STORY · DANCEHALL
2 Tone and the Jamaican source
Well supported
A Coventry label built its entire sound, and its politics, on records its founders had spent years studying.
Jerry Dammers taught himself ska from Jamaican 45s in a Coventry flat and turned that education into 2 Tone Records, a label whose biggest hits sat directly on top of foundations laid by Prince Buster and the Skatalites a generation earlier.
A flat in Earlsdon
In the summer of 1977, Jerry Dammers was living in a flat on Albany Road in the Earlsdon area of Coventry, teaching himself ska by listening, over and over, to old Jamaican 45s. Two years later that education became 2 Tone Records, backed by Chrysalis and run out of the same city.
The label's roster read like a snapshot of multiracial late-1970s Britain: The Specials scored two UK #1 singles, "Too Much Too Young" and "Ghost Town"; The Selecter, fronted by Pauline Black, and Madness both released early records on the label before it folded in 1986.
2 Tone's black-and-white checkerboard logo was a political statement built out of a musical debt — you could not separate the message from the source material.
Naming the source
None of this concealed where the sound came from. The clipped upstroke guitar, the horn charts and much of the repertoire traced straight back to Prince Buster and the instrumental muscle of The Skatalites, whose late-1950s and 1960s Jamaican ska records 2 Tone bands covered, rearranged and toured behind. What made 2 Tone distinct was the explicit political use to which that borrowed sound was put: in Thatcher-era Coventry, a multiracial band playing music built on Jamaican records became its own argument against the National Front.
That history is now formally recognised in Coventry itself, home to a dedicated museum tracing 2 Tone's lives and legacies — a rare case of a British scene's Jamaican source material being folded back into its own civic heritage.