 not a hammer. You get a reputation to be the inspiration of
 the world, and not just the bogeyman. Should be ashamed, you
 know. I was thinking about it last week, and it's like,
 most of the world looks up to America, so it's a shame
 that we keep spitting in their eye. We're better than
 that. I think Barack Obama would give us a better face
 internationally. He could show that we'd crossed a line in
 our own evolution, that people would feel much more secure
 with us around, the rest of the world.
 
SB: He's got heart.
 
DW: He certainly does, and I mean, he's got heart and he
 was the editor of the Harvard Review which meant he was the
 best lawyer at Harvard that year, so he's pretty smart,
 too. It's a nice combination.
 
 
SUGAR AND STRESS, FLIP EVERY PENNY AT LEAST TWICE
 
Going on the second 40 minutes of chatting with Dave
 Wakeling, a brief interlude interjected itself into the
 proceedings as a bikini-and-cape-clad buxom lass jetted
 across the football pitch (soccer field for the Yanks)
 during a US Soccer Team match on the muted TV.
 
Dave Wakeling: Oh, now that's better. They usually have
 naked guys running across the soccer field, but that's a
 lot better.
 
Steve Bringe: That's a vision.
 
DW: Now he's going to tackle her.
 
SB: I think that guy just found a date, didn't he?
 
DW: Yeah. So he's looking, he starts looking... no, I'm
 not looking. That's so great. Good girl. Now who won,
 though?
 
SB: Who cares?
 
DW: Oh, come on, it's America and a football. What kind
 of patriot are you?
 
SB: I'm looking at the girl, man.
 
DW: Oh, yeah. Right. Who are these guys running around?
 
What's the point of all that? The dichotomy, my friend.
 Dave Wakeling is a serious man, and Dave Wakeling is a
 naughty, filthy schoolboy. Using one of his favorite
 metaphors, it's two sides of the same penny. As the
 conversation with Dave drove on, it became increasingly
 apparent that he operated on many universal echelons
 simultaneously, that he could switch from talking on the
 beauty of musical inspiration to the innate ugliness of a
 divisive world culture just as quickly as you could flip
 said penny, not knowing which face would land upwards in his
 somehow racing but cohesive mind.
 
Let's start off this segment with a tale of Madness.
 
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 
We'll Start at Victoria Gardens and End with a Rendez
 View
 
 
SB: Okay, next one here. I just need to put this one in
 here somewhere…
 
DW: Sure.
 
SB: 1983, there's this song called "Victoria
 Gardens" (on the Madness album Keep Moving)…
 
DW: Oh yeah.
 
SB: …and you guys came in there and lent your vocals. How
 did that come about?
 
DW: It was one of those nice accidents, that [Madness]
 happened to be recording in London at the same time as we
 were. And so, it was like, oh, we got this song, and
 somebody said, "Oh, it would sound great with those
 boys from the Beat on it, wouldn't it? Would you like to
 come down?" And so we did. It didn't take very long.
 I wish it'd took longer, as it was great fun.
 
I'd known Clive Langer before I was in a group, and
 before he'd started producing Madness. He was involved
 with a group from Liverpool, whose name bloody escapes me.
 But now if you're a Madness historian, you'll…
 
SB: Maybe the Boxes? Was that it? Or was that afterwards?
 
DW: No, it was a rock band out of Liverpool that he was
 connected to. And a friend of mine in Birmingham, Paul, used
 to work for him, so I'd met him. And so it was nice to see
 [Clive], and it was an honor, really, to be on a Madness
 song, because they really had the three minute pop single
 down, didn't they?
 
SB: Sure.
 
DW: Sometimes, coming from Birmingham, we didn't really
 understand what they were on about 'cause they're from
 London, so it all seemed like rhyming slang. It's like,
 "What's he on about? What's he on about? Well, it
 probably means something in London."
 
SB: Oh, that's just Lee Thompson. He's got bizarre
 lyrics. 
 
DW: Yeah.
 
SB: Alright, thanks. Let's see. Your current tour has you
 trekking from North Carolina, to Florida, to Texas, to New
 Mexico, and back to California. How does this compare to
 when you started out with 2 Tone? How does the touring
 compare to that now?
 
DW: Well, most of the time I'm sober enough to remember
 it nowadays. I don't remember much of the other one. So
 that would be a direct comparison there.
 
It doesn't have the furore of like when you have an album
 in the charts. But then, you got a lot of people at concert
 in those days that were there because their school friends
 were there. You buy the albums because the other kids in the
 class are buying the album. 
 
Now, we play to people who have either been listening to
 the music for 25 years, and say the sweetest things before
 and after the shows about how much it means to them, how
 you've been a part of the soundtrack of their lives. Which
 is very touching, because there's a lot of exciting things
 about the pop trade, you know, there's a lot of benefits
 and bonuses: The fame, the money, the women, the fast cars,
 all of the usual clichéd things. But to have somebody say,
 "Your music has helped me through my life for the last
 25 years," is priceless, really. A bit like that Visa
 card advert, it's priceless, you can't buy that. 
 
And so because of that it actually means more than all the
 rest of it put together, really. Yeah, it's kind of an
 honor, you realize then, to be invited into somebody's
 life. They've used your lyrics and your songs to help them
 in certain situations. Were they depressed in college and
 thinking of killing themselves? Were they getting married
 and a little scared? Were they getting through a divorce and
 getting even more scared? Were they having a baby? All these
 things and the different songs they've used, and the
 lyrics they've told me that have helped them along the
 way. How fantastic is that?
 
SB: Yeah, I won't bother you with mine.
 
DW: Yeah, it's okay, go ahead…
 
SB: Yeah, you're part of the soundtrack.
 
DW: Well, it's my honor and my pleasure.
 
SB: It's my honor and pleasure to actually have had your
 music around all those years.
 
DW: Great.
 
SB: Your Teardrop Vox, it's in the Rock and Roll Hall of
 Fame now.
 
DW: How spooky is that? It's a bit like not doing your
 homework and still acing the quiz, you know. Because I'm
 not a shredder, I've never done a guitar solo in my life.
 But it was really a thrill to be asked. It was hard to give
 it up because I'd played that particular guitar every gig
 for 27 years straight. Maybe I'd missed one when it was
 being repaired or something, but whilst it was available and
 in action I used it every gig. And so it was a tearful
 parting that morning, and I played it for the last time and
 had a little cry. I polished the guitar with the tears, put
 it in the box and took it to the Hall of Fame.
 
Now it's sitting in between Kurt Cobain's guitar and
 Sterling Morrison's from the Velvet Underground, and the
 guy that runs the Hall of Fame did an interview with me in
 Ann Arbor, Michigan in the 80's where I'd told him what
 a big Velvet Underground fan I was, and so he put my guitar
 next to my hero from the Velvet Underground.
 
SB: How cool is that?
 
DW: Very cool.
 
SB: You miss her now, huh? You miss her.
 
DW: I went back to see her three weeks ago, in Cleveland we
 played, and I looked, and then I walked away. And then I had
 to go have another look. And then I found myself saying
 goodbye a couple times. And then I found myself tearing up a
 little bit. And then I found myself with one of the people
 who run the place looking at me like I was about to do
 something weird, so I had to get out of there quick.
 
SB: Years I saw you playing that thing.
 
DW: I've got some copies of it now. A fellow called Jack
 Charles who used to be the guitarist in Quarterflash bought
 the rights to those Teardrop guitars and makes the most
 perfect… I wouldn't say copies, because they're as
 good as, and in fact in some ways they're better, better
 finished… so I've got a direct rendition of the Brian
 Jones version of it, and a slightly more rocking version
 with a whammy bar and three pickups, and I might get a
 semi-acoustic one soon. But he makes great guitars, you
 should check him out. Phantom Guitars. 
 
The only thing I would say about those guitars is they're
 bloody useless for playing on your knee sitting down. It
 just falls off your knee all the time. If I'd have known.
 
SB: Your songwriting often harkens back to recurring themes
 like isolation and greed. Infidelity is another such theme
 with early hits like "I Confess" to your solo work
 of "One + One + One." What is it about cheating
 lovers that has you lyrically revisiting the topic, and do
 certain aspects of humanity interest you more than others?
 
DW: I suppose so. You try to think with your head, it just
 depends which one sometimes.
 
Interestingly, "I Confess" and "One + One +
 One" are from different sides of the same penny. So one
 would be the cheater and the other one would be cheated on.
 I actually think that human beings are polyamorous. I
 don't necessarily believe that monogamy is a natural
 state, and I think often people get caught between being
 faithful to an idea or another person, or being faithful to
 their own heart. And I think that can get you into troubled
 waters sometimes. Turbulent waters at least. 
 
Luckily, I'm not so driven by it nowadays. I have a
 chance to take a deep breath and remember that sadly it's
 easier to get into a woman than it is than to get out of
 one.
 
SB: Like Madness, you've dedicated your time and talent
 in support of organizations like Greenpeace and the Campaign
 for Nuclear Disarmament. What do you think is the greatest
 concern to our planet?
 
DW: I would say global warming is because it's going to
 have a lot of repercussions with everything else. You can
 wonder about population and overpopulation and resources and
 that, but with a good dose of the effects of climate change
 coming out of global warming, then whatever resources we do
 have are going to be stretched even further. And we may end
 up having to spend so much money on emergency fixes for the
 effects of global warming that we may not ever get ahead of
 the game enough to build an infrastructure that could
 perhaps curtail some of the gases we're pumping out and
 have some sort of remedial effect.
 
So I would say that that's probably the worst of it. Mind
 you, you never know when someone's going to loose off a
 nuclear bomb, really. That's always in the back of my
 mind. I'm just glad now, as I'm sure most Americans are,
 that we gave Pakistan a nuclear bomb. Good one! Nice move! 
 
SB: Yeah, right.
 
DW: That taught those Indians a lesson, eh?
 
SB: We'll see how long Kashmir lasts, huh?
 
DW: I know. That is a shame, isn't it? I don't know,
 that's why I think somebody like dear Obama could help
 out. I think he says more clearly than a lot of other
 politicians that we're all in the same boat here, and that
 we have to learn to compromise and get on with each other.
 This divided America and divided world is not responsible
 for our children. It's not good enough. It's not good
 enough to be squabbling and then leaving them with the pile
 rubbish to sort out. I think we have a greater
 responsibility, we've got to get this straight. We can't
keep acting like it's the 19th or the 20th century. It
 clearly is the 21st century.
 
And those divisions between all sorts of religious
 extremists. You could say anything fundamentalist tends to
 be fundamentality cruel in the end. Whether it's Muslim,
 Zionists, Christians, it's the same bloody God. It's
 well meant to be. Poor old God would be rolling in His grave
 if He was dead.
 
SB: Well, there's the quote I'm putting up. There's
 the quote I'm taking.
 
DW: Yeah, that's right.
 
SB: Speaking of your social awareness, you continue to
 include props for The Smile Train. What attracted you to
 this organization? (During the playing of
 "Tenderness" at English Beat concerts, Dave
 invites the audience to throw paper money on the stage in
 support of The Smile Train).
 
DW: I saw it by accident, really, just cruising on the
 internet. And I thought it was a nice name, "Smile
 Train." You can ask the blokes in Madness, because
 "the happy train" in England means that
 somebody's gone a bit crazy. Ah, he's on the happy
 train.
 
So I thought it was something to do with that and then I
 looked and it's this charity that fixes kids with cleft
 palates around the world, using local surgeons, training
 people, at 250 bucks. And I just thought that was
 revolutionary, at a time when the world seems ever more
 divided and arguing along political and religious lines, I
 thought, "Well, I bet there isn't anybody in the
 world who wouldn't think it was worth 250 bucks to fix a
 kid's face forever." 
 
You know, some of these kids are really looked down upon in
 their societies. Can't come out of their house, they're
 bad luck, and all of this. So at 250 bucks, give a kid a
 chance to speak, eat, drink, go to school, lead a normal
 life. And from a music business perspective, I mean, 250
 bucks is a sushi lunch for a few record company guys, and
 you don't even eat the wiggly bits.
 
So, I thought, "What a great thing that would be to be
 involved in." It seems to me that I'd done a lot of
 work with Greenpeace, Heal The Bay, nuclear disarmament
 issues, but the world seems so tight and fractured and
 divided now that as soon as you mention that you just get
 into an argument. 
 
And so, seeing Smile Train, I thought, "Wow!"
 This could be something where I could get involved, it's a
 human-based charity, and people would be able to contribute.
 And after they've done it, they'd realize a number of
 things; one, we can all make quite a profound difference if
 we all move at the same time, in the same direction. Most
 nights, during the song "Tenderness", at least one
 and sometimes up to six kids get a new face in five minutes.
 And the audience remembers that after the show. "Wow!
 Well, we did make a big difference." And they remember,
 "Oh, so what, you mean we're all one?" It's
 like, Ha! Gotcha!
 
SB: That actually leads into the next question, with
 another Madness tie-in. You guys helped out on the
 "Starvation" single (in 1985, Dave and members of
 UB40, the Pioneers, and the Specials, amongst others,
 performed on this charity single for African famine relief,
 a collaboration organized by Madness and released on
 Madness' Zarjazz label). From famine to facial
 disfigurement, do you think the industrialized world, well,
 actually kind of ignores the developing world at times?
 
DW: Yes, we either ignore them or abuse them, don't we?
 Now we're sending them the worst of the factory jobs and
 having their kids do it for us. You know, so, it's never
 been too kind.
 
I think it's becoming more and more obvious, now that all
 the kids are on the internet, all the grown-ups now have
 flown a few places around the world, the world isn't such
 a huge place any more, and I think knowledge is becoming
 more easily shared. I think slowly but surely we're all
 starting to realize we're in the same boat, but whether
 we'll do it in time, I don't know. There's that
 balance of fear. You know, fear is a very powerful thing,
 and it can make people do more or less anything.
 
SB: So is hope.
 
DW: Yes, they're two sides of the same penny, really. And
 although I understand Barack [Obama]'s vision of hope...
 I've been in touch with their campaign since May of last
year and went to visit them in Chicago and offered my
 support and that… but I also have some fairly harsh things
 to say about hope. And [Obama's] actually sort of
 addressed it in his speeches, that it's not just
 pie-in-the-sky or in the future.
 
But in Buddhist terms fear and hope are more or less the
 same thing. It just puts you into the future, so that
 you're either excited with fear or excited with hope. But
 unfortunately the only thing that happens when you move into
 the future is it takes you out of the moment, and the moment
 is the only place you can ever make complete change. So,
 hope and fear, it's just like regret and sweet memories,
 it's either the future or the past, but change only ever
 happens in the moment.
 
And [Obama's] kind of addressed that now, that it's not
 just pie-in-the-sky hope, but it's hope plus action… we
 hope.
 
SB: You might want to forget about this, but a few years
 ago… Greg Proops… Rendez View… (Rendez View was an
 American TV dating show hosted by comedian Greg Proops and
 featuring guest "judges." Dave sat in on the panel
 during one episode)
 
DW: Oh, god… good god…
 
SB: Yeah. What was that about?
 
DW: Well, I had a manager at the time who felt that I was
 of… that I could do my celebrity a world of good by
 sitting in on various TV shows and getting my face about
 that way, because I'd always got plenty to say. So I did
 Rendez View and I did another talk show as well about
 relationships, based on those men are from Mars, women are
 from Venus… [some] famous actress that was the star of the
 show. So I did a few actually, I did a few of them. 
 
I don't think Rendez View ended up as bad as it could
 have done, really. There's something about that kind of
 reality-style TV that's a bit vicarious, isn't it?
 Laughing at other people for doing exactly the same as
 you'd do, so it's a bit superior sometimes. But they
 also said how fantastic I was and would phone me back and
 they never did, so that was the end of my job as a TV
 pundit.
 
SB: I got that on tape somewhere.
 
DW: Do you? Thanks a lot.
 
SB: It'll find its way up on Youtube one of these days.
 
DW: Yeah, I bless you for that.
 
 
HERE WE GO BATHING IN THE RED LIGHT
 
In the wrong hands, charm is a frightful thing.
 Broadcasting a Chicklet-tooth grin into blue-haired
 checkbooks every Sunday morning, the successful
 televangelist exploits charm like a dingo exploits a
 doggy-door to the maternity ward. Strip away the Aquanet
 helmet, immaculate threads, and Nutrasweet persona, and so
 often all you have left is a putrid excuse for a stump not
 even worth lifting an untied boot to rest upon.
 
I've met my fair share of popstars, quite often folks
 I've gone through the rigors of adolescent hero worship
 with, and it's utterly heartbreaking when you see the
 singer doing lines of blow backstage in front of his
 then-teenage son or the bass player asking a roadie if there
 is any way he could get a quick fake I.D. for the nubile
 underage vixen he's lured back to the tour bus. In the
 wrong hands, charm is not only frightful, it's downright
 disgusting.
 
It might be cynical, but it's so much easier living by
 the adage, "With no expectations there are no
 disappointments." It's with this mindset that I go
 into interviews and reviews, and more often than not the
 musician turns out entirely personable. With Dave Wakeling,
 though, your first impression is just how charming he is. Uh
 oh. Better watch this guy closely.
 
Any trepidation you might have with Dave would be entirely
 misplaced. The charm is used for good, not evil. Engaging
 and charismatic, comfortable and caring, this is Dave
 Wakeling. The secondary impression is immediate: This guy is
 genuine. This guy is just plain likable. You are put so much
 at ease by his effortless banter that by the time you check
 your watch, a good hour and a half has evaporated and you
 suddenly feel like you've imposed far too long… which he
 dispels quickly enough by treating you to yet another
 anecdote and observation.
 
My son, Scott, was sitting in on the interview with us.
 Scott's usual stance with rock stars is a quiet
 distancing, taking on a third person approach to the entire
 escapade. You should have seen him this past week mustering
 up the courage to talk with Sam Endicott of The Bravery.
 With Dave, though, he was so comfortable he chimed in and
 asked if he could throw a question in the lot. Coach Dave
 was in attendance (read on for this bit), and Scott was
 completely at ease when he asked his question of Dave.
 
Scott Bringe: You play in front of big crowds, right? Did
 you ever, like, forget some lyrics or something?
 
Dave Wakeling: Yes. It's terrifying. It's about the
 most terrifying thing that can ever happen to you on stage.
 Sometimes you just draw a complete blank. Especially if
 something really great's happening in the song, then you
 forget, like, "Are we on the second verse or the third
 verse?" And the moment that indecision starts, then you
 can't remember any of it anyway.
 
So usually then I run to the bass player and say,
 "Wayne! What's the first line?" Sometimes he can
 remember, but sometimes me just interrupting with that
 question, now he's in the same state of panic and he
 can't… "I don't know! I don't know! Oh my
 god!" So I make the saxophone player keep playing and
 I'm like, "Come on, come on, come on, come
 on…" If it won't come then I'll just sing one of
 the verses that I can remember. 
 
Or then sometimes, if I'm feeling very brave, I'm like,
 "You know it's in there. Just go for it." And
 you get to the mike and I don't know, "bah nah
 nah…" And it comes out of your mouth, and wow! It was
 there!
 
It's the scariest thing, that is. Because all of a sudden
 all the sound disappears. It goes silent, you start sweating
 behind your ears, and you swear that everybody in the crowd
 is looking just at you going, "I think he's forgotten
 the lyrics. Yes, I bet he's forgotten the lyrics."
 Uh! I can't breathe! I can't think about it!
 
Steve Bringe: You should have heard Suggs a [short] while
 back. He totally botched some lyrics [in concert]…
 
DW: Really? Well, they got a lot of words in them songs and
 a lot of different people writing them. In the main part,
 I'm lucky because at least those lyrics came out of the
 mud of my subconscious. So I only have to go sifting through
 and they'll be there, apart from the cover versions.
 
You'd like Dave. Honestly. My kid did, and he's a tough
 sell. Anyhow, back to the grown-up talk, and quite grown-up
 it got, speaking on lyrics and lyrically speaking. There's
 no need to save it for later. Or shave it. Whatever and what
 have you.
 
_________________________________________________ 
Stay tuned for part Two next week!

The Birmingham Walk of Stars, Broad Street, honours those people who have made a significant contribution in the categories of music, television, film, radio, theatre, sport, business and literacy. The Beat isn't yet on the 'Most Wanted' list so let's change that! Click here  and vote to nominate The Beat!

If a new nomination is chosen by the organisers to be inducted on to the Birmingham Walk of Stars Broad Street, one lucky person who nominates them, will be picked at random and offered the opportunity to be a VIP guest at the star induction ceremony.

Once The Beat get enough nominations, then the voting begins to get them an actual Star! We'll  keep you posted!

Those of you that have attended one of the Rockin the Colonies shows....

Please take a few minutes and post a comment on this blog to let us know what you thought of the show!

If you have any nice photos please tag them so we can get them up in the Rockin the Colonies picture folder!

Thanks and hope to see you soon!

The English Beat

         X

Dave Wakeling returns to Marin on June 7 as he leads his seminal British ska band, the English Beat, through a headlining performance as part of the 25th annual Novato Festival of Art, Wine & Music.

In its heyday of the late 1970s and early '80s, when the "two-tone" ska style caught fire as a happy hybrid of reggae, brassy jazz, R&B and New Wave pop, Wakeling's band led the pack with U.K. groups such as Madness, the Selecter and the Specials. The band, just known as the Beat overseas (there was a California-based band called the Beat during that era), broke through with hits such as "Mirror in the Bathroom," "Twist & Crawl," "I Confess," "Save It for Later" and sped-up remakes of "Tears of a Clown" and "Can't Get Used to Losing You."

Reached by phone from his tour bus in Fairfield, Conn., during a 12-day run of East Coast performances, the frontman - a familiar face in the county after several years of consistent local performances - discussed today's healthy music scene, the endurance of ska's reggae-flavored beats and his mistaken Marin connection.

Q: How often are you touring these days?

A: It seems to be kind of every other month or every third month. Most of the time we're working in California, but obviously you can't do that all year. It's nice (and) means we don't overplay or saturate any particular area.

Q: Rumor has it you're a part-time Marin resident these days with a home in the West Marin area. Is that correct?

A: I wish. The only thing I can guess is (that rumor) started from a magazine article (for Marin) where one of the prerequisites was you had to have a residence or be a resident, and they just assumed that. I don't even know if the article ever ran.

But I play 19 Broadway (in Fairfax) so frequently, people presume I live here. I presume to live in a lot of places, but mostly I've been living on a bus looking for my sunglasses.

Q: Is Los Angeles still your home base?

A: Yes, I'm a dude. Not, like, totally but, like, partially.

Q: What keeps bringing you back for performances at the relatively intimate confines of 19 Broadway in Fairfax?

A: It's a very erudite audience, so the songs seemed to have lived on in people's subconsciousness. Compared to other places in the country, they're a healthy bunch so they enjoy dancing in their 40s and 50s, so that's also part of it.

We see a lot of a lot of familiar places at those shows and there's a big appreciation of anything reggae in that area. Mixing reggae and anything else we find in the kitchen seems to fit in kind of well.

Q: What draws you to festivals such as the event in Novato?

A: I like playing that sort of events. There's something about an irresistible beat and good bottle of wine that seems to set people off.

Q: What is the current configuration of the band these days?

A: I'm backed by a great group of guys including some former members of General Public and the Specials and some chaps who grew up listening to the band's tunes.

Q: What type of set can one expect these days from an English Beat concert?

A: Last night (in Hoboken, N.J.) we ran 21Ú2 hours. We play all the English Beat hits, all the General Public hits, but we go a bit deeper into the English Beat catalog and play a few new ones. It's a real two-tone festival.

Q: What do you think of today's music scene?

A: The good stuff is great and the bad stuff is crap. Actually, it's quite a wonderful and diverse period at this moment. People are bringing independent music with independent thought. I see it as a healthy time for music in all genres and I can only see it getting better and better. There might not be as much money for the record companies as there used to be, but oh well.

Q: After all these years, what keeps the English Beat going?

A: First and foremost is the reaction of the crowd and there seems to be a resurgence of the genre. And, oddly the sentiments of the music of the early records have become pertinent again. Something in the late '70s is seamless in this period in time. There's this general fear of Armageddon anytime, growing signs of a recession and combined with that there's a blossoming independent music scene. Socially and politically, stuff we were doing back in the day resonates with the current particular mood.

Q: How would you compare the reception you get in Marin to the crowds you experience in other parts of the country?

A: It's one of our best reactions currently. But we're starting to become the bee's knees all over the country. It's becoming quite a big deal and in some ways 19 Broadway is one of the first small clubs we've played. I've liked the vibe there so much, we always try to play there every four months or so.

Q: What is it about your music that is able to connect with different generations?

A: We've been lucky in some ways as every eight or nine years another wave of ska would come in. I think we're on the third or fourth wave. Every time there's a resurgence of new ska bands, there seems to be renewed interest in the waves of ska preceding it. I supposed some young people see us in the same way I saw (Jamaican ska pioneer) Desmond Dekker. It is wonderful to see somebody age 16 and somebody in their 50s dancing in step with each other.

For pictures from this article visit here

NOVATO FESTIVAL OF ART, WINE & MUSIC

JUNE 7-8

The English Beat is scheduled to play at 5:30 p.m. June 7. For a full schedule, log onto www.novato.org/about/artwinemusic.cfm

Dave Wakeling is a founding member of The English Beat, known outside of America as The Beat. Any legit Ska playlist will include their songs: "Mirror In The Bathroom," "Save It For Later," "I Confess." Dave tells the stories behind these songs, and explains why it's our weaknesses that unite us.

Carl Wiser (Songfacts): How do you typically write?

Dave Wakeling: The lyrics - I have to just build up a head of steam, and either some kind of intense emotion, either great happiness or great sadness, something. They often come to me in a big wedge, as if it's been delivered from somewhere else. But I think what happens is that you just put yourself in a situation so you're somehow in the middle of the flow. You're in the middle of the river rather than dragging on the wave at the edges. And quite often the nucleus of the song, the hook line and the primary points I'm trying to make for those couple of rhyming couplets, they'll all arrive in a very quick amount of time. That's why I say, sometimes it feels like it's being delivered. But then once you realize the gift you just got, it's a matter of, Okay, now what do you want to do with it? What points do you want to make? And then often it can take months. And I don't rush it, I just wait until stuff pops: like Wow! There you go. That's it. So I just ponder all the issues around it and let my self-conscious deliver suggested rhyming couplets as the weeks go on.

SF: So you would write most of the lyrics?

Dave: Yeah. And I would agonize over them. I could sit up all night staring at the lyrics trying to figure out whether something should be sung as a colon or a semicolon.

SF: But it sounds like you don't get your inspiration from waking up and sitting down at a desk and thinking, I'm gonna write a song.

Dave: No. I have done it a couple of times with other songwriters, and I've found it very exciting and very freeing, because in those situations, you're just writing a song from a point of view of poetry. But most often I write my own songs from a point of view of feeling really strongly about something. Something has to be very heartfelt and I have to be moved to the point where sometimes I'm shaking a bit with it.

SF: What's an example of one of those songs that you felt very heartfelt and almost shaking that you wrote?

Dave: Well, actually, most of them. "Tenderness" was very much like that (This was a hit for General Public, a group Dave formed with Ranking Roger after The English Beat). A lot of it, in writing a song, it's like you're searching for some answers. And you've got maybe this first rhyming couplet that's come up, and that's fired up your imagination. And it sparks off a series of questions about your own life, so you start pondering it. And so there's a lot of sort of self-analysis that goes on: What do you think about this, then? What do other people think about it? By the time you get to the end of the song, sometimes you've figured out that rigor, at least in your own mind, and then you play it to people and find out if it connects. My notion of it was that you have to find something really personal, and you have to try and find a way to express it that is as universal as possible. I also have the notion that where we connect the most is in our confessed weaknesses, not in our comparative strengths. So the songs will have a bit of a nod and a wink in them: anybody ever mess up like this? And you feel it come back from the crowd, "Oh, my God, I've done that." So I suppose the basic elements of our humanity is our own sense of foibles.

SF: Well, "Tenderness" was one of those songs that definitely touched an audience. And there are some really interesting lyrics in there. For instance, when you're whistling in the graveyard calling up to your girlfriend, where would that come from?

Dave: It was a phrase of my father's when I would disagree with him and try to stand up to him as I was growing old. He'd be like, "You're just whistling in the graveyard." So it was like he was accusing me of a false sense of courage, like I was trying to act more bravely. I think the phrase was actually whistling past the graveyard. He said it to me as, "Oh, you're just whistling in the graveyard." I actually stick quite a lot of my dad's little phrases and witticisms in songs. And I suppose in Birmingham they had a sort of colloquial history that most people's dads would have said to them. But it was trying to build up a false sense of courage and call up your girlfriend, knowing whatever it was that she was going to catch you at because you weren't telling the truth.

SF: That's great. One thing I notice is that sometimes English sayings put into songs do very well in America. There's this Steve Winwood song, "While You See a Chance you take it."

Dave: Yeah.

SF: And the next line, which I was always fascinated by, is "find romance, fake it." And nobody in America knew what that meant. I talked to the guy who wrote it (Will Jennings), and he said, "Yeah, it comes from a saying called fake it till you make it."

Dave: Fake it till you make it. If you have confidence, somebody might believe it.

SF: Did "Tenderness" start as an English Beat song?

Dave: Yes, it did. It started being written during that time. We tried to get rehearsals set, and it was one of the reasons that we knew that The Beat had really come to its end: where I was before, everything had gone very smoothly and magically without even trying. It was now almost nigh impossible to get rehearsals together. Somebody would have something to do in the morning, so they couldn't be there until 2, and somebody else has got to leave at 2:30 because they've got a meeting to go at 3, and they couldn't do Thursday, what about next week? And on and on and on. And it was hard for us to get anything done. I think we managed two rehearsals, perhaps, for that third album.

SF: So in a way is "Tenderness" about your experience with the English Beat?

Dave: No, not really. I used to like traveling with the trucks that carried the gear. I'd always been a big fan of that TV show Cannonball when I was a kid, and thought that the idea of American trucks was very romantic. So when we came on tour, I used to love to drive overnight with the truck drivers and talk rubbish on the CB in there. And so it was as if the trucks were driving in what's called "the endless gray river." And the notion was that you were driving around in there in America searching for the tenderness, whereas, of course, it's in your heart all the time. So it's like you're looking in the outside world for something that can only be discovered in yourself, because love is a verb, not a noun. That was the notion of it. But also there was a darker side to the song, because it came out in that period of AIDS, fear of AIDS. Nobody really knew much about it, and everybody was all of a sudden terrified to touch a door handle. Being a terrific hypochondriac, and everybody was always having colds on the road on tour, it's like any time anybody sneezed, I was like, could that be AIDS? So it was to do with that, but in sort of non-obvious way.

The English Beat released just three albums, but covered a variety of styles and subjects in that short time. Here, Dave explains why the "neck down" jobs can be great for songwriting, and how an uncomfortable triangle inspired one of their classics. And if it sounds like Dave is singing something naughty on "Save It For Later," that's because he is.

SF: Could you tell me a little bit about "Mirror in the Bathroom"?

Dave: Yeah. I was working in construction at the time, and it was the winter, I had forgotten to hang my jeans up to dry overnight, so when I got into the bathroom to shower up, I noticed my jeans were still on the floor, soaking wet, covered in sand. So I hung them up thinking well, it's probably best to have them steaming hot and wet. I went to shave, and it was snowing, and I really, really didn't want to go. So I started talking to myself in the mirror as I was shaving up. And it was weird, because I looked deeper in the mirror, and I could see the little caption on the door behind, and I said to myself, Look, David, there's just me and you in here. The door's locked. We don't have to go to work. Of course we did. Got on the motorbike, and I just started pondering as I skated my way to the construction site on this motorbike. And that's how it started. It was thinking about how self-involvement turns into narcissism and how narcissism turns into isolation, and then how isolation turns into self-involvement again, and how what a vicious cycle that can become. So then I just started thinking about different situations where people would ostensibly look like they were doing something, but in fact they were checking their own reflection out. And you'd see it perhaps on Saturday afternoon with people window shopping, half the time they're actually just looking at their own reflection. Then this restaurant opened, and it was a big deal at the time because it had glass tables, and I was like, oh, you can watch yourself.

Then, in America in the early '80s, everybody gave me knowing winks and said, "Oh, I know what that one's about, then, Dave." And it wasn't that mirror in the bathroom at all, it was the one on the wall, and not the one on your knee. And oddly, songs can become sort of strangely prophetic, though. But certainly at the time of writing, nobody had any money or any access to cocaine... until after the song was out.

SF: No wonder people got confused.

Dave: I know.

SF: It sounds like you're not like Bruce Springsteen, who has just made music his whole life. You've actually had some real jobs before you became a full-time musician.

Dave: I was a firefighter for a couple of years. But I used to like working construction because it was called a "neck-down" job, what we call it in England. Clock on, switch off. They could have the use of your muscles below your neck for the eight-hour shift. But quite a lot of the lyrics, at first we tell them, we wrote over that snowy winter.

SF: Were you in the band, or were you making music while you were working this job?

Dave: Yeah, they kind of overlapped a little bit. It got to be very tough work, because you'd get home from the site and then go off and do a gig, and sometimes when it was out of town you wouldn't be back till the sun was coming up and you'd get home and get on the motorbike and go to the site. It became too much in the end.

I was the only English kid on the squad. And I said to my foreman, "I won't be coming in." And he said, "Oh, Jesus. Well, fuck you, then." He says, "I'll see you tomorrow." I said, "No, no, you can't. I won't be coming in." And that was it. The last day of my construction career. I took a break during the early '90s and I worked full-time for Greenpeace.

SF: That's an interesting kind of a job direction there.

Dave: It had always been an ambition of mine. To be honest, I wanted to be three things; I wanted to be in a pop group, I wanted to work for Greenpeace, and I wanted to be a Buddhist monk. And those were the only three things I really wanted to do when I was 18. And so I needed to pass a good few years of IRS records, I needed a soul cleansing. And this opportunity came up with Greenpeace, and the timing of it was so magical, I loved it and stayed there for five years working special projects and everything with liaisons in the entertainment industry. I got to be executive producer of the solar power live album called Alternative Energy, which was a fundraiser and all about the issues of global warming and climate change, which are very difficult for Greenpeace to get hard news all of the time, because there was a lot of money invested in saying the science wasn't real, it was an unproven theory.

SF: And then you still haven't become a Buddhist monk, huh?

Dave: I haven't. I say my prayers every day, and I find it probably more helpful than anything else in keeping a sense of humor, a sense of irony, and a slight sense of detachment. I don't go skinning like I used to. And sometimes it helps when things are difficult or painful, to be able to just sit in it instead of looking for an escape away from it. They say that when we get in trouble, that it's actually a sign that we're just about to learn something very important to us, if we can sit in it.

SF: One of the harder things is just sitting there quieting the mind.

Dave: Well, it's impossible, especially with a jackhammer mind like mine.

SF: There's what's called a Dharma Center in Vermont where if you don't want to go all the way to Asia, it's a good way to get a little Buddhism.

Dave: Yeah, I've always fancied going on one of those ten-day retreats. I'm told they're very challenging. But I very rarely get ten days off from work, and I've always felt a bit guilty disappearing and leaving the family, if they've only just seen me coming back off tour or whatever. So I still haven't managed it, but I always think I will one day. At the moment I try and convince myself that I'm doing a kind of Dharma yoga. You know, I'm trying to spread good feelings with my concerts. Trying to uplift people's spirits a bit and remind people you can still have a bit of fun with a sense of irony and although life's tragic, so be it.

SF: How about the song "I Confess." Can you tell me about that?

Dave: Well, like a mixture of my songs, they would have an element in it that was autobiographical, which would often be very, very deep. And it would borrow from stuff I'd read in magazines and seen on the news, or overheard. I used to love listening to people's conversations on buses. And in order, I suppose, to make it appear more confessional and more personal, I would often mess with which person it was written, whether it was I, or he, or she.

"I Confess" was only partly autobiographical. A lot of other references point to a story I'd seen in a magazine about how a guy screwed his wife's sister on their wedding night. That was taking it a bit far. But it made me think of how people can get very sorry for themselves in any sort of situation regardless of their own actions. And so two things in it that were really personal for me was that I found that I ruined three lives, but didn't care, till I found out that one of them was mine. And the second thing was, I noticed in my own life and in the young friends' love affairs that were going on, that when things started to go wrong in them, the argument was often about who loved each other the most, and the accusation was that the other person didn't love as much as you did. And so it seemed to me that the hardest confession to make in those sort of situations were they were right, you didn't actually care very much. And so really the deepest of the confessions for me in that song was if it's all the same to you, I'll stay indifferent.

SF: Like you said, you ruined three lives. So that is really how you feel.

Dave: Well, it can be whenever you get caught in some sort of uncomfortable triangle.

SF: And this did happen to you?

Dave: Yeah. (laughs) And not just once. But yes, it happened once to the point where it reminded me of this story I'd seen in a magazine, so I mixed the plight of this guy in the magazine who had been caught having sex with his new bride's sister on their wedding day. "No, no, you don't understand, it's not what it said." "Yes, it is." And I mixed that with my own tawdry tales of young love.

SF: Oh, my goodness.

Dave: But often in order to make a point harder I would switch the stories around. Like in the song "Best Friend," I'm actually singing it to myself in the same mirror that "Mirror In The Bathroom" was written in. It was actually my sister's bathroom in Birmingham. But I kept that mirror for a long time, eventually lost it. But "Best Friend" was singing a song to a reflection, you know, I just found I'm your best friend – you.

SF: How about the song "Save It For Later"?

Dave: "Save It For Later" is funny, because it's not really about anything - I wrote it when I was a teenager. I wrote it before The Beat started. And it was about turning from a teenager to someone in their 20s, and realizing that the effortless promise for your teenage years was not necessarily going to show that life was so simple as you started to grow up. So it was about being lost, about not really knowing your role in the world, trying to find your place in the world. The actual hook line itself was just a dirty joke, I just thought it was hilarious that you could get in a song: "save it – comma – for later – F-E-double L-A-T-O-R."

SF: Oh, so it's fellatio.

Dave: (laughs) So I thought it'd be really neat to get that in a song and everybody would be singing it. I didn't know it was going to be a joke that lasted for 30 years. So, you couldn't find your own way in the world, and you'd have all sorts of people telling you this, that, and the other, and advising you, and it didn't actually seem like they knew any better. So it was like keep your advice to yourself. Save it – for later.

SF: In the song "Jeanette," is she a real person?

Dave: It was an archetype, but there was somebody, evidently her name was Jeanette. It wasn't a friend of mine, but a friend of somebody else's in the group who did have a Ronettes' style haircut, like a big beehive hairdo. And she was the initial inspiration for the song. But then it sort of got written about an archetype, I suppose. Sort of a rich girl that might want to hang around musicians. Like a trustafarian or something.

SF: Your song "Twist And Crawl," could you tell me about that one?

Dave: Well, not really. Because I didn't write the lyrics too much to that one. I filled out the lyrics, but it was actually a friend of David Steele's, the bass player, Peter Greenall, wrote the lyrics to it. We sat and talked a bit once and he showed me the poem. I filled in the song and made it scan a bit more, and I wrote the changes in sort of middle 8 breaks and stuff like that. It was about somebody wanting to be in the twist and shout kind of casual '60s confidence, but found that it was more like twist and crawl. Just social discomfort to the point of pitiful pain of always feeling you're in the wrong place at the wrong time and saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. Never getting anywhere with it, you know.

SF: Well, that sounds similar to the theme of "Too Nice To Talk To."

Dave: Yes, that was exactly "Too Nice To Talk To." There was a club called Barbarella's in Birmingham that was quite famous. And they used to have this dastardly trick at 20 past 2 every morning, because they closed at 2:30, it didn't matter what was happening, whatever record was playing, they would just scratch the record off and turn on the lights. And it was like (screeching sounds), "Okay, thank you, good night." And you'd be in the middle of some delightful fantasy dancing with somebody. They used to play a lot of Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music in there, very romantic. And a lot of punk songs, too. And so it was a story really about wanting to go and dance with somebody and just spending too long, and going over in your mind what you would say, or what you ought to say, or having your friends going, "Go on, go and talk to her." And you waited that long for it, you took a big breath and strode towards the dance floor, all the lights in the club went on and the record got scratched up (screeching sound), "Okay, thank you, good night." Oh, it's too late now, it's 20 past 2, I've spent all night just watching you. But yeah, it's to do with that shyness to the point of discomfort. And then finally making the bold move just a moment too late.

SF: And you do have one very political song, which is "Stand Down Margaret."

Dave: Yeah.

SF: A lot of Americans don't really know what was going on there, could you give us a bit of an idea of what you were dealing with?

Dave: The late '70s in England were troubled times: high unemployment, secession, the fear of nuclear war breaking out, the kind of fantasy end-of-the-century, end-of-the-world kind of feeling. And Margaret Thatcher came on, kind of like the last great hope of the British Empire. She'd actually been born above a grocery store in Nottingham, a working class city. But had developed airs and graces and a posh accent and kind of saw herself as being of the upper classes, which she wasn't. So it was sort of a false accent, and a false attitude that went with it. Then she fell head over heels with her teenage heartthrob, Ronald Reagan, and went about trying to dismantle any sense of social unity that England had: breaking the unions, letting people go out on strike and starve. And in a very few short years she managed to turn people in England from neighbors to competitors. A lot of people bought shares in the gas company and the train company and the water company, bought shares in the companies that our dads had already paid for. And in doing so turned everybody into competitors - instead of neighbors now we were competing as investors, jealously guarding our shares. Our people stopped talking to each other at bus stops. People started to become more suspicious of each other. And the sense of camaraderie was broken in a way that I haven't ever seen fully replaced, really. It may have been that Britain needed dragging into the 21st Century, but it may also be that making the mistake of believing that just because communism was obviously collapsing, that didn't mean that all of the tenets of world capialism were absolutely accurate. That there was perhaps stuff in our system that weren't that great, either. And I think they're starting to see that it's okay for someone to make a billion dollars, but if they do, somebody else has to go without dinner that night, because that money comes from somewhere. And so the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and poor old Margaret was acting as though she had airs and graces to the manor born. So it was stand down in the political sense – resign. But it was also stand down as in get off your soap box. Get off your high horse. Stop trying to talk down to people. You don't really know that much more than them, anyway. And stop putting on this hoity toity accent, because you know you're really a shop girl from Nottingham.

SF: Well, the whole theme of unity and getting together, that seems to show up in your song "Doors Of Your Heart."

Dave: Yeah. Everybody needs someone they can cling to now and then, no more defense, no more pretense, no reason to explain you can feel love thumping at the doors of your heart. I try sometimes to stop pretending everything's okay and be isolated, and actually enjoy the fact that we are all one, that what's good for one of us is good for all of us, and what's bad for one of us is bad for all of us. And that whether we like it or not we're all in the same boat. So that was what it was about, really, and how much comfort could be derived from that. Sometimes you can have as many intellectual ideas about something as possible, but when your heart starts bursting through your chest, you get a different sense of reality.

SF: I know the heart versus the brain.

Dave: Exactly. And I am trying to get the two of them to co-exist whenever possible.

The first single for The English Beat was an uptempo cover of the Smokey Robinson classic "Tears Of A Clown." It was released on the Chrysalis subsidiary 2-Tone Records, which was started by Jerry Dammers of The Specials. After this single, The English Beat negotiated a deal with Arista records to form their own Go Feet label, which gave them a great deal of creative control.

SF: What gave you guys the idea to cover "Tears Of A Clown"?

Dave: When we first started rehearsing the songs, the drummer (Everett Morton) thought our songs were a bit weird. We had rehearsed the songs, and it would go okay for a minute, and then we would all veer off on our own little tangents and we'd lose the groove on it again. And so Everett said, "Why don't we find a song that we all know and learn that one by ourselves, come back next Tuesday, and we'll play that song and get a groove with that one. And then we'll go back and play one of your weird songs, like that mirror thing." And so that's what we did, we'd play "Tears Of A Clown," then we'd play "Mirror In The Bathroom," then we'd play "Tears Of A Clown." We'd play "Twist And Crawl," and we'd play "Tears Of A Clown," "Big Shot," "Tears Of A Clown," "Click Click," "Tears Of A Clown." And by the time we got five or six songs together that would hold together, David Steele, the bass player, said, "Let's do a show. We should do a concert." We're like, "We've only got six songs." He said, "Yes, but one concert is worth a thousand rehearsals." Because you can sit around and be pretentious in rehersals as long as you like. So we started doing shows, and in order to have seven songs instead of six, we put "Tears Of A Clown" in the set. We'd practiced that song more than any of the others, it turned out. Because it was our magnet, our training model for all the other tunes.

We took all and any sort of gigs, some were punk gigs, some were reggae gigs, some were working men's clubs, some were pubs that were trying to get some business going mid-week, we'd take anything. And sometimes the punky songs went well, sometimes the reggae songs went well, and sometimes neither of them would go down well, but everywhere we went, every time, "Tears Of A Clown" always went down fantastic. So Jerry Dammers came to us, told us about 2-Tone and came and saw the band. He said, "Would you like to do a single for 2-Tone," and we said yes, we'd love to, thanks. And he said, "We really liked that 'Mirror In The Bathroom' song." And we said, "That's probably our best song. Yeah, that would be a good one." Then he came back a week or so later and he said, "Oh, Chrysalis says you can do 'Mirror In The Bathroom,' they like it, but they would own the rights to it for five years." We're like, "No." I said, "You know, that's our best tune. We'd want it on our album. But so long as we can bring it out on our album, that would be fine, you can have it as a single." So he went off again and he came back and he said, "No, Chrysalis said if it's the single it can't be on your first album." So we said, "Well, tell them to fuck themselves." and we said, "We'll do 'Tears Of A Clown' then." Because that always goes down great. And you can tell the fellows at Chrysalis they can argue with Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson about whose song it is. And so we just insisted, and as luck would have it, our song came out in October, and by December 6 it was Number 6 in the charts, and it was the runaway dance party hit of the Christmas of '79. It was on every jukebox and every turntable for every Christmas party. So I think it probably worked out really well, because I don't know if "Mirror In The Bathroom" would have been that cheery as a Christmas single.

SF: Probably not.

Dave: A British song about isolation and narcissism that will morph into a song about cocaine in the bathroom, you know?

SF: The B-side of "Tears Of A Clown" is a song called "Ranking Full Stop." It's a lot of fun. Could you tell me what "ranking" is, and anything about that song?

Dave: Yeah. I can't tell you much about the song, because it's Roger's lyric. But "ranking" is just like in top ranking, or high ranking, you know. It would be the sort of boast or name that an MC, a Master of Ceremonies will toast at a concert he'll give himself. The guy that works with the DJ and talks over the radio and talks over the songs and introduces the band. So that would be where "ranking" Roger came from. It's just like high ranking or top ranking.

SF: But that's a fairly common saying over there?

Dave: It's a Jamaican phrase that we use quite a lot in England.

SF: It was always strange to me how Jamaican sayings make their way over to England, the reggae sayings.

Dave: Well, it's not that strange, really, because there were hardly any black people in England until the mid-'50s, which I think a lot of American people don't know. My mama tells me she remembers seeing her first black person ever sometime in the 1940s during the War. They were all very excited and followed him down the street, poor buggar. But it wasn't really until after the end of the second World War when the British infrastructure had been devastated with the German bombings, that they invited people from the British colonies and protectorates and commonwealth – British Commonwealth country, they call them – to come and help rebuild the motherland. And the idea was that people would come out for three years, make a load of money, go home, and build themselves a big house in Jamaica. But like anything else, when you travel across the world on some sort of spurious idea like that, people ended up setting roots, people ended up having kids, going to school, you never quite saved enough money to go back and build that big house in Jamaica. But although some people now have some roots that they've re-established in Jamaica, the vast majority of the population ended up staying in England. So that first set of kids of Jam-English people were born in the late '50s, and so about the time I was born, mid- or to late-'50s, you had a whole generation of first generation English born of Jamaican parents who had only been in England for a few years. And the Mods and the Rude Boys on the Jamaican side have seen styles of sharp suits and ties and hats and a slightly dandy-ish approach to stuff. Dressing up is a big thing. And looking smarter and richer than you actually were, you know. It's like a working class way of putting on a brave front dressing sharp. So there was quite a lot of cross pollination between Mods and Rude Boys there towards the middle to late '60s. And that was where I heard my first ska music, the Trojan Tightened Up volumes 1 through 4 that become very popular amongst the Mods, who turned into Suedeheads, the Suedeheads turned into Skinheads. And that early ska/reggae was the favorite music of the skinheads on the soccer terraces. That was where I heard my first reggae was at the soccer games.

SF: The Mods and the Rude Boys, were they necessarily black or white? Or did that even matter?

Dave: The Mods were white, in the main part. The Rude Boys were the first English generation born to Jamaican moms and dads who had emigrated to England. So they were the first JamEnglish generation.

SF: That's really interesting. I don't think a lot of people over here know about that stuff.

Dave: No. It's always been so convoluted, I think the racial politics of America, they presume that England must have had a very similar racial background to America. But although the good old British Empire helped design and make fortunes out of the slave trade, there weren't any slaves in England. Very few. A handful. But they would be more personal butlers than people who were used in the fields.

SF: So which of the songs that we haven't talked about are some of the ones that you feel are some of your stronger more really intense songs?

Dave: We've covered most of the main contenders. "Click Click" is about suicide. About there being five shots in the cylinder. "Click, click, click, click, click, six shots and you've clicked it five times, so you know the next one's a bullet.

SF: What made you write that song?

Dave: A rainy afternoon in Birmingham, England when you've just got 15 months of rainy Tuesday afternoons in England. And suicide can seem like a viable alternative, you know. But it was with a sense of irony about it, as well. It was like considering suicide, but not really. Probably not going to do it, but pondering it. And it was funny, because I've had a lot of people tell me, "Do you know how really close I came to killing myself when I was 19 or 20 or 21..." That time when one does consider that sort of thing the most. They say, "It's your song 'Click Click' that put me off the idea." Made me laugh about it a bit."

"Big Shot" was about being stuck at a bus stop trying to go to work, and everybody would be driving by, one person in the car, and enjoying splashing in the puddles so as to soak everybody at the bus stops. So there I was at the bus stop seething. So it's people going after their office jobs, you know.

SF: This was when you were a construction worker?

Dave: No, actually this was a little before then. My dad had hooked me up with a great job in a car battery shop that ruined your clothes - every time you touched a battery it burned another hole in your shirt. It was horrible. And it stung, battery acid. Nice people, though. Very nice people. He really wanted me to be in the motor trade. Terribly disappointed.

SF: The last thing I have for you, Dave, I'm wondering how you went from Greenpeace to then leaving Greenpeace to make music again.

Dave: Well, it was odd. Stoker, the drummer from General Public, got in touch with me and said that he bumped into Roger and they'd been talking. And would I fancy doing a General Public style thing again? I said, "Oh, that might be fun." And about the same time this guy I knew who put songs in movies, he was just starting at it, but he ended up becoming very big at it and very successful. And he said that he'd got this movie called "Threesome" that he was looking for music for, and they wanted kind of suggestive songs to go with this soundtrack. He'd got a big long list of songs that we'd thought up, and he actually first approached me, "Would you like to do 'Stuck In The Middle With You,' and I was like, "No. Thanks for the thought. No." I noticed "I'll Take You There" was on that list. And "I'll Take You There" had always appealed to me as a song, because there was a Harry J & the Allstars instrumental called "Liquidator" about an assassin. And it's the bass line to "I'll Take You There." In fact, it came out in Jamaica and in England two years before "I'll Take You There" came out in America. And "I'll Take You There" is, for all intents and purposes, just the "Liquidator" with lyrics on the top. And so I thought that would be good, we could do a version of "I'll Take You There" for this movie, and we could try and knock as many pieces of the original "Liquidator" back into the tune and see if anybody dared say anything. And of course because it had been a dirty secret for 30 years, nobody dared mention it now. Even when we said, "Well, actually, there's a lot of this song 'Liquidator' in there, should we mention that in the publishing?" "Nonono, just leave it." And we did. And it went to like 1 on the dance chart, so that was it. We made an LP then, and toured a little bit for General Public. But it really wasn't to my taste. Some people were living in England, some people living in America, it cost ten thousand dollars to fly everybody together for rehearsal, and the Earth starts being a place twice as big as your hand. We had technicians scurrying around. it was all a bit high-falutin' for me. So after a little while I'd got the bug back in my feet for wanting to tread the boards again, but I wanted to do it in a different way. I started my own 4-piece band and called it Bang. And sort of went back to roots. The Beatles, there was only four of them and they sounded okay, so I did that instead. Bang went on for a couple of years, but so many times I would show up, and they would say, "Tonight: The English Beat, General Public, Bang, and Dave Wakeling," like it was four groups. In the end, I just gave up. I was like all right, fine. English Beat it is. You can't fight against the tide.

SF: Yeah. It's like what Eric Clapton tried to do with Derek and the Dominos. They would show up and it would say, "Eric Clapton, and Derek and the Dominos."

Dave: That's right, exactly. I had all sorts of stuff in the contract, you know, if he dares mentioning The Beat or General Public you have to pay me in full and I don't have to play the show. And you get there and it's sold out and there's a line 'round the block, and everybody's really excited. So you just shut up and sing.

SF: I guess that's the lesson. Which of your songs go over particularly well when you play them now?

Dave: We do a segue of Ranking Full Stop into Mirror In The Bathroom that always brings the house down. "I Confess" always goes down great, because I think the whole crowd is wondering, will he hit the six falsetto? A couple of the covers, the dirty reggae songs of Prince Buster. "Tenderness" and "Never You Done That" always go down very well. "Hot You're Cool" goes down great if we do it. We end up playing about 2 hours and 20 minutes a night now. And then we come off stage and somebody, some bright spark, will rattle off the names of eight songs that we haven't done. And we just look at them in disbelief. I suppose it's a compliment if we played 28 songs and you're still bummed about 8 that we haven't done, then obviously the cup runs pretty deep.

SF: Yeah. I think you're seeing a lot of guys that are probably now about 40 years old who were playing your records back when they were DJs at college radio, and are so happy to see that they were right, this was a big deal.

Dave: Oh, it is. It's a lovely feeling. And I get to meet a lot of them. You know, we played 138 shows last year (2007), most of them were sold out. We do three or four different new songs every night as we build up a collection of songs that will be on our next record of some sort. We have some new songs, some live songs, some acoustic songs, some studio modern remakes of old classics.

For more intriguing song facts visit songfacts.com

Just letting you know that The English Beat will be on Fearless Music TV in NYC this Saturday night, March 22, performing "Mirror In The Bathroom".

 Fearless Music TV is on Saturday nights at 12:30am on Fox 5 in NYC, and if you are not in NYC, check out the time and channel listing at the Fearless Music Myspace here here. Just click on blog titled TIME/CHANNEL LISTING FOR FEARLESS MUSIC.