For no real reason other than that we can, this week we’ll be showing you five great songs from various bands covering 2-tone icons The Specials. The band, who formed in 1979, was among the forefront of musicians to push ska music outside of the Caribbean, and their music became a unifying force among racial tensions in the UK in the 1980′s. Watch Monday’s installment by The Ordinary Boys here.
Alright, alright, it’s a cover of a cover, but The Specials version of Monkey Man proved to be just as popular (if not more so) than the original by Toots and the Maytals some 20 years earlier. 20 years later still, Reel Big Fish covered the song as a single music video, and recorded it again for their 2009 cover album “Fame, Fortune, and Fornication.” Check out all three versions here.