SKANK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (20)
By:
December 8, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… ska records! PLAYLIST HERE. Series edited by Josh Glenn.
Movie themes used to be an important sub-branch of popular music. Westerns, espionage and private eye films in particular were frequently translated to the pop record market. Even war films.
The film The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) produced an unlikely hit with “Colonel Bogey March,” combining a strict martial drumbeat with a whistled male chorus, which probably exhausted the public’s appetite for the military march for a good while. Four years later, veteran Hollywood composer Dimitri Tiomkin delivered a kind of reconstructed version of the march for the film The Guns of Navarone (1961): the explosions of tympany and martial bigness are there, but they alternate with passages of relative quiet. More or less appropriate, given that the movie is about a band of commandos and resistance fighters crossing the fictional island of Navarone to take out the massive Nazi artillery of the title.
But when Jamaica’s hardest working dance band, the Skatalites took on the Guns of Navarone theme that fancy-pants orchestral diffidence was never going to cut it. The Skatalites’ philosophy was: find the core, trim it down, make it swing. They return the tune to its roots in early twentieth-century march, but with similar subversions to those that befell the original form: mess with that tempo a wee bit, loosen it here, tighten it there, add a mad accent somewhere else, anticipate or lag by a microsecond or two and that erstwhile military march becomes foxtrot, swing, funk, rock’n’roll. Or ska. No one’s going to march off to war to that tune now.
The Skatalites, mostly veterans of 1950s tourist hotel orchestras, could as easily play the hits of the day as they could cut loose on jazzy improv or find soul in the schmaltziest of ballads. They more than any other single entity were responsible for the emergence of those sounds and feels that became ska, reggae and rocksteady. Individual Skatalites Tommy McCook, Jackie Mittoo and Roland Alfonso became hitmakers under their own names, and the group played uncredited behind many of the stars of Jamaican music.
Movie and TV themes were always a staple for the Skatalites. Sometimes, as with Prince Buster’s “Cincinatti Kid,” there is little more than a tip of the hat to the movie source — in this case, Buster repeating the best line from the movie, in which Steve McQueen’s young poker prodigy goes up against old school master Edward G. Robinson, (“Hey Cincinatti, people say you’re good, and I think you’re the best I ever met. But while I’m around, you’re second best.”).
Doing this piece for HILOBROW has sent me happily down a Skatalite/movie theme rabbit hole. Should you care to join me you could do worse than dial up Studio One 007 (Licensed to Ska) and be entranced by the whole album, starting with ex-Skatalite Roland Alphonso’s magnificent “James Bond.”
SKANK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Lucy Sante on Margarita’s WOMAN COME | Douglas Wolk on Millie’s MAYFAIR | Lynn Peril on Prince Buster’s TEN COMMANDMENTS | Mark Kingwell on The [English] Beat’s TEARS OF A CLOWN | Annie Nocenti on Jimmy Cliff’s MISS JAMAICA | Mariane Cara on The Selecter’s ON MY RADIO | Adam McGovern on The Specials’ GHOST TOWN | Josh Glenn on The Ethiopians’ TRAIN TO SKAVILLE | Susannah Breslin on The [English] Beat’s MIRROR IN THE BATHROOM | Carl Wilson on Prince Buster / Madness’s ONE STEP BEYOND | Carlo Rotella on The Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ THE IMPRESSION THAT I GET | Rani Som on The Bodysnatchers’ EASY LIFE | David Cantwell on Desmond Dekker’s 007 (SHANTY TOWN) | Francesca Royster on Joya Landis’ ANGEL OF THE MORNING | Mimi Lipson on Folkes Brothers’ OH CAROLINA | Alix Lambert on The Specials’ TOO MUCH TOO YOUNG | Marc Weidenbaum on Dandy Livingstone’s RUDY, A MESSAGE TO YOU | Heather Quinlan on Fishbone’s MA & PA | Will Hermes on The [English] Beat’s WHINE & GRINE / STAND DOWN MARGARET | Peter Doyle on The Skatalites’ GUNS OF NAVARONE | James Parker on The [English] Beat’s SAVE IT FOR LATER | Brian Berger on The Upsetters’ RETURN OF DJANGO | Annie Zaleski on The Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ SOME DAY I SUPPOSE | Deborah Wassertzug on The Bodysnatchers’ TOO EXPERIENCED | Dan Reines on The Untouchables’ I SPY FOR THE FBI | PLUS: AL Deakin on SKANKING FOR YOUR LIFE.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!