Curtain has fallen
A love letter to the lyrics of You’re Wondering Now, written by Clement Seymour and covered by The Specials.
October 1979. Margaret Thatcher and vinyl records are both enjoying high market share. The Specials release their eponymous first album. It is mostly a rocksteady study in anger and disenchantment, a reaction to inner cities being hollowed out and ordinary people being left behind.
Forty years later those are familiar feelings. With the benefit of four decades of hindsight, it is apparent that, back then, The Specials were not railing against the beginning of the end, but against the beginning of the beginning. Maggie didn’t say that there was no such thing as society until 1987, but The Specials saw her coming and called her out early.
You’re wondering now
What to do
Now you know this is the end
You’re Wondering Now is the final track on Side 2. The album ends not with a defiant bang but in melancholic resignation. Picture a defeated army, broken soldiers huddled among the ruins awaiting dawn’s decisive onslaught. You’re Wondering Now is the ska equivalent of the mournful harmonica and the smoke from a hundred last cigarettes.
Curtain has fallen
Now you’re on your own
In 1979, as a thirteen year old, I heard “Britain has fallen”, which sounds more apt to my fifty four year old Europhile ears. Back then, You’re Wondering Now was a jaunty dirge for comradeship and working class solidarity. These days it is the last rites for freedom of movement and a compassionate society. Is that Iain Duncan-Smith, Priti Patel or Nigel Farage at the beginning, shouting at the migrants knocking on Britain’s door?
You can’t come in!
If you want to find it, there is a lot of meaning packed into these two and a half minutes. It is clever, compact writing. It gives its audience something to work with, the foundations on which you can layer your own significance. You’re Wondering Now effortlessly multi-tasks as a funeral piece, as a breakup song, or the soundtrack to lockdown. It is a timeless interpretation sponge. It is a lament for the demise of progressive politics. It is an unheeded warning about social distancing. It is the Last Post for our unsustainable capitalist lifestyles.
You’re wondering how
You will pay
For the way you did behave
Actually, as the Earth simultaneously floods and burns, there’s not much wondering left to do in this respect. Payback for the way we have behaved is a done deal. We are out of time and we’re losing things that can’t be recovered — polar ice, rainforest, insects, animal species, perhaps even our humanity.
I won’t return.
Forever you will wait.
We’re in the first year of a new decade, which feels like the Dawning Of A New Era. And we’ve gone all-in on a losing hand. When they covered You’re Wondering Now, The Specials pulled a neat trick of simultaneously capturing the Zeitgeist and being forty years ahead of their time. They also pull the neat trick, with this deceptively simple, deceptively soothing Two Tone lullaby, of making you tap your foot as you shake your head.
Is everybody happy?
If you liked this, you might also like this love letter to the lyrics of Levi Stubbs’ Tears by Billy Bragg.
