"Призрачный город": Песня о Британии 80-х

The Specials song

"Ghost Town" is a song by the British two tone band the Specials, released on 12 June 1981. The song spent three weeks at number one and 11 weeks in total in the top 40 of the UK Singles Chart. Evoking themes of urban decay, deindustrialisation, unemployment and violence in inner cities, the song is remembered for being a hit at the same time as riots were occurring in British cities. Internal tensions within the band were also coming to a head when the single was being recorded, resulting in the song being the last single recorded by the original seven members of the group before splitting up. However, the song was hailed by the contemporary UK music press as a major piece of popular social commentary, and all three of the major UK music magazines of the time awarded "Ghost Town" the accolade of "Single of the Year" for 1981. It was the 12th best selling single in the UK in 1981.

The tour for the group's More Specials album in late 1980 had been a fraught experience: already tired from a long touring schedule and with several band members at odds with keyboardist and band leader Jerry Dammers over his decision to incorporate "muzak" keyboard sounds on the album, several of the gigs descended into audience violence. As they travelled, the band witnessed sights that reflected the depressed mood of a country gripped by recession. In 2002, Dammers told The Guardian: "You travelled from town to town and what was happening was terrible. In Liverpool, all the shops were shuttered up, everything was closing down  We could actually see it by touring around. You could see that frustration and anger in the audience. In Glasgow, there were these little old ladies on the streets selling all their household goods, their cups and saucers. It was unbelievable. It was clear that something was very, very wrong." Jo Ann Greene of Allmusic notes the lyric "only brush[es] on the causes for this apocalyptic vision — the closed down clubs, the numerous fights on the dancefloor, the spiraling unemployment, the anger building to explosive levels. But so embedded were these in the British psyche, that Dammers needed only a minimum of words to paint his picture." The club referred to in the song was the Locarno (run by the Mecca Leisure Group and later renamed Tiffanys), a regular haunt of Neville Staple and Lynval Golding,

In March 1981, Jerry Dammers heard the reggae song "At the Club" by actor and singer Victor Romero Evans played on Roundtable, the singles review show on BBC Radio 1. Fascinated by the record's sound, Dammers telephoned the song's co writer and producer John Collins a few days later, although as Dammers first phone call was in the middle of the night, Collins initially took it to be a joke. Following conversations with Dammers, Collins travelled from his home in London to meet the Specials at their rehearsal studio and agreed to produce their new single. After becoming overwhelmed with the multitude of choices available in the 24 track studio used during the recording of More Specials, Dammers had decided that he wanted to return a more basic set up, and after a recommendation from bass player Horace Panter who was familiar with the place, the band chose the small 8 track studio in the house owned by John Rivers in Woodbine Street in Royal Leamington Spa. Panter said "Everybody was stood in different parts of this huge room with their equipment, no one talking. Jerry stormed out a couple of times virtually in tears and I went after him, 'Calm down, calm down'. It was hell to be around." Dammers said "People weren't cooperating. 'Ghost Town' wasn't a free for all jam session. Every little bit was worked out and composed, all the different parts, I'd been working on it for at least a year, trying out every conceivable chord  I can remember walking out of a rehearsal in total despair because Neville would not try the ideas. You know the brass bit is kind of jazzy, it has a dischord? I remember Lynval rushing into the control room while they were doing it going, 'No, no, no, it sounds wrong! Wrong! Wrong!'" "Friday Night, Saturday Morning" was written by lead singer Terry Hall and describes a mundane night out in Coventry.

The music video, directed by Barney Bubbles, consists of bass player Panter driving the band around London in a 1961 Vauxhall Cresta, intercut with views of streets and buildings filmed from the moving vehicle, and ends with a shot of the band standing on the banks of the River Thames at low tide. The video's locations include driving through the Rotherhithe Tunnel and around semi derelict areas of the East End as well as in Lothbury and Throgmorton Street in the financial district of the City of London in the early hours of daylight on Sunday morning, where the streets were deserted as it was the weekend. The shots of the band in the car were achieved by attaching a camera to the bonnet using a rubber sucker: Panter recalled that at one point the camera fell off (briefly seen in the finished video at 1:18) and scratched the car's paintwork, to the displeasure of the car's owner. The original Ghost Town car can be seen (and sat in) at the Coventry Music Museum.

Contemporaneous reviews identified the song's impact as an "instant musical editorial" on recent events (the 1981 England riots). Although initial reviews of the single in the UK music press were lukewarm, by the end of the year the song had won over the critics to be named "Single of the Year" in Melody Maker, NME and Sounds, the UK's top three weekly music magazines at the time. The summer of 1981 saw riots in over 35 locations around the UK. The song created resentment in Coventry where residents angrily rejected the characterisation of the city as a town in decline. The song was featured in the 2000 Guy Ritchie film Snatch, the 2004 Edgar Wright film Shaun of the Dead, and the 2022 Netflix animated film Wendell & Wild. The song experienced a thematic resurgence on music streaming platforms in 2020, after lockdown orders were placed following the COVID 19 pandemic. In December 2021, a commemorative plaque was affixed to the house where the former Woodbine Street recording studio was located. The plaque mentions "Ghost Town" was recorded there. In 2022, it was included in the list "The story of NME in 70 (mostly) seminal songs" at number 19, for "Lacing ska and reggae with the amphetamine edge of new wave". Mark Beaumont praised the song and its "brooding evocation of Thatcher’s wasteland Britain". British pop group Duran Duran released a cover version of the song on their 2023 Halloween themed album Danse Macabre.