The Specials
Tickets:
Tickets for:5th June 2022
BELFAST
Live at Botanic Gardens
Sunday 5 June 2022
Tickets On Sale Now!
“Love is so much more powerful than hate.
Hate is destruction and love is production.”
Lynval Golding.
“That’s the thing with the Specials. We are three very different people,
but you put us together and we become the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world, as far as I’m concerned. Something remarkable happens.”
Horace Panter
Influential, important and exhilarating live, The Specials are a Band embedded in this country’s DNA. It is impossible to envisage the musical landscape without them, from the startling, angular Gangsters in 1979 to the epoch-making Ghost Town in 1981. They infused ska with punk, homegrown political anxiety with wider issues.
In February 2019, The Specials released ‘Encore’. Positively received, critically and commercially, the Band spent most of the year on tour in the UK, North America and Europe. Towards the end of the year, the question arose about going back into the studio and making an album.
The Band got together for a week in February 2020, played around with some ideas and began plotting the course… around a week later both Lynval and Nikolaj came down with the flu or so they thought… hello Covid-19… on Monday March 23rd the whole country went into lockdown… bang went the plans.
2020 Became a year of waiting and hoping and being totally clueless. It was also turning into a year of locked-in paranoia and mass unrest. And then, protest… the murder of George Floyd ignited mass protests…
As it was proving impossible for the Band to work in their usual way, they decided to do an interim project, for their own sanity as much as anything else!
One idea was to look at ‘the protest song’ compiling a list from the last hundred years or so – found around 50 songs and then picked 12. By April 2021, it was time to record and breathe as a Band again….
THE SPECIALS
PROTEST SONGS
1924 – 2012
THE SPECIALS PROTEST SONGS 1924-2012 IS OUT NOW
Tickets for THE SPECIALS live in Belfast go on sale Friday 4 February at 9am www.ticketmaster.ie
FOR MORE CONCERT INFORMATION CHECK www.aikenpromotions.com