How 2-Tone brought new ideas about race and culture to young people beyond the inner cities

The Conversation

Center

High Factuality

How 2-Tone brought new ideas about race and culture to young people beyond the inner cities

This Town, Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight’s latest drama for the BBC, brings to life a defining – if short-lived – era in the history of British youth culture and popular music. Set in the West Midlands against the backdrop of industrial decline and social unrest in the early 1980s, the drama unfolds to the syncopated sounds of 2-Tone. A furious mix of punk and Jamaican ska, 2-Tone became a genuinely national phenomenon, bursting out of a …