I left India aged 2, then lived in Sheffield and came to Coventry aged ten (1965). Obviously I’ve got loads of memories. I don’t know, for some reason I can remember thinking the top floor of multi storey car parks was a good place to hang out when you’re a bored teenager.

Not that much I don’t think, although I’m grateful they sent me for piano lessons. I was rubbish and hated practising, the only thing that interested me was teaching myself blues. It was The Who, The Small Faces, The Kinks, which made me want to be in a band, and I loved soul music, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Tamla Motown.

I got into reggae from when I first heard it around 1969, Desmond Decker and all that, I was trying to get my school rock band to play it as early as 1971, but no one took reggae seriously in rock circles in those days. Yes it was a conscious effort to combine ska with punk, but it still seemed natural to me. We injected a bit of that funky African offbeat energy, which most rock could do with I reckon.

Some people seem to have forgotten that strictly speaking The Specials didn’t actually break up, some of the band left and said I could carry on the name, which is what happened. I suppose at first maybe it seemed like a bit of a relief, because a couple of the band had become impossible to work with by the end, but deep down it was very disappointing. When the Fun Boy Three went "pop" and left the Specials I don’t think they really understood the unique position they were in. What they did quite possibly reduced the chances of protest music getting into the pop charts right up to the present day. I also don’t think they realise what I was put through trying to keep alive that standard of music, combined with the political ideals, which the Specials had come to represent. I got more than enough grief from a couple of the original Specials for my song-writing and arranging, that resentment was even more crazy from a couple of the replacement members. It was probably a mistake to expect another good live band to come mainly from Coventry, so soon after The Specials and Selecter. We still managed to achieve "The Boiler", the "In the Studio" album, and "Free Nelson Mandela" though, but it took forever and all turned into a bit beyond a nightmare. By the end I was in so much debt to the record company I had to stop recording. I got involved in organising Artists Against Apartheid, which led to the Mandela concerts at Wembley Stadium, so some good did come out of it all in the end. Maybe Terry Hall wouldn’t have been as convincing as Stan Campbell singing "Free Nelson Mandela" anyway.

I’ve never had any stance to keep 2 Tone or The Specials as things of the past. The Fun Boy Three took that stance when they left the band. If I’d had my way The Specials might still be making music today, who knows. I’m very proud of the music we made and I still want as many people as possible to hear the proper Specials’ records. Anyone who really valued the band would be bound to have a little bit of disregard towards the people who demolished it wouldn’t they? Terry Hall now says they didn’t really have a reason for leaving. A couple of them went on to rubbish The Specials or me in interviews, then a couple claimed to have formed The Specials (when everyone knows it was me), then a couple claimed to still be The Specials even though they’d left years earlier. As I understood it they stopped being The Specials when they announced they’d left the band. For them to use the name like they did wasn’t fair on the public. They didn’t even phone me to see if I might be interested. It was hard to see the thing I’d worked towards for years being pulled back down almost to the level of a pub band. I think it’s them that disregarded The Specials, I never did.

If many people had actually heard those later records made under The Specials’ name they’d be able to work out how much I contributed to the real Specials, and what a massive effort it would take, from everyone, to get it back to anything which could really be taken seriously again. There’s a web site which was set up at the time they were doing the rounds as the Specials and I think the guy who set it up was given a bit of a false impression. I don’t know if there’s really been that much speculation, it’s hard to say how many of the public are really losing sleep over it. I wish, as much as anyone, that we were all young and The Specials were still together, just like the good old days at the start; but the practical reality is it’s quite late in the day. People have got new careers, some have moved on musically, some have hardly played for years, there are health problems, some voices may be damaged, some people’s memory never was that good, and we don’t even live on the same continent. A lot of fans who loved the Specials don’t want to see us reform. If anyone outside the band tries to push us back together, they might be well meaning, but I think it just makes it even more unlikely for anything at all to happen. Too many old bands take advantage of the public’s good will by doing second rate "take the money and run" type gigs. The public, and any band members, would need to know that whoever was working together was doing it because they really wanted to, for genuine musical reasons, not just because someone was offering money or whatever. Otherwise I don’t think it would be the real Specials. I put my name to the joint statement that there are no plans to reform in the foreseeable future, just like every other member from the original band did.

Renaming one of the multi storey car parks "Ghost Town Park" would do me, but seriously, if it’s true anyone really wanted to do anything like your suggestion, it would be brilliant, it’s not really for me to say though. Maybe because 2 Tone was against racism I should also really say I hope there’s something in the city to commemorate people who’ve been killed in racist attacks, like Satnam Singh Gil who was twenty when he got killed in 1981. Doctor Amal Dharri got stabbed in the chip shop off Albany Rd. in the same year, it was supposedly for a fifty pence bet . I think they deserve to be remembered more than we do really.