There was a culture war going on in England at the end of the 1970s, and for an extraordinary 18-month stretch, it looked like 2 Tone Records, an independent label out of Coventry, were winning it. From late 1979 to the summer of 1981, 2 Tone released three top-10 albums and nine top-10 singles and EPs (by the [English] Beat, the Selecter, and the Specials), dominated the pop music scene and changed the conversation about race in the UK. The bands signed and produced by Jerry Dammers, founder of 2 Tone and creator of the Specials, were multiracial, multigender, intentionally activist in their music and performance, and left-wing in their politics. They were also shot through with contradiction and conflict and soon collapsed under the weight of their ambitions and the expectations of their meteoric success: too much too young, as one of their most popular songs went.
Too Much Too Young is the well-chosen title of Birmingham-born music writer Daniel Rachel’s definitive history of 2-Tone. Exhaustively researched and exhaustingly detailed, Too Much Too Young was released in 2023 in England and appears this summer of 2024 in a US edition. Pulling no punches and sparing no accolades, Rachel set out to tell the full story of Dammers and his labor of love—and has succeeded admirably in his goal.