‘The Boiler’: how The Specials created ska’s first MeToo anthem
Following the dissolution of the Coventry 2-Tone group’s first incarnation in 1982, principal creative force Jerry Dammers opted to persist with The Specials while Terry Hall, Neville Staple, and Lynval Golding saw chart success with the new wave-tinged Fun Boy Three. Signalling the ‘mark two’ of the band as The Special AKA, Dammers, along with labelmates The Bodysnatchers’ Rhoda Dakar, cut a devastating single confronting rape and sexual assault, precipitating ‘Me Too’ by nearly four decades.
The Specials’ record on misogyny wasn’t squeaky clean. Founded on staunch principles of racial unity and unequivocally rejecting the National Front’s lurking presence in the skinhead and ska scene and aligning themselves with left-organising like Rock Against Racism, the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament, and the Right to Work March. Flashes of spiteful chauvinism blot 1979’s The Specials, however.
“And you think it’s about time that you died/ And I agree, so you decide on suicide/ You tried but you never quite carried it off/ You only wanted to die in order to show off” is a vicious line from ‘Little Bitch’ that’s aged like milk, and ‘Nite Klub’s “I won’t dance in a club like this/ All the girls are slags” point to a machismo the young men had yet to shake off.
After their defining document of Thatcherite decline ‘Ghost Town‘ in 1982 and the new ‘AKA’ successor outfit, Dammers explored the stark topic of male violence and patriarchal entitlement with brutal frankness. Depicting a scenario of a young girl with low self-esteem who thinks she’s a ‘boiler’ (a disparaging term for someone deemed unattractive), having second thoughts about a date she’s with goes tragically wrong as the protagonist is forced into a backstreet and assaulted.
While there have been serious efforts by charities and activists to shift perceptions of rape away from ‘dark alley’ type of examples, ‘The Boiler’ still stands as an uncompromising and bold piece of work that tackled the subject so unflinching for a top 40 single.
Its queasy clash of jaunty ska skulk behind Dakar’s narrative spoken word tale pushes the single to unnervingly familiar territory as if the nightmare is taking place in and among the clubs filled with violent men and drink-spiking predators. The horrifying crescendo sees Dakar recount the escalating danger our protagonist is in and screams for the rapist to stop repeatedly with skin-crawling terror, all while Dammers’ ska plays along like a distant music venue’s hazy party thump encroaching the traumatised confusion.
‘The Boiler’ was dropped uncannily around a real case of sexual assault, which caused outrage for its judicial callousness. A businessman named John Allen was convicted of the rape of a teenage hitchhiker in Ipswich Crown Court, changing his initial ‘not guilty’ plea upon the young woman breaking down in court. In sentencing him, Judge Bertrand Richards had said the girl was “guilty of a great deal of contributory negligence”, and Allen walked away with just a fine of £2000. This hadn’t been lost on Dakar, who discussed to NME at the time, calling the single “uncannily timed”.
Little has changed, with a police force and judiciary still mired in misogyny and sexual assault receiving abysmally low conviction rates. Long before the modern discourse around sexual violence and ‘Me Too’, Dammers and Dakar’s ‘The Boiler’ took a bold, significant step in challenging the epidemic of male violence.
