The New Cue #290 June 5: Dave Wakeling of The Beat
"Pete Townshend called up and said, 'Me and Dave Gilmour are trying to play your song...'"
Good morning!
We hope you had a 10/10 weekend. We’re here to keep the good vibes coming with a special Story Behind The Song all about The Beat’s 1982 classic Save It For Later. Vocalist Dave Wakeling tells us about how he accidentally came up with the song, why the rest of the band initially rejected it, getting surprise phone calls from Pete Townshend, the sad decline of the pork pie hat on the British streets and more. We’ll see you paying New Cue subscribers on Friday for another shed load of new musical recommendations, but until then, enjoy the edition!
Ted, Niall and Chris,
The Story Behind The Song… The Beat
An amiable, self-deprecating Brummie, singer Dave Wakeling speaks of “the established 2 Tone ranking system”. In Dave’s mind, it goes as follows: The Specials, Madness, The Beat, The Selecter. While they might not have the scene-starting cache of The Specials and split up before achieving Madness’s national treasure status, The Beat made some of the finest pop music of the era.
Exhibit A, Mirror In the Bathroom:
And B, Tears Of A Clown:
C, Can’t Get Used To Losing You…
We could go on. Formed when Wakeling and guitarist Andy Cox moved to the Isle Of Wight to fit solar panels (as so many bands do), they recruited bassist David Steele via an ad in the local paper. They then moved back to Birmingham and The Beat were completed by Lionel ‘Saxa’ Martin on saxophone, drummer Everett Morton and the late, great Ranking Roger as co-vocalist.
By the time of their third album, Special Beat Service, tensions within the band were starting to show and Wakeling and Ranking Roger left to form General Public, with Cox and Steele going on to achieve enormous international success as the Fine Young Cannibals with vocalist Roland Gift.
With the musical landscape shifting post-2 Tone, 1982’s Save It For Later achieved only modest success in the UK, but was a hit in America and went on to become The Beat’s most successful song there. Chris spoke to Wakeling over Zoom a few weeks ago about the track and the history of The Beat. Before you read on, though, now’s a good time to reacquaint yourself with Save It For Later. It still sounds magnificent…
Hello Dave, where are you?
I’m on the tour bus in New Jersey and it’s a bit bouncy. I wasn’t expecting such a rough drive but we’re hanging on back here.
How do you find it zigzagging around America in a bus? Do you get more of a sense of the place that way?
Very much so. You get a quite distinctive flavours between the various states, the different weathers and the different attitudes that go with them. I’ve traveled around America for over 30 years now and you do see a great deal. Mainly you see trees, a lot of trees. [Looks out the window] Some of those out there were probably only saplings when I first saw them, now they’re mighty oaks…
Thanks for taking some time out of your tree-spotting to talk to us about Save It For Later. That song predates The Beat, is that right?
It does. It was one of the first songs that I wrote. That one, End Of The Party, Best Friend and Click Click had all started forming when we were living on the Isle of Wight. Me and Andy would play them around the fire in the living room at night and the other people who lived in the house with us would go, ‘Oh, they’re quite good, people would like those...’ That was the start of it really. We were just doing it for our own entertainment at the time.
Save It For Later had been with me for a while. I really liked John Martyn and I was trying to tune my guitar to get it to sound like him. I came close, but it turns out that he played in D-A-D-G-A-D, an old blues tuning, but I accidentally tuned the G in the middle to an A. I didn’t know that at the time, at that point I didn’t even know the notes had letters. It sounded quite close to John Martyn, but not close enough for me so I got bored with that project quite quickly. But the guitar was still in this tuning and it really resonated. At the time I had one of those metal guitars, a National Steel. You could hit a note on that, go off on your bike, come back, and the guitar would still be reverberating. When I played that tuning it made the whole of my body vibrate. It was very soothing, so I used to play that tune and it started to develop. It’s only three chords, it’s one of the few songs I can play on stage without looking! I didn’t know what the lyrics were about, it wasn’t until I finished that I realised it was about not knowing. It was about being young but not knowing what your place in the world was. Plus, it linked in very nicely with a dirty grammar school joke: Save it, comma, fellator. Leave it out, cocksucker! I thought it would be funny if you could have a song on the radio with a hidden swearword in it. I squeezed a few ambiguous words into other songs but nothing as blatant as that.
How come it didn’t come out until your third album? Had you taken it to the rest of the band before then?
I did and it was rejected for our first two albums as being too ‘Old Wave Dave’. It wasn’t punk enough. I had a bit of luck as David Steele had a bit of a writing drought heading into our third album, it turns out he wasn’t really a happy camper and wanted some time out. He wasn’t as prolific so I brought up Save It For Later and the record company insisted it went on the record, which they didn’t normally do. Maybe they had to give David Steele some extra money for him to allow it to happen. It was a tortured negotiation!
Did David Steele play on it?
He did eventually. Only me and Everett played on the backing track initially, but David and Andy agreed to overdub on it once they agreed that it was actually alright. It was always the orphan that song but I started to think that if the record company liked it then maybe it was a hit, so I kept half the publishing on it. Before, everything had been a socialist enclave in The Beat, we shared everything equally. Which I’ve come to regret in later life, but it seemed like the right thing at the time. Lo and behold, it ended up become the biggest earning song in the catalogue. None of us expected that. It’s been covered by Pete Townshend and Pearl Jam, who kind of wrote [1994 track] Better Man off that back of it… if you ask my opinion.
What’s the story about Pete Townshend getting in touch with you about it?
It was because of the tuning again. It was even a problem for him! He called me up, I don’t even know where he got my number from. The phone goes and he said, ‘It’s Pete Townshend, I’m sitting here with Dave Gilmour from Pink Floyd and we’re trying to play your song, but we can’t work out the tuning, what is it?’ He called me up a few times after that and asked if he could cover it. It was for some volcano benefit in Latin America or something. I thought, they’ve got enough volcanos there, they don’t need anymore, surely? When it eventually came out it was for a different charity I think, so I didn’t make any money out of it, but to have Pete Townshend cover one of my songs was one of the most notable moments of my career.
The Who played it too, didn’t they?
They did. I saw one video that somebody shot in Las Vegas of The Who at soundcheck with just The Ox [John Entwistle] and Pete Townshend playing Save It For Later over and over again for about 15 minutes and it just gets louder and bigger each time. It was fabulous. I think that’s probably the most incredible, most wonderful thing that’s happened to me in the pop world, because his songs meant so much to me as a kid growing up. To have him cover one of my songs meant the world to me. I got to meet him too, at The Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles. He said to me, ‘Dave, songwriters are the luckiest people in the world. It just doesn’t always seem that way.’ I still don’t know what it means. Enigmatic. Always enigmatic, Townshend isn’t he? Might have been some of that Eastern philosophy he dabbled in.
The Beat broke up soon after Save It For Later and Special Beat Service came out. If you’d stayed together, might you have gone further down that route?
I don’t think so to be honest. I think that the group was more or less at the end by the time we were making that record. I think that’s why it’s such a diverse set of songs, it’s because there wasn’t really one vision of what it should have been. Some people had a vision of what they thought it might be, some people couldn’t even be bothered to get it done. Our idea initially with The Beat had been: How would it sound if you had The Velvet Underground playing a jam with Toots And The Maytals? So you got a sense of industrial angst, but you had an uplifting backbeat to it. That was the idea. So it sounded industrial and angsty but it had some vibrancy. Save It For Later fitted in with that.
Was your younger self vindicated that it became the band’s most successful song?
Yeah, and the album was a substantial hit in America. To date, it’s sold more than the first two records. Whereas in England, the sales slightly diminished on the second one and then diminished again on the third one. By that point 2-Tone was over. Everybody was going into their mum’s wardrobe to get dressed up to go concerts. The New Romantics were in charge. Us 2-Toners dressed like we were working on a building site, which didn’t quite have the panache to get people’s attention after that. By ‘83 it was much more flamboyant and the music was more about escapism. Things had gotten so bad that people were sick of going on unemployment marches. Here’s The Specials, Elvis Costello and The Beat on Top Of The Pops with another brand new song about unemployment! So quite rightly the main function of music became escape. If you couldn’t find a job, why not pretend to be on a yacht with supermodels in the Caribbean? That sounds better than going on another unemployment march in the rain. So, things had changed by that point – there wasn’t a pork pie hat to be found on the streets of Britain! Gone!
Thanks for talking to us, Dave
Pleasure!
The bEaT are currently touring the UK. They play The Town Hall in Birmingham on 12 June, London Roundhouse on the 16th June and The Great Hall in Cardiff on the 30th. More information and tickets HERE
CC