Too Much Too Young - 2002 Remaster

This song tells the story of a teenage mother from a scathing, judgmental perspective: Ain't he cute? No he ain't He's just another burden on the welfare state It's based on a 1969 song by Lloyd Charmer called "Birth Control." The Specials' keyboardist Jerry Dammers sped up the tempo and updated the words.

The Specials landed their first UK #1 in February 1980 when "Too Much Too Young," their third single, claimed the top spot. They were hot stuff in Britain, but at the time were touring America, where they were slogging it out to sparse crowds. They went home in March but returned to perform on the April 19, 1980 episode of Saturday Night Live, bringing ska to the show for the first time. "Our performance was incendiary," Horace Panter of The Specials said in the book Skaboom! An American Ska And Reggae Oral History. "We were all in bad moods and the tension was palpable. I felt kinda embarrassed by it, to be honest."

Dammers told the story of the song in an interview with BBC Coventry & Warwickshire's Annie Othen: "I can remember, obviously, what the song was about... I nearly had a thing with a married woman and it didn't happen in the end - obviously because she was married - so there was all that sort of rage and frustration of a young man. The song kind of got a happy ending because, obviously, the kid came first. So behind all that rage, it's actually quite nice because we both walked away from it for the sake of the kid."