SPECIAL ORDER

"We realized we were in danger of becoming the Best Specials Tribute Band In The World,” chuckles Horace Panter, “and that’s something none of us are interested in becoming. The time was right, and oddly, the pandemic gave us, as it did many people, a chance for a rethink.”

We’re sitting with our morning coffees in a freshly-gentrified quarter of Birmingham, where the Specials are playing tonight, and we’re talking about how one of the UK’s most emblematically political bands has found a whole new lease of life. In March 2020, the Specials convened for what they thought would be the recording of a new album. The pandemic put paid to those plans, but oddly, it also gave the group—now pared down after the sad passing of drummer John Bradbury in 2015 to three of the original members, vocalists Terry Hall and Lynval Golding