The English Beat’s recent Ashland concert was cancelled due to winter road closures, but they promised they’d be back in April. As a LocalsGuide cub reporter I did a series of lengthy interviews with their lead singer, Dave Wakeling. For those of you with short attenetion spans, here are the highlights. If you like this, then dig into the longer blogs.
ON HILLARY CLINTON: “I don’t believe a bloody word she says. One minute she’s soft, then angry, then you can see when she’s uncomfortable with a question – she gets that weird smile. Like a sheep killing dog.
ON POLITICS : “You know there is this great French saying, “If you’re under thirty and not a Socialist, you have no heart, and if you’re over forty and a Socialist, you have no brain”.” (Curt’s footnote : go google this – lots of variations and trivia. Also attributed to Winston Churchill)
ON THE U.S.of A. : “You know, my Dad used to say, “Watch out if everyone in America ever got along, cause they could just roll the whole lot of us.” America is still the hope of the world. It has the ability to be the future and inspire the world.”
ON TATTOOS : Then there’s the whole fashionability thing. Like the Hell’s Angel’s tattoos of the 60′s. Or the tribal tattoo’s of the 80′s. It dates you, just like using too many synthesizers.”
ON THE FIRST CONCERTS HE EVER ATTENDED : “Black Sabbath one weekend, and Led Zeppelin the next. They were both local bands. All of Black Sabbath was from Birmingham, and Robert Plant and John Bonham were from a town fifteen miles away. I didn’t realize
the implications back then.”
ON THE ORIGINS OF SKA MUSIC : “But it was the big house parties held in Birmingham that fused the two sounds (reggae and punk) and dance styles. They’d have two DJ’s spinning, one with 12″ dub slates, and the other with 7″ punk vinyl.”
ON RACIAL TENSION AND MUSIC : “With a racially mixed crowd dressing similar and enjoying the same scene Saturday night, it made it hard to have race conflicts on Monday morning. ”
ALL YOU SKANKIN’ MODS…ENJOY THE INTERVIEWS!!!
…….. CURT
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