The Selecter & The Beat
24th January 2018
Powerstation, Auckland, New Zealand.
The Selecter reviewed by Marius Nel & The Beat reviewed by Mairi-Anne Nel. All photography by Taylor Conboy.
In the queue outside The Powerstation, a glance at fellow concert goers made it clear this band appeals most strongly to my generation, although more than a handful of fans (infants in their third decade of life) arrived later. The Beat has been around since the late 1970s. If you haven’t heard them before, this Birmingham group has a similar flavour to their sibling bands of the Thatcher era: Madness, The Police and others. They were all dusted with the same condiments.
The Beat has gone through many permutations of musicians over the years, with its two main founder members heading different groups now. This is Ranking Roger’s branch of the original band’s family tree.
My fellow reviewer and I started at the sound desk, where we asked for the set lists for both groups in this double feature gig. The Selecter’s list was forthcoming, but “The Beat just make it up as they go along,” revealed the house manager. OK. The Beat should have no problem gaining permanent residence in New Zealand. They fit right in with Kiwi she’ll-be-right mentality.
The seven-member band kicked off 40 minutes late, with Ranking claiming it was still only six in the morning back home. Their first number was walking-pace reggae, but it was followed by their 1981 hit, “Too Nice To Talk To”, a really frisky piece, very tightly executed.
The group’s sound is a punk-ska-reggae blend: a vigorous, bobbing rhythm with a brisk, steadying, underlying swing and conversational turn-taking with the sax. The harmonies are simple and the musical mood is happy, even when the lyrics are socio-political. “We try everything,” announced Ranking, “because dance music is what it’s all about,” before he plunged into “Stand Down Margaret”. For the uninitiated, this joyful number is about the unemployment caused by Thatcher. Lyrics include: “I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever get the chance / Just to sing to my children in a holiday jam”, and “Our lives seem petty in your cold gray hands / Would you give a second thought, would you ever give a damn?” However, its cheerfulness makes you feel like an ice cream ought to be an antidote to any, in fact, all of life’s disappointments.
The set came almost equally from the group’s historical hits and from Bounce, its 2016 album. From the latter was drawn “Side To Side”, “Avoid The Obvious” (a nod to Bowie and other heroes of Ranking Roger), “Fire Burn” (war protest) and “My Dream”. While political comment remains a theme of some of the lyrics, it is no longer the core. The band’s contemporary pieces do not have the guts of the 1980s but do retain much of its heart. The set ended with the old hit, “Mirror In The Bathroom”. The crowd loved it. I did too. Its sinister, narcissistic lyrics, presented with musical verve and an incongruously happy melody made me feel a lot better about my tenuous hold on mental health.
Ranking and his son, Ranking Junior, are good showmen. Junior presents with matching energy (“My Dream” left me feeling like I’d been shaken vigorously in a bottle along with several plastic balls and a metal spike), but with less clothing. He started the evening in the traditional jacket and tie, but as the set progressed, he undressed, ending with a naked, gleaming torso.
Senior engaged the audience between every piece, lashing up their enthusiasm, telling them a little about the songs and teaching the fans how to pronounce “Wha’ppen?” Then … he told us how happy he was to bring his show to New Zealand and to Australia.
“Fuck Australia!” churlishly bleated a Kiwi behind me in the darkness. Now, someone really should tell Roger not to mention us and them in the same breath. It isn’t safe. At the very least, it might require the composition of another jiggling song to ice-cream-out our political pain.
Ska music. Happy people. Bouncing and bopping. Yes, a whole evening of that. You don’t go to one of these concerts if you want to get all dark and philosophical. For this you would have had to go to Roger Waters’ show, which was in town on this same night.
Entering the hallowed portals of The Powerstation we were told to have tickets and ID at the ready – no under 18s allowed. A quick glance around the others in the queue and someone said: “She must be joking!” We were all at least over 40. But later there was a smattering of 20 pluses. Let me say this: music in Auckland is alive and kicking and the Powerstation is one of the hottest spots for live music: it is cavernous and the audience has a clear view of the stage from either the roomy dance floor or the large balcony that runs along three sides of the hall. There is a kickass PA system with towers blasting to the audience on the upper level as well so we all become part of the crowd. It has seen some big names in music: Radiohead, The Beastie Boys, Snoop Dogg to name a few. My co-reviewer and I were directly under one of the powerful air conditioning units which kept us cool and comfortable on this seasonably muggy January night.
After The Beat had tuned the audience to well beyond concert pitch to the point of fever pitch, I wondered how their tour mates The Selecter were going to shape up. This band has staying power with a string of hits like “Three Minute Hero”, “Missing Words” and “On My Radio”. I had a listen earlier to their latest single, “Frontline” from the album with the same title and was blown away by the extremely relevant social message of consumerism and Internet obsession and which asks, according to their website, “can we really reduce people’s lives to hashtags?”
The lights went down and in filed all eight members of the band: two saxes, a keyboard, lead guitar, drums, bass and of course the pint-sized voice in the fedora, Pauline Black with her co-front, Arthur ‘Gaps’ Hendrickson.
The room sizzled with “The Avengers” – largely instrumental with Pauline working the audience with her charm. Then into “Three minute Hero”, the song of so many “wannabes” looking for their hit while having to face the humdrum of an ordinary grey life. The audience started hopping.
Then came the rousing “Frontline” with its huge chorus and the audience was roaring along: “My mind is full, my heart is empty; It’s hard to live in a world of plenty – Frontline!” It was at this point that I got all dark and philosophical, despite the vibrant, happy atmosphere: is vibrant, happy music really the vehicle for a sobering social message? Well, hopefully the seeds are sown for the revolution here…
Let’s talk musicality here – and I’m afraid this is an inevitable comparison with The Beat who had two guitarists whose only role seemed to be to provide the “chunk-chunk” ska rhythm and not much else. The Selecter’s Will Crewdson, their sole guitarist, made his presence powerfully felt with good rock riffing on songs like “Frontline” and “Missing words” – a breakup song and I must admit one of my favourites of the evening.
Keyboardist Lee Horsley played some mean Hammond riffs and comps, especially that screaming intro on “Danger” – very apt! This took the song more across to the genre of rock than ska – listen to the studio version of the song and it’s a different animal altogether. Again, some good riffing from Will Crewdson here.
Another comparison with The Beat: The Beat are a blend of ska and reggae in roughly a 70:30 ratio, whereas The Selecter (whose name derives from the Jamaican word for a disc jockey) has a blend of ska, rock and reggae in a roughly 70:20:10 ratio. Which for me, as a rock enthusiast, at this point in the show, made me look more favourably upon The Selecter for this evening: they were, in the words of Frank Zappa, letting the audience “get down with their bad selves” whereas The Beat were a lot lighter on their ska feet.
There was great harmonic interplay between the members of this tight band: most of the members sang parts on at least one part and Pauline’s powerful, throaty voice fit beautifully into the velvet glove of Gaps’ tenor. Fedoras and fezzes off to the sound crew for this act: every instrument and voice had its own space and could be heard clearly.
The evening got rollicking and rolling as “Train to Skaville”, a cheeky nod to “Take me to Funky Town”, pulled out of the station. And zoomed through “The Big Badoof” and the very clever ska-fying of the iconic James Bond theme with macho posturizing from Gaps’ semi-rap delivery with trippy delay effects while Pauline joined drummer Winston Marche to bang a gong.
The audience were chanting full throated, “It’s just the same old show” on “On my Radio” and the sing-along continued through to “Too Much Pressure” with the title line’s repetition throughout the song.
They were joined by Ranking Roger and Ranking Junior from The Beat for the finale, wrapping up the evening of hopping, bopping, happy music (with some serious social content) neatly with a green, red and yellow bow. Now: who could go home feeling down about our shitty world after that?
The Beat:
The Selecter:
Were you there at the Powerstation for this brilliant Ska showdown? Or have you seen The Beat or The Selecter perform live somewhere else before? Tell us about it in the comments below!