Pop Preservation Society presents for one night only…’Two Tone Ska Night’ with DJ Vittorio.

2 Tone Records began in a Coventry (UK) flat in 1979 and peaked two years later, when The Specials’ era-defining Ghost Town went to No 1 as riots blazed around a UK in a time of recession. The label launched The Specials and The Selecter from the current City of Culture, plus Londoners Madness, Birmingham’s The Beat and others, all to chart success. It also ended up naming an entire movement: the dance crazy, sharp-suited, political, multi-racial ska-pop that reverberates to this day.

DJ Vittorio will spin records from the Two Tone era, and will go back much further. From the great Prince Buster, Skatalites to Desmond Dekker, the evening will go back as far back as when the genre began in Jamaica during the late 1950s. Ska was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae. It combined elements of Caribbean mento and calypso with American jazz and rhythm and blues. Ska is characterised by a walking bass line accented with rhythms on the off beat.

DJ Vittorio will also play the great ska acts from Australia including Strange Tenants and The Allniters for an evening of dancing and partying. Or as Suggs from Madness puts it, “running around like idiots, a blur of legs, arms and adrenaline.”