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. 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. The building which housed the club is now Coventry Central Library. 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, and which is also named as the club in "Friday Night, Saturday Morning", one of the songs on the B-side. Jo-Ann Greene of Allmusic notes the lyric "only brush 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. The song's sparse lyric alludes to urban decay, unemployment and violence in inner cities. We had almost been written off and then "Ghost Town" came out of the blue. It's hard to explain how powerful it sounded. There were weird, diminished chords: certain members of the band resented the song and wanted the simple chords they were used to playing on the first album. The overall sense I wanted to convey was impending doom. In an interview in 2011, Dammers explained how witnessing this event inspired his composition: It was clear that something was very, very wrong." In Glasgow, there were these little old ladies on the streets selling all their household goods, their cups and saucers. You could see that frustration and anger in the audience. We could actually see it by touring around. In Liverpool, all the shops were shuttered up, everything was closing down . In 2002 Dammers told The Guardian, "You travelled from town to town and what was happening was terrible. As they travelled around the country the band witnessed sights that summed up the depressed mood of a country gripped by recession. The tour for the group's More Specials album in autumn 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.
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