Official T Shirt The Beat Ska Band Album I Just Can't Stop It

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So, fast forward to the present day. I’m sat in an onion shaped pod in the garden of an Edgbaston home belonging to one of Birmingham’s musical icons and all round top bloke Ranking Roger. With it’s Deloreon style door of entry and the mother of all glass ceilings “so I can do some serious star gazing” this is where Roger still creates music to make your head bob and your feet tap. M: With your son now sharing lead vocals, it creates a nice dynamic onstage, like it’s a family affair but do you get on ok while you’re on the road. Given that it’s such a tough business, did you have any reservations about your son going into it (i.e. Murphy Ranking Junior – co-member of ‘The Beat’)? So we took some time off after touring with The Pretenders and starting jamming again. Within it all we’d been reading our fan club letters and we got this one from a lady in America saying I’ve tried to use your music for my keep fit lessons and it’s too fast. It was a lovely written letter so we decided to tone it down a bit in the way that The Beat became what we call ‘one-drop’, where the rim shot and the snare hits at the same time and that’s the main emphasis. So we did Doors of your Heart and Monkey Murders and along with a few others and that was the kind of style for that album in the end. RR: heard about that. It sounded like a really good thing. We met them years ago and I thought ‘They’re really nice guys… for Americans!’ Very into their music, they loved our music and their music was OK.

At the moment it’s definitely David Cameron (British Prime Minister). But I also think that Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (U.K.I.P.) is potentially very dangerous. So he says – and if Saxa says you’d better believe it. I know they used to play Manchester and Liverpool quite a lot, he used to play with these jazz bands that went all around the country, and I know John Lennon used to go to a lot of blues dances, or shebeens as they were known then, and obviously they were after hours parties, and sometimes they would have a band playing there, just a small line up, nothing too loud, but enough to keep the thing going. I think it was in that kind of setting where it must have happened. For John Lennon to have been into that kind of thing is good, and later on we found out that George Harrison was a big reggae lover within The Beatles, there was a reggae vibe I think, in there somewhere. I’ve got this thing out at the moment on Pledge, a double CD compilation of collaborations with people like Sly & Robbie and Death In Vegas and that will be followed by Return Of The Jedi, which will feature some of what would’ve been The Beat album.

Interview – Ranking Roger of The Beat

PLEASE NOTE: In some European countries you may be asked to pay a surcharge to receive your parcel. It seems you spent a lot of time touring around 81-82 with artists including The Clash, The Specials and even Bowie. Which gigs stand out in your memory today? Maggie Thatcher’s economic policies had literally ripped the heart out of the local community and it left a lasting effect even to this day. One has only to drive through places like Longbridge to see just how bad things became then. Over 30 years later & things are only just beginning to improve. Yeah I think so but maybe we changed it too radically y’know. I call the first album a classic, the band were hungry, we were young, there’s major notes against minor notes in there & stuff. It’s all in there. It’s only after we recorded them that we really got to play them properly. Touring with the police was exceptional too, it showed me the top line of being a big pop star in the music industry, I used to get up and DJ with them onstage every night. I was only 17-18 while they were well into their 20′s so maybe because I was so young, I got away with it. Or maybe it was my smile.

Ranking Roger: It’s not really much of a summer anymore is it? We’ll find out whether there really is a summer in the next couple of weeks but so far it’s been good. Plenty of gigs. Having thought about it, maybe it’s the fact that I never got married. I should have been married. I’ve 3 kids and was with an Irish girl for 20 years, but we split up about 10 years ago. I regret that. We should have got married, but we didn’t. Maybe if we’d married we wouldn’t have split up later, I don’t know. Saxa had played with some huge names. Is it true he had played with first-wave ska legends such as Prince Buster and Desmond Dekker – and even The Beatles? We’re here to discuss the release of The Beat’s wonderfully titled second album Wha’appen? on heavyweight vinyl by Demon Records ( demonrecords.co.uk). Originally released in 1981 and featuring the hits Doors of your Heart, All Out to Get You and Drowning it marked a departure of sorts from their debut release. M: That would complicate things a little. Although, last year, the US Beat and the English Beat toured America together, billing it; ‘Two Beats Hearting As One’.

But, amidst all of this upheaval and social change there was the music. Out of the devastation of the heart of the country came bands like Dexys, The Specials, The Selecter and The Beat. It was loud, proud and carried a message, so much so that at times these bands were derided for their stance. Taken as a political one they were shunned by the BBC (quite ironic really given current circumstances) and banished to the lower reaches of the charts.