Ghost Town

The Specials keyboardist Jerry Dammers wrote and recorded this in a Tottenham, London apartment. On the surface, it is about the decline of Coventry, where the band grew up, but the latent meaning is quite different. The song was written just as three band members - Neville Staples, Lynval Golding and Terry Hall - were leaving The Specials to form Fun Boy Three. According to Dammers, the song was inspired by the band's split. He said in 2008: "'Ghost Town' was about the breakup of the Specials. It just appeared hopeless. But I just didn't want to write about my state of mind so I tried to relate it to the country as a whole." Many in the UK could relate. Coventry was a thriving industrial town in 1960s, but fell on hard times in the 1980s. "Ghost Town" caught the mood of Summer 1981 as levels of civil unrest not seen in a generation hit the UK.

The song was influenced by scenes noted during the band's UK tour. Dammers recalled in an interview in the music magazine Mojo, "In Liverpool, all the shops were shuttered up, everything was closing down. In Glasgow there were little old ladies on the streets selling their household goods."

"Ghost Town" was the seventh UK Top 10 for The Specials and their second #1, following "Too Much Too Young." The song wasn't even released as a single in America, where the band tried and failed to break through in 1980 with a tour and an appearance on Saturday Night Live. They learned that getting on the radio and placed in record stores there was nearly impossible because there was no classification for ska or two-tone, and they didn't fit under the aegis of pop, punk, reggae or rock. It wasn't until the '90s that America warmed to the sound they helped create.