Ghost Town

The Specials' timeless 'Ghost Town' is 30 years old. While it's become one of those songs that captured a zeitgeist, I think it was largely (though not completely) down to fortuitous timing, with the song being used as a soundtrack to many of the documentary clips of the rioting that happened across Britain just weeks later. I recall a 1981 interview with Terry Hall in which he said it was written solely as a response to the violence at gigs that a lot of bands were experiencing and little else, but clearly there was plenty more going on in composer Jerry Dammers' head at the time.