DAVE WAKELING’S father used to tell him, “If God made something better than this, he kept it to himself.” He was talking about sex, but right now, sitting in a small, sunny cafe, sipping on champagne with a plate of crab eggs benedict in front of him, Wakeling’s thinking of California.
“Does it get better?” he asks rhetorically.
This is why he moved here from England, where in the late ’70s and early ’80s his band the Beat rose from the ashes of the punk flame-out to chart—along with the Specials, the Selector and Madness—a 2-Tone movement that successfully combined ska, punk and pop. The Sex Pistols used to listen to reggae music almost exclusively on the bus, but never dared to incorporate it into their music; similarly, Wakeling remembers how parties at the time used to feature one DJ playing punk and one playing reggae. He remembers the night that Beat guitarist Andy Cox (who would go on to play in Fine Young Cannibals) said to him, “What if you could get elements of both DJs into the same three-minute pop song?” Wakeling’s famous description of his musical vision is “the Velvet Underground meets Toots and the Maytals at a Buzzcocks concert.”
“I purposefully didn’t want it to sound like it was from Kingston, Jamaica, in 1963,” says Wakeling of his approach to ska. “I wanted something that would sound new and would stand up in its own right.”
The Beat only lasted five years and recorded three albums, but their legacy is immeasurable. Songs like “Mirror in the Bathroom,” “Save It for Later,” “I Confess” and “Hands Off She’s Mine” are iconic today, but unfortunately goodwill between the bandmates didn’t last as long. The breakup was famously brutal, with the Beat shattering into several spin-offs (including Wakeling’s General Public). In America, the Beat was always known as the English Beat, because there was already a band with that name stateside. So after various attempts to regroup the Beat imploded (including a disastrous episode of VH1’s Bands Reunited), Wakeling simply picked up with the English Beat last year. A U.K. version of the Beat also tours over there, featuring original members Ranking Roger and Everett Morton. Wakeling is currently working on an album, after several of the new songs got an enthusiastic reception in spots like the South Bay, where he’s played several times since re-forming the group. Sadly, he says, writing in California in 2010 is not so different from writing about England in 1978. “It’s a very similar story,” he says. “Re-evaluation and recession. It ends up with people having to re-evaluate their empire, and its position in the world.”
Avalon NIghtclub, Santa Clara
Friday, 9:30pm
$22
