ABSTRACT
One cold night in Birmingham in 1978, I met Jerry Dammers, keyboard player with Special AKA, then the Coventry Automatics, later still the Specials, at the flat of the group’s third manager, Mike “Shoop” Horseman. Crouching on the floor over his sketch pad, Dammers, the man who master-minded Two Tone, looked up from a doodle he’d just completed of a pair of shoes next to the photo of Peter Tosh in his early Wailing Wailers days; the photo which, in negative, was going to be the Two Tone trademark. Dammers looked up and said:
“What I need now is loafers. A pair of loafers just to top it off.”
