Jerry Dammers knows don't argue: the 2 Tone Lives & Legacies exhibition
"In normal circumstances", says Jerry Dammers in the brochure to 2 Tone: Lives & Legacies (Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry), "musicians displaying their artworks should be illegal", before going on to excuse himself for putting some of his college artwork on display in this sprawling 2-Tone exhibition. Yep, Dammers gets a free pass because ... well, because this is largely his show.
The exhibition brochure has 50 of Dammers' "personal reflections" (some fairly lengthy) on an array of artwork, photos, clothing, flyers, posters, handwritten lyrics etc all seemingly belonging to the great man himself. So we see a couple of JD paintings, a triptych of drawings, a photo of a 3D reproduction of some soundsystem speaker cabinets, even an animated film affair (Far Gosford street, Coventry's semi-bohemian enclave of long standing). It's very much the hors-d'œuvre, of course, because in reality everyone's going to this show to gorge themselves on 2-Tone nostalgia. Tuck in rudie, it's later than you think. Anyway, I too went along. I ate my fill, and ... I wasn't sick. Which is saying something. Disgorging bile on anything faintly "mainstream" or backward-looking is one of this blog's basic stances. Almost as soon as they announced this exhibition as part of (groan) Coventry City of Culture I was grinding my teeth. What!? In 2021 you're going to showcase just how exciting the city of Coventry is by mounting an exhibition about a music scene from ... four decades ago? Er, right. So why didn't 2 Tone: Lives & Legacies give me the chronic dyspepsia it threatened to? Hmm. I guess in the end I found it hard to truly dislike. Call me an old softie, but as with many who were young when 2-Tone emerged, I've still got a store of affection for this stuff.
Anyway, tempting though it now is to emulate Mr Dammers and give you 50 numbered sections explaining in great detail my every last thought about the Herbert exhibition, interlaced with some dog-eared memories of seeing the Specials skanking the house down back when I was a raw Coventry youth in 1980 ... I'll spare you. Instead, suffice it to say there were things I liked in 2 Tone: Lives & Legacies. Namely these things:
*The handwritten lyrics for Ghost Town, complete with Dammers' Biro'd corrections. Seems "All the clubs have been closed down" in line two had originally been "are closing down", and "This town, is coming like a ghost town" in line three had originally been "This place, is coming like a ghost town". (Fwiw, I think they're both improvements). It also appears that Dammers wrote "Here [sic] what I say" as a would-be line six - later excised, homonym and all?
*The looped photos playing on a fairly large screen from Mark Osborne, whose black-and-white images of the Coventry post-punk music scene 1979-1981 are both evocative (long-lost Coventry bands like Urge live in the local FE college students' union) and extremely interesting as photos (unusual angles, a lot of close-ups, nothing too "rock and roll").
*The punters on the day I was there. Mostly, misanthrope that I am, other people just tend to annoy me, but here (if we leave aside the middle-aged retro-merchants, of which there were a fair few), I liked the fact that there was an old white-haired chap who may have been in his late-seventies wandering about this exhibition. My favourite moment of all was watching this man staring for quite some time at a "funky" lightboard which said "June-July 1978 the Special AKA support the Clash on the On Parole Tour". What did he make of this? Meanwhile, at the other end of the age spectrum, there were a group of boisterous teenagers carrying skateboards going around the hushed exhibition loudly proclaiming "I've got that, I've got that, I've got that, I haven't got that". Deathless satire or loutish behaviour? You decide.
And er, that's about it. A lot of work has evidently gone into this exhibition and I know I'm not doing it justice (or even really trying to). For me, it's that age-old problem: how can rather sterile exhibitions about music ever really work? We're talking about something that generally requires audio amplification, that thrives on energy and atmosphere, and something that's even - let it be acknowledged - often more enjoyable when accompanied by lashings of alcohol or drugs (or at least the buzz of a crowd). Here you've got museum-standard exhibition cases, wall exhibits with explanatory notes and extremely tinny, low-volume ska music playing in a couple of corners of the room. Too little pressure, this pressure's got to start ... Yeah, sorry Jerry, sorry City of Culture, sorry every 59-year-old Fred Perry-wearing Specials fan everywhere. Now, having officially banished myself from my home city (sent from Coventry etc), let me end by saying - in no uncertain terms - Jerry Dammers Was Right. He was right to think fusing ska with punk's spikiness would work. He was right to (very ambitiously) weave serious political messages into a pop enterprise. He was right to broaden things out to South Africa (though I personally can't stand Free Nelson Mandela as a song). And he was right to try to retain artistic independence over 2-Tone within the Chrysalis operation. And, of course, he was right to say musicians displaying their artworks should be illegal. I would probably go further. It should be illegal for gallery spaces to mount exhibitions about music scenes unless there's loud music playing at all times. And even then I think I'd probably put the curators on parole until they mended their ways. Gangsters the lot of 'em.
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