ORIGINAL RUDE BOY

Non-Fiction (Autobiography) 368 pages

Aurum Press - April 23, 2009

 

This autobiography of ska legend Neville Staple charts the life of the Jamaican singer and the rise and fall of the so-called “Second Wave” of ska that emerged out of Coventry and fused Jamaican Rude Boy music and punk. Neville was the Rude Boy – Terry Hall was the punk. Together they fronted The Specials – a band that dominated the UK charts from 1979 to 1981. Characters who walk through Neville’s life are a rollcall of eighties pop: Blondie, Madness, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, Elvis Costello and Sting to name but a few. Neville gives a unique insight into the Rude Boy culture of seventies Britain – how before he joined The Specials, Neville had a traumatic family life having been taken from his mother in Jamaica at the age of 5, resorted to burglary and thieving to keep himself in fashionable clothes, made “sound system” music and incessantly womanised. Then how that culture fused with the dying embers of punk to create the music that a generation danced to.