Interview: Jerry Dammers

But he is. "They're very weird and I like weird things," he says. For the past few years, Dammers has helmed a tribute band of his own, the Spatial AKA Orchestra. And just to whom might this 18-piece big band be a tribute? Despite the playful name, it's not The Special AKA (aka The Specials). The Spati

"Weird" barely covers the sight of such heavy jazz hitters as Zoe Rahman and Denys Baptiste, both former Mercury Prize nominees, plus Dammers's respected contemporaries Larry Stabbins, Terry Edwards and, on occasion, Rico Rodriguez, all rigged out in African robes and Egyptian masks, sharing a stage with sphinxes, mannequins and a spaceship fashioned from a motorbike sidecar. Dammers reckons it's only going to get weirder: "Maybe we'll do a gig dressed as geography teachers one day. As long as it's extreme, I don't mind."

In addition to the music of Sun Ra, the Orchestra also interprets works by fellow far-out composers Alice Coltrane, Cedric Brooks and Erik Satie and remoulds a choice selection of Specials songs, allowing Dammers to stir his love of jazz, hip-hop, reggae and rock into one cosmic melting pot.

"The instrumental side of ska was pretty much Jamaican jazz over a popular street rhythm," he says. "So we're joining a lot of dots and maybe for the rock fan it's giving a slightly alternative history of what became known as psychedelic music."

The Spatial AKA Orchestra predates and is entirely independent from last year's Dammers-free Specials reunion tour – but it is not far off how Dammers would have envisaged a Specials comeback.

"The purpose of this exercise is not to alienate Specials fans," he says. "I'm not trying to sever the links with my past. The thing I've always done is mix elements of the past with the present and the future. I hope from seeing this people will maybe see the original Specials slightly differently – although it was a ska band, it was also what I might call a cutting-edge retro band.

"Ska was the thing we happened to revive, but it could have been anything in a way. This is all part of a progression. It's not supposed to be a battle with anybody."

And yet the return of The Specials did become a battle zone, with Dammers claiming he was frozen out of the reunion plans, while his former compadres nonchalantly counter-claimed that "the door is still open". While they gave interviews in the run-up to the keenly anticipated tour, Dammers was often on hand to refute their version of events.

I had been pre-warned that, a year down the line, he wouldn't want to talk about The Specials or his erstwhile bandmates any more, but he freely broaches the subject himself. In fact, just try to stop him saying his piece about "the reunion" (he refuses to call it a Specials reunion "because it's not The Specials").

"What they did is not real," he avers. "They're trying to exactly reproduce the past and you're always going to fail if you try and do that. They basically did the first album and I think The Specials moved beyond that and the best stuff was at the end. By the time we got to Ghost Town, we'd actually become a classic British pop band.

"I always think it was completely unnecessary for The Specials to break up and, between the Special AKA (featuring only Dammers and drummer John Bradbury from the original line-up] and the Fun Boy Three (the post-Specials band formed by Terry Hall, Neville Staple and Lynval Golding], you can get a picture of what it might have been like. This (the Spatial AKA Orchestra] is where the real Specials have ended up. It might seem like a long journey, but then people have missed out on 20 years of my musical activities. But there is a strong link – it's what I've learned about music. So I hope people will understand what I do a bit better from this."

When the Special AKA split in the mid-1980s, Dammers retired from the public eye. He spent four years working behind the scenes for Artists Against Apartheid, organising the 1986 concert on Clapham Common and Nelson Mandela's 70th Birthday Tribute at Wembley Stadium.

He recorded bits and pieces over time and still hopes to release something from what he terms "the lost years" in "the not too distant future", but says he "lost the plot" as far as playing live went, managing only one unofficial performance at the Glastonbury Festival in 1994 with his short-lived group Jazz Odyssey.

Instead, he channelled his musical energies into running club nights, organising hip-hop/jazz jam sessions at The Wag Club in London (where he met many of the musicians he would eventually recruit for the Spatial AKA Orchestra) and taking care to fill his DJ sets with progressive, positive rap and reggae which eschew the sexism, homophobia and violence prevalent in those genres.

Dammers – whose song Free Nelson Mandela became a rallying cry for the anti-apartheid movement – has been a political animal since his schooldays in Coventry, attending his first demonstration when the Springboks toured the UK in 1969. It was "rowdy", he recalls. "I grew up in an era when there was someone standing outside the school gates trying to sell Mao's Little Red Book and we were all told not to buy it – so obviously I bought it. My economics book said, 'The wages are the cost of production' and I put my hand up in class and said, 'But surely the wages are the reason for production' and got whacked across the head and called a communist, so I realised I had said something important."

Dammers's politics dovetailed with his musical aspirations. The mixed racial make-up of The Specials – and most of the other bands on the 2 Tone label – was a deliberate and provocative statement in a time of spiralling unemployment and social unrest. "It was politically motivated," he confirms. "At the time a lot of the left-wing socialists were white hippy students, so it was a definite attempt to change that. That was what punk was about in a lot of ways. And those hippy students in the Communist Party eventually turned into New Labour."

He sees the same "blandification" happening in music. "I try and keep in touch with modern stuff," he says, with the weariness of someone who feels the battle is lost. "My personal bugbear is that white rock music is never going to be able to be politically effective because it doesn't reach out to black people. Harking back to the era of The Beatles – four white boys with guitars – doesn't reflect the reality of Britain today and it's actually living in the past. That is why The Specials – the real Specials – is still ahead of the pack culturally, mainly because I made the effort to make sure it incorporated the reality of Britain.

"To this day, it's surprising how few, for want of a better word, multi-racial bands there are. The big black bands in America – the JBs, the Earth, Wind & Fires – have more or less disappeared. Computers have taken over and most records are made by one or two people as opposed to a lot of people which made it very organic and ever-changing. So we're trying to revive that tradition a little bit.

"I do believe music is dead," he concludes cheerfully, "but it's fun to stick electrodes in the corpse and watch it twitch a bit."

Jerry Dammers' Spatial AKA Orchestra plays the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, tomorrow.

Interview: Jerry Dammers - Musician