CD - The Specials - Protest Songs 1924-2012

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, 'how about we go back into the studio and make an album'?

We got together for a week in February 2020. We played around with some ideas. It felt good, so we began plotting the course... around a week later both Lynval and Nikolaj came down with the flu. At least we thought it was the flu... hello Covid-19... on Monday March 23rd the whole country went into lockdown... bang went our plans.

We sat... we waited... Lynval returned to Seattle.

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...

Lynval returned to the UK in September and we got together to discuss ideas... it was proving impossible to work in our usual way. We decided we needed to make some kind of interim project, for our sanity as much as anything else!

One idea was to look at 'the protest song'... we thought about compiling a list of protest songs from the last hundred years or so... we found around 50 songs and then picked 12... onto April of this year... we booked some time in London's Eastcote studios...

Time to record and breathe as a band again...