There is something wonderfully defiant about 2Tone. More than four decades after its heyday, those clipped guitar chords, walking basslines and blasts of brass can still turn a seated theatre into something considerably less orderly.
House of Fun, arriving at Nottingham’s Royal Concert Hall on Thursday night, understands that perfectly.
Billed as a celebration of the great British ska and 2Tone songbook, this is far more satisfying than a conventional tribute show. There is no attempt to impersonate one particular act. Instead, House of Fun raids one of British music’s richest periods and turns it into a gloriously energetic night out.
And what a catalogue it has to work with.
Madness, The Specials, The Beat, Bad Manners, The Selecter and The Bodysnatchers provide music practically engineered to make standing still impossible. More impressive is how fresh much of it remains. These aren’t songs preserved as artefacts of late-70s and early-80s Britain. Played by a lively band at considerable volume, they immediately regain their swagger.
That matters because 2Tone was always about considerably more than having a dance.
Born amid economic uncertainty, racial tension and political division, the movement mixed Jamaican ska and reggae with punk urgency and the experiences of young people growing up in British towns and cities. Its black-and-white imagery wasn’t simply clever branding; integration was fundamental to its identity. Beneath some enormously entertaining records were songs about racism, unemployment, alienation and a country struggling with itself.
There is an obvious contemporary resonance, but House of Fun never turns the evening into a history lesson. The history is already there in the songs. The band’s job is to make them live again, and they attack them with tremendous enthusiasm.
The essential ingredients are all present: guitars that chop rather than roar, basslines doing much of the melodic heavy lifting, keyboards, irrepressible brass and that unmistakable offbeat rhythm pushing everything forward. Crucially, it feels like a band playing together rather than musicians mechanically reproducing familiar records.
There is plenty of musicianship on display but very little showing off. Ska works because of the collective groove, and House of Fun understands that the song should always win.
The Royal Concert Hall might seem an unlikely setting for music born in clubs, pubs and sweaty venues, but that contrast quickly becomes part of the fun. The conventions of a Thursday evening theatre audience steadily disappear as familiar introductions arrive. Heads nod, feet move and before long large sections of the audience have effectively abandoned their seats.
The Madness material inevitably produces some of the biggest reactions. Their ability to combine music-hall humour, pop melody and ska rhythms has allowed those songs to become part of Britain’s communal musical memory. Yet the show wisely casts its net wider.
The Specials bring a darker edge, The Beat irresistible rhythms and Bad Manners sheer exuberance, while The Selecter and The Bodysnatchers remind us that the 2Tone story stretches far beyond the handful of songs permanently attached to retro compilations.
That variety prevents the evening becoming a simple procession of hits. Instead, it makes a convincing case for the durability of the whole genre.
There is warmth to the performance too. House of Fun doesn’t treat the material with excessive reverence. That would miss the point. This was music filled with humour, eccentricity and youthful energy, and the show embraces all three. It is affectionate without slipping into pastiche.
Most importantly, it still feels like a gig.
Plenty of theatre-based music productions are technically immaculate but leave the audience watching rather than participating. House of Fun breaks through that barrier. As the evening progresses, the relationship between stage and auditorium becomes increasingly informal until everyone seems engaged in a mutual attempt to see who can maintain the energy longest.
By the final stretch, the answer appears to be everyone.
Perhaps that explains why this music continues to work. Some in the audience will remember buying these records when they were new, but 2Tone no longer belongs exclusively to the generation that created it. A sharp rhythm, a brass section and songs about ordinary British life remain a compelling combination.
House of Fun doesn’t reinvent any of it. It doesn’t need to.
Instead, it takes an exceptional body of music, gives it to a band capable of doing it justice and reminds us why these songs filled dancefloors in the first place.
For one exuberant night in Nottingham, the Royal Concert Hall feels less like a concert hall and considerably more like the biggest ska club in town.
