A guest posting by Leon MacDuff
We all know what style of music 2 Tone Records specialised in. Heck, we can all say it together on the count of three… 1. 2. 3. SKA! And great stuff it was, too. But I’d like to shine a light on the side of 2 Tone that never gets mentioned. The attempts to broaden the label’s musical palate which were met with, let’s just say, rather less success.
Mostly this came after the Summer 1981 splintering of the Specials. The label’s aversion to long-term deals meant that by the time Ghost Town made number one for the week of the Royal Wedding, all the other bands who’d built the label’s reputation had already moved on – or in the case of the Bodysnatchers, split up. And after that, though 2 Tone carried on issuing records by the Special A.K.A. (and “solo” works by their trombone-playing associate Rico), none of their subsequent signings were really ska at all. There was the punk-funk of The Higsons, the Style Council-type pop-soul of The Friday Club, and even Specials stalwart John Bradbury turned to soul-funk with his own band J.B.’s Allstars.
I say this mostly came after the Specials splintered, but the first attempt at something different had actually come nearly a year earlier. In the summer of 1980, when 2 Tone was still seen as a guaranteed hit factory, there was the mod-lounge cabaret (with a hint of ska) of The Swinging Cats, whose one and only single had a medley of tunes made famous by easy listening maestro Mantovani on one side and an original song on the other. Neither side is a classic, but to me it’s clear that of the two, Mantovani is the throwaway and should never have been promoted as the lead. It was 2 Tone’s first significant failure:-
mp3: The Swinging Cats – Mantovani
mp3: The Swinging Cats – Away
But if there’s one band who really became the symbol of the label having lost its way, it was The Apollinaires (pictured above). The Leicester-based six-piece arrived on 2 Tone in 1982, around the same time as The Higsons, and peddling a superficially similar brand of frantic funk. But where The Higsons, to quote one title, “put the punk back into funk”, The Apollinaires seemed determined to excise it completely. Their two singles for 2 Tone are both energetic and quite likeable, and would probably fill the floor at the indie disco, but overall they are terribly polite. And now I listen to them back-to-back, actually quite similar:-
mp3: The Apollinaires – The Feeling’s Gone
mp3: The Apollinaires – Envy The Love
These singles were not hugely successful – never mind the top 40, they didn’t even make the top 200. And it’s not as though you had to sell many records to make the top 200; the Higsons managed it consistently, future 2 Tone signings The Friday Club and J.B.’s Allstars both managed it, and the Swinging Cats would almost certainly have managed it had there been a Top 200 in 1980 (Mantovani was apparently the 118th best selling single of September 1980, which suggests it probably scraped the weekly Top 100 – but only 75 were published at the time so we may never know for sure). The bottom line is that of the 28 singles that 2 Tone issued to retail in its original run, just two failed to show up on any kind of official sales report: The Feeling’s Gone and Envy The Love. The Apollinaires were a flop. Probably a worse flop than they deserved to be, really.
So where did they come from, and where did they go… where did they come from, Cotton Eye Joe? It turns out that lead singer Paul Tickle made his recorded debut with the group Sincere Americans, who contributed a song to the 1980 compilation East. So I went digging, and it’s not a bad compilation, though the only band I recognised is B-Movie who eventually morphed into a synthpop act but at this juncture were a guitar-bass-drums trio. It is the same B-Movie, though – trust me, I did check! Another band on the LP, The Fatal Charm also went on to release several albums, but I have to confess they passed me by. Anyway, though the profile on Discogs says “several members” of Sincere Americans joined The Apollinaires, going by the line-up on the inner sleeve, Tickle is the only future Apollinaire to appear on East:-
mp3: Sincere Americans – Contact
Several line-up and name changes later, the ensemble became Il y a Volkswagens (not I Y A Volkswagens, as many sites erroneously call them – come on everyone, remember your French from school…), who issued one single in the autumn of 1981. I have to admit that though I was aware of Il y a Volkswagens, I had always thought it was a personal project by indie producers Eric Radcliffe and Jon Fryer. And in my defence, Discogs has them down as (the only) members of the band. But actually they merely produced the single, doing what producers do. The actual band included Tickle and guitar-toting brothers Tom and Francis Brown who survived to The Apollinaires proper :-
mp3: Il y a Volkswagens – Kill Myself
mp3: Il y a Volkswagens – American Dream
After this, they apparently simplified their name to The Volkswagens, continued gigging, and eventually were approached by Jerry Dammers to record for 2 Tone. And changed their name again. And also their line-up, with the definitive sextet (or as close as this ever-shifting combo got to a definitive line-up) comprising Tickle, the Brown brothers, Kraig Thornber on drums, James Hunt on bass, and Simon Kirk on percussion. Loads and loads of percussion! Fellow Leicester band The Swinging Laurels (not the Swinging Cats) provided the horn section, until they became too busy and the Apollinaires finally got round to assembling their own, swelling the group’s membership to an ultimately unsustainable ten. Stephen Leonard-Williams played the flute that is perhaps the most distinctive element of the 2 Tone singles.
After 2 Tone, there was one more Apollinaires single. And it was a weird one, credited as a “B.F.W. / T.U.R.C. co-production” – BFW stands for Birmingham Film Workshop and TURC for Trade Union Resource Centre. The public service union NALGO made a film to support their anti-privatisation campaign “Put People First” (Channel 4 part-funded it, so it probably turned up on telly at some point) and The Apollinaires recorded the theme for it. Well, if you can’t get The Redskins… :-
mp3: The Apollinaires – Put People First
Neither The Apollinaires nor any of its individual members seem to have any recording credits after that, so that was it. Still, they’ll always be part of the 2 Tone story… even if they were perhaps the least successful band the label ever signed.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 