‘Man at C&A’: The Specials’ grapple with nuclear war
As soon as Coventry ska revivalists The Specials had kicked off the two-tone wave, combining punk’s ephemeral urgency with the reggae fusions of 1960s Jamaica, founder and principal songwriter Jerry Dammers had grown tired of the beast he’d decisively delivered.
While some of the day’s most essential pop hits orbited The Specials—think Madness, The Selecter—Jerry Dammers could see Bad Manners veering into camp ska parody from a mile off, and made it a point to steer the band clear of that path.
1979’s The Specials catapulted the band to national stardom and placed them at the forefront of a socially conscious, racially united working-class movement, offering the charts a sharp riposte to Margaret Thatcher’s economic and cultural bludgeon. But after six months of relentless touring, the exhausted band came under pressure from two-tone’s parent label, Chrysalis Records, to record a follow-up. While they kept up momentum with the stand-alone single ‘Rat Race’, the band reconvened to discuss new ideas, only to find themselves at a tense creative crossroads.
For 1980’s sophomore album More Specials, Dammers took the producer’s chair alongside Dave Jordan and treated the studio as an instrument. In contrast to Elvis Costello’s live-capture approach on their debut, Dammers leaned into overdubs and individual takes—a meticulous process that brought him immense satisfaction, but tested the patience of others. This bold departure from straight ska reaches its strangest depths on ‘Man at C&A’, co-written with frontman Terry Hall, which pushes the band fully into their new embrace of the weird.
A former giant of the British high street before its closure in 2001, C&A was the leading purveyor of drab, unfussy suits and cheap fashionwear for most suburban aspirants who couldn’t afford the latest high-end garments, most of the country at the time. The Specials set the average C&A shopper at the centre of World War III and its resulting nuclear destruction: “But I’m the man in grey / I’m just the man at C&A / And I don’t have a say / In the war games that they play”.
Touching on the Iranian Ayatollah and the Kremlin’s remote doomsday machinations, Cold War anxieties are grounded with the British everyman, just like any other of their social critiques. An ordinary Joe just trying to survive while East and West’s thermonuclear missiles face each other on either side of him. Such an apocalyptic scenario required a suitably dread-filled score: Dammers coating Bradbury’s explosion sample drums and big band horn sections with an eerie swell of dub expanse straight from Scientist’s mixing desk.
‘Man at C&A’ illustrates More Specials‘ adventurous energy masterfully, and cements Dammers’ idiosyncrasy for muzak as the mad genius it was, laying the sonic groundwork for future spook hit ‘Ghost Town‘. In an age of battling superpowers and global political failure, ‘Man at C&A’ depicts a terrifying endtimes scenario that’s only grown more timely in the dawn of managed decline and right-wing, millenarian seizure of the American Executive.
