Dance Craze: Still a favorite record after all these years.

The US version on the left and the UK version on the right.

Dance Craze: Still a favorite record after all these years.

by rick olivares

The latter half of 1981 was memorable for me. I was in first year high school at that time. I had my first teacher crush and utterly despised another one. Every Wednesday, my classmates and I would go to either the old Yamaha Studios in the PCI Bank Arcade in Greenhills or to this place called Lola’s along Roces Avenue in Quezon City where we’d jam and rehearse for our high school band (that we first put up while as seventh graders).

New Wave and Punk were in full swing and it was an exciting time discovering all these things. That was the time I managed to get U2’s debut album, Boy; Echo and the Bunnymen’s Crocodiles, Rush’s Moving Pictures, and this one… Dance Craze. The Best of British Ska… Live!

Boy I got at this comic book/record shop at the old Manila Bank Arcade in Greenhills. Moving Pictures I bought at Musikland. Crocodiles was given to me by my classmate, Nick Ramos. Dance Craze…. I heard about it on the radio from Howling Dave over DZRJ where he plugged the record that was going to be released locally by OctoArts that acquired among others the Sire, Virgin, and Chrysalis labels. That meant a lot of the punk and New Wave records would only heard on the radio or saw that our rich classmates had -- could soon be in our hands.

Let me digress for a moment. There is something about being in first year…. In college, I discovered the Smiths, R.E.M., Prefab Sprout, and the Style Council. Their collective effect on me… that’s a story for another day.

Back to those days from 1981. I picked up Dance Craze (also at Musikland) and I must have played that record to death that to this day, I know all the words to the songs. I could never dance to disco but ska - 2-Tone ska -- got me dancing. Listening to the songs and the music got me also in touch with what was going on in Great Britain at that time – the race riots, the high unemployment, the Falklands War, domestic terrorism from the Irish Republican Army, and more. The Bad Manners song, “Inner London Violence” made it all too real for me.  

I wore my Specials t-shirt like a badge and covered my bag with pins from the 2-Tone bands. My friends and I (from school) would walk along the corridors like Madness nuttily did.

Of all the bands that appeared on the album, I first gravitated to Madness and even learned all the dance steps at the back of their One Step Beyond album. As I got older, I moved on to Bad Manners and ultimately, the Specials which remain a strong favorite even after all this time. The Specials are the one 2-Tone band whose albums I have.

Dance Craze along with the Clash’s Black Market Clash and UB40’s Labour of Love got me to backtrack and like reggae, rock steady, and dub. Dance Craze opened a whole new world of music for me.

To be honest, I have no idea what happened to that record that I bought back in 1981. I tried looking for the compact disc when I was living in the US and Hong Kong to no avail. When I returned to the Philippines, I found this shop in Cartimar, Recto selling the DVD of the film as well as MP3s! Of course, I got them. However, it was only when I returned to vinyl this year that I got back that record. And I got two – the US (that lists the Beat as “the English Beat” and a few other minor details) and the Japanese version. Looking now for the British as well as the local pressing.

I can’t begin to tell you how much I enjoyed listening to Dance Craze when I got it all over again. Aside from being a treasured memento from my youth, it contains some really great music. And I find myself dancing again.