The reunited version of The Specials finally unveiled themselves live on British TV on Tuesday night performing 'Gangsters' and 'Message To You Rudie' on Jools Holland Live on the BBC. The band, who were nicely suited and booted and featured a horn section and a look alike sub for Jerry Dammers, played faithful and understated versions of two of their classic songs. The band will appear on the show again tonight to perform 'Little Bitch' and 'Man At C&A' and will conduct an interview with Holland.
Fan reaction has been mostly positive, though a few have felt the performance was lacking the proper enthusiasm. To be fair to the band, this was only the 2nd time in 25 years that they had played live in front of a crowd and TV studios always lack the energy of a club atmosphere. Personally I was happy and relieved to finally see the band playing live after all the anticipation and the angst surrounding Jerry Dammers involvement in the reunion.
Here is video of the performance from Tuesday night. What do you think?
Many thanks to the Mondo De Muebles blog for the MP3 download link of the band's performance on Tuesday night's show below:
The Specials - Jools Holland Show 8/4/09
2 comments:
Thanx, from Paris, to be honest it's strange to see back together The Specials and do Gangster in 2009, feel like out of time, very strange.
I prefer better the version of Message To You Rudy (AN VERY GREAT VERSION) that they do than gangster.
anonyme73
Slow start from Terry Hall but warmed up by a great "Little Bitch". Missed this screening, went to see Rico play in Brixton with Jerry Dammers playing support DJ. Rico lived up to all expectations as did Jerry with a wicked selection of tunes, we danced into the small hours. Didn't get to speak to either of them though, think they have both heard enough questions about the Specials. We did spend a couple of hours at the bar afterwards with Eddie "Tan Tan" Thornton, a great trumpet player and a great bloke. The perfect advert for the Alpha Boys School. This is a great warm up to the tour.
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