The Selecter Story

the seeds were sown along time ago in the early 70's. silverton hutchinson, a childhood friend and later the original drummer for the automatics/specials, invited me to jam with some friends at the holyhead youth facilty in coventry city centre. this was a basement where you could set up amps and drums and then play as loud as you wanted til late. here I met the people who would turn out to be significant throughout my life, they were charles "aitch" bembridge (who played more bass and organ then) arthur "gaps" hendrickson (who played guitar - see the chapter five pic) desmond brown (the person who taught me how to really play the reggae chip) charley anderson (the dreadlocked bass man) and lynval golding (later to be the specials guitar player).
I have fond memories of walking there with my newly purchased gibson sg junior guitar, because my wife at the time, jane and I lived close by, plugging in and playing bluesy improvisations as we jammed bob marley riffs. in that same era I knew john bradbury and jammed with him in a band that rehearsed at warwick uni. he then went to hull for his degree, returning to coventry a few years later as punk was beginning. however, I also got to know ray king at the holyhead and he was known as a rival to geno washington some years before. in about 1974/5 ray and I formed a band called nitetrane with two brothers raymond and earl on drums and bass and we gigged the central area for a while playing soul covers. we decided to audition keyboard players feeling the sound was too sparse with a single guitar and jerry dammers saw the ad, turned up and got the job immediately! we continued to gig as a five piece for a year until a calamitous two weeks in tunisia made us feel it was time to change,(incidentally, it was in tunisia that jerry bought a baseball shirt with the name walt jabsco emblazoned on the back). jerry and I tried to work on our own songs but we didn't hit it off as a partnership, the beginnings of the automatics were forming in his mind and I was not in the plan. I got on with writing and recording my songs, making some demo recordings in a cellar below brad's flat in warwick with brad on drums and kevin harrison engineering, one of those demos was called missing words and another was called washed up and left for dead. kevin went on to achieve success with urge and their song revolving boy and the songs evolved into the versions performed by the selecter via a band called the transposed men, more on that later. so, in 1977 even though punk was peaking and various soon to be members of the specials and the selecter were in bands, I was in a day job which paid for my first car and telephone line. at least I was mobile and connected! brad worked in a record shop and when elvis costello released watching the detectives we played it over and over in the shop. we thought it was just what we were trying to do, mixing reggae with rock/pop songwriting. time passed but one day brad visited and said let's make a single. he had seen countless examples of bands doing just that from being in the record shop and we thought we would too. I said that I was working on a melody, at that time just a tune with no clear idea of a finished result and that roger lomas had built a small studio in his garden with a 4track tape machine and some bits and pieces of recording gear. brad agreed to see roger and roger agreed to produce and engineer the project, we started in october or november 1977 and added to the track whenever we could all be there. from start to finish it was 3months but we didn't record every day, sometimes a couple of weeks would go by because one of us couldn't be there. the main thing is that I have not laughed and enjoyed myself, while recording, more than in those days spent making the selecter, or the kingston affair as it was called then. the name I came up with while brainstorming with brad was the selecters, spelt with an e instead of an o to set it apart. have a look at the pic of the mock up single of the track in the selecter pics gallery. we had hopes that we could release it but nothing came of it. by this time jerry had managed to get the automatics into a settled line up which was steadily building a huge live audience by gigging throughout the uk. a feeling of excitement was beginning to be tangible. I decided to form a band, just having an instrumental track, good though I thought it was, didn't feel enough. I always wanted to gig, to play for an audience so having a band was the only way I knew, besides I written quite a few songs by now and I wanted a chance to sing them and be the front man. the line up was brad on drums, kevin harrison on guitar, steve wynn on bass, desmond brown on hammond and me singing and playing guitar. we called ourselves the transposed men, a sci-fi book on brad's table providing the idea( the transposed man by dwight v. swain) and we played three gigs, got turned down by virgin records and others but we played a set which included on my radio, street feeling and out on the streets again. the only audio that exists is a rehearsal recorded on a mono cassette machine of the day in the binley oak , a coventry pub that was used extensively by bands to rehearse. as 1978 drew to a close, the automatics/special a.k.a./specials began to record a song called gangsters, the sessions funded by a local face named jimbo o'doyle, a likeable man if he was your friend. jerry approached me one day and asked "can we borrow brad for the recording because silverton was not turning up for the sessions". I could only shrug my shoulders knowing that brad would obviously say yes and that would be the end of the transposed men. trying to find another drummer who could play reggae and rock in those days was just about impossible and the band fell apart. the specials now were the line up everyone knows, with gangsters recorded, mixed but no b side. all the studio time was used on getting gangsters absolutely just right. the idea came, I believe, from lynval golding to have my instrumental track as the other side of their first single, to have double a sides by different artists like some of the jamaican releases we had seen. this seemed like a good idea to me and we managed to get an afternoon in the studio to overdub a rhythm guitar onto the original mix of the kingston affair to enhance the ska feel. the name seemed wrong by now so I renamed the track the selecter by the selecter, it had a skewed sort of effect which I liked, and everything was set. jerry and myself mastered the tracks at porky's fine cuts mastering studio, where just about everything that was released that was any good was cut(mastered) and jerry got a deal with rough trade to manufacture and distribute several thousand copies of "gangsters vs the selecter". they sold, more were pressed, they sold and so it went until it started to really sell. john peel played the selecter one evening while I was listening to the show and it was incredibly exciting to hear my music on the radio, on the john peel show. as the track finished though he credited it to the specials, so I phoned and got to speak to him between plays and then he made it clear on air that the specials were on one side and the selecter, the other. could not have been better in every way, what a moment to remember. the single reached number 6 in the uk charts in july 1979, exceeding 250,000 copies sold and giving us a presentation silver record each. 2tone records was launched and what came next is well documented elsewhere but the early history is perhaps a lttle less clear, I hope my ramblings have been worth reading. I am to this day really proud of that record and what ensued because of it. I believe that the people who experienced 2tone music in those times would all agree that it was life changing, and for the better!