Fun Boy Three

The Specials were unlikely pop stars. In 1981, the Coventry ska band, fronted by young misfit Terry Hall but led by keyboardist Jerry Dammers, hit No. 1 with “Ghost Town,” a haunted state-of-the-nation address that painted an image of a country beset by economic decay and racist violence. It was a surprising capstone to a three-year period in which they had come to define two-tone, a working-class, multi-racial subculture, and channeled the downcast, nihilistic mood of Thatcherite Britain. “Ghost Town” perfectly captured the Specials’ ethos and aesthetic, laying bare the contempt the British state had for disenfranchised young people while retaining the wit and candor that reflected their humble origins.

The Specials were at their critical and commercial peak, yet relationships within the band were rotten. Hall, along with Lynval Golding and Neville Staple, felt constricted and underappreciated by Dammers, despite the songwriter’s messages of unity and social justice. “Equality and democracy were what we preached. That’s how it was when we started, but it didn’t last,” said Golding at the time. “When we started making $2,000 a night instead of $200, we weren’t equal anymore; we were working for Jerry Dammers.”

At the height of their popularity, Golding, Hall, and Staple walked away and started a band where they had everything they claimed Dammers had withheld from them: total creative freedom. Fun Boy Three drew from the same well as the Specials, combining elements of punk with the Jamaican styles that were rattling sound systems across the country. But they gave themselves the liberty to be as wild, weird, and flexible as they wanted. No more suits, no more monochrome, and no more checkered 2 Tone Records stripe on the sleeve. On the cover of their self-titled debut album, the band appeared in front of a giant red spot, dressed down in singlets and t-shirts. The three musicians were already celebrities in the UK, but here they were presented as a band casting off the codes of the two-tone subculture they had helped define.

Any sane A&R might have thought twice about betting big on a record like Fun Boy Three, but Chrysalis, the parent company of 2 Tone, rightly decided that the trio was, as Hall put it, “too big to be dropped.” Regardless, any concerns around commercial appeal were moot: The band didn’t demo their songs, so there was nothing for Chrysalis to object to. Working with Specials producer Dave Jordan, the band commuted between Coventry and London every day, improvising songs based on mambo, cha-cha, and reggae rhythms until they hit upon a sound that was spooky and sexy in equal measure, like exotica played by the most maladjusted person you know.

The band’s first single—the eerie, thundering “The Lunatics (Have Taken Over the Asylum)”—was like a Specials song on the point of combustion. It’s ostensibly about the abjectly depressing Thatcher and Reagan era, but at times it seems to double as FB3’s rebuke to Dammers. When the Specials reformed in 2009, Hall told The Guardian that Fun Boy Three was “the sound of three people sent mental by being in the Specials,” and his lyrics toward the end of “Lunatics” seem to nod to his time under the thumb of his former bandmate: “Take away my right to choose/Take away my point of view/Take away my dignity/Take these things away from me.”

“Lunatics” was—somewhat improbably, given its loose structure and avant-garde palette—the first of seven UK Top 40 hits that Fun Boy Three netted in a little under two years. It began the history of one of UK pop’s greatest curios: a hugely successful band that, despite great commercial impact, left little lasting trace on the world. Fun Boy Three released two Top 20-charting albums in two years (the latter, Waiting, produced by David Byrne) and launched the career of Bananarama, who performed on their debut. But they were such a cultural anomaly—their roots too obscure to legibly scan for a general listening public, their hits too strange to find an afterlife on golden oldies stations—that their impact now, 40 years after their debut, seems remarkably small. When Hall died of cancer last year, at the age of 63, obituaries and tributes treated Fun Boy Three as a footnote in his career, if at all; Staple’s memoir, Original Rude Boy, rarely touches on the group.

It’s a shame, given that Fun Boy Three still sounds as mischievous and enigmatic as it likely did upon release. Its status as a relatively forgotten cultural artifact only adds to its mystique: This album of Gregorian-style chants and absurdist one-liners made for an entirely unexpected entrant to the UK Top 10. At the time, Golding called Fun Boy Three an “extension” of the Specials, but Fun Boy Three might be more accurately described as a distillation of “Ghost Town”—bleak and cavernous, politically and spiritually dejected, haunted by the darkness of modern-day Britain and the racist violence entrenched in its history.

One of the band’s goals, according to Golding and Hall, was to convey a sense of subtlety that the clear-cut, ultra-political Specials never possessed. At the time, Hall described the Specials’ lyrics, many of which were written by Dammers, as “too blatant,” saying that he was “embarrassed singing them sometimes.” Disavowing his past work was a favorite pastime of the 23-year-old, a self-described “old punk” with the cynicism to prove it, and he wouldn’t stop with the Specials: By the time the band released Waiting a year later, he had been slagging off Fun Boy Three in the press for a good few months.

Nevertheless, you can hear Hall, Golding, and Staple working hard across Fun Boy Three to find new modes of songwriting that were far removed from their previous project. These songs are made largely from looping phrases and chants, heavy on deadpan spoken word and only occasionally spotlighting Hall’s distinctive whine. Their circular structures seem to have been influenced by the drum machine at the root of the songs; as with each production element, the singing on Fun Boy Three contributes more to a given song’s groove than its meaning. There are few lead vocal lines, and when there are, they’re almost always offset by chants or proto-raps from the entire band.

Like the high-gloss pop bands Soft Cell and the Human League, Fun Boy Three embraced the newish technologies that had become widely available in the early ’80s. They just used them to make music that sounded nothing like what was on the charts. “Funrama 2” is the closest thing Fun Boy Three has to a ska song, but it could hardly be confused for anything the Specials ever produced: Filled with sounds of soccer whistles and jungle animals, using Bananarama’s voices as percussive elements, it has more in common with jazz than Jamaica. Sometimes, Fun Boy Three hit upon a sound that was uncharacteristically current, but even then, they did it in their own wonky way: “Faith, Hope and Charity,” with its metallic drum-machine chug and discordant guitar line—the only one on the record—sounds like Afrika Bambaataa filtered through the confrontational spirit of no wave, inadvertently hybridizing the sound of New York’s two most fertile creative scenes.

They often came across like crate-diggers trying to weave together sounds from pop’s past. Even in the Specials, Hall had been interested in classic pop music, and here he flexed his wide-ranging taste in impish, anarchic ways. “It Ain’t What You Do It’s The Way That You Do It,” Fun Boy Three’s biggest hit, was a remake of a 1930s jazz standard, featuring Bananarama singing lead and Hall playing piano. They had discovered the London trio during their tenure with the Specials, though the details are fuzzy; sometimes they claimed to have seen a photo of them in The Face, and at others they said they saw them performing at a London club. Impressed by their singing ability, and seeing them as a female mirror of Fun Boy Three, they recruited them to sing across the entirety of Fun Boy Three.

“It Ain’t What You Do” was a huge hit in the UK, reaching No. 4 on the singles chart and propelling Bananarama to national fame. Their cameos were so sparkling and magnetic that they earned them a “co-starring” credit on the back of the album. Although they rarely sang anything other than backing vocals, Bananarama were an essential part of Fun Boy Three, turning a weird, sometimes painfully misanthropic record into something softer and prettier. They served as the lawful good counterpoint to FB3’s chaotic evil: When the three women left the studio one day after tracking vocals for “Funrama 2,” Hall, Golding, and Staple recorded percussion by throwing ashtrays and drum cases around the studio. “It was the same at school,” Hall said of recording with Bananarama: “The girls used to work hard and the boys used to mess about.”

Fun Boy Three is as political as any Specials record, but, true to their word, Hall, Golding, and Staple most often hid their politics beneath a glaze of impressionism. “Best of Luck Mate” is built around the kind of slinking piano line that you’d expect to hear in a dinky 1960s spy show, Staple toasting cryptically about frittering his scant income away on gambling. It’s a wryly mundane vision of British disillusionment in the ’70s and ’80s, still deeply tapped into their social milieu but less polemical than the songs Dammers had written.

The exception is “I Don’t Believe It,” a reggae song in which Golding sings about the constant surveillance that Black Brits were, and still are, subject to. It plays with the cadence and tone of a nursery rhyme, but has a Stepford-esque eeriness to it. Golding delivers his lyrics with equal parts discontent and paranoia: “Man call around to make a few inquiries/He tell me what I smoke before I even smoke it/Everything is written in the neighbor’s diary.” Golding was a pacifist and a strong advocate for racial harmony; “Why,” the B-side to “Ghost Town,” was written and performed by Golding about being a victim of a racially motivated attack. Where that song is pleading and confused, the overwhelming tone of “I Don’t Believe It” is one of exhaustion created by the sheer drudgery of having to wake up and contend with a deeply racist society day in and day out.

By the time Fun Boy Three was released, “I Don’t Believe It” had already taken on new layers. The day the band finished recording the album, they returned to Coventry. They played “It Ain’t What You Do” at a local radio station, and afterwards went to Shades, a nightclub near the city center, to hang out with two of Staple’s friends. There, the group was jumped by a gang of white youths; Golding’s throat was slashed, and he nearly lost an eye. While in intensive care, his house was robbed.

Just as quickly as they began, Hall disbanded Fun Boy Three in 1983, shortly after the release of “Our Lips Are Sealed,” their take on the Go-Go’s hit Hall had co-written with Jane Wiedlin, and FB3’s final hit. It’s possible that, to Hall, commercial viability was antithetical to his art; he once said that he was “uncomfortable” with the success of “Ghost Town,” and started Fun Boy Three because any attempt to find a midpoint between pure radicalism and pure pop was a fool’s errand. To his credit, Fun Boy Three was a chart success in spite of its craziness—the sound of three people driven mad and coming out on top.

Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.

Fun Boy Three: Fun Boy Three

$30 at Rough Trade