When I saw The Beat, it was a cold slightly damp, dark January night, and I was excited to get a fix of musical warmth in a never-ending winter.

The Hare and Hounds was rammed: I was squashed between 50-
year-old men clad in black puffers clutching plastic pints, waiting for a support act that didn’t come. They scowled at me while I danced, and I still don’t understand why: The Beat’s music is infectiously danceable – even their newer stuff holds up. It’s the sort of music that commands you to move your hips and throw back your hair, impossible to stand still without tapping your feet. When they arrived on stage, their current front man, Ranking Junior, called out for the rude girls and rude boys in the audience to call back to him. When I looked around at who he was calling out to, I couldn’t help but giggle a little.

Formed in Birmingham in 1978, the Beat solidified itself as one of the big four ska/reggae bands that came up out of the Midlands, alongside the Specials, the Selecter, and UB40. As the line up currently stands, the band is fronted by Ranking Junior, aka. Mini Murphy, aka. Matthew Murphy, the son of the Beat’s late front man Ranking Roger. Murphy has been performing as part of the band since at least 2005 and has, in his own words, been tasked with carrying the flag of his father’s legacy. Despite many of the set being songs written by his father, Junior is – in his own right – a brilliant performer and musician. He commands the stage in a way that makes you completely forget that he is anyone’s
successor, and manages to stand in for both his father’s MCing and Dave Wakeling’s vocals simultaneously.

In 2016 Murphy co-wrote ‘Bounce’, the band’s first album in over 30 years which was met with rave reviews. It is a sound that manages to continue to sound like The Beat, undeniably a ska album with heavy reggae and dance influences but with a contemporary flavor that moves away from the 80s undertones that define some of their original discography. The highlight of the album, in my opinion, is ‘Side to Side’, which became a breakout hit after being featured on radio 6’s ‘A-list’. It
proved to be just as catchy and moveable live as it is on the album.

They could have easily just performed the entirety of ‘I Just Can’t Stop It’ to a similarly positive reception, however this would have gone against everything the Beat had worked towards in the past twenty years and would have meant ignoring an entire generation of their music. I guess you have to wonder what the point of a multi-generational spanning band is if it isn’t to track a musical evolution. I very much appreciated their insistence on treating the different eras of their discography with equal care, not dependent on the track’s popularity. I often find myself falling into the trap of listening to a band on Spotify and looking at the streaming numbers to tell me which songs are worth listening to,but live, there isn’t anyone to tell you what song is from what album, who worked on it, how popular it is. It made 40 years of work feel ubiquitous. If you weren’t familiar with the intricacies of the Beat’s
discography you could just find yourself enjoying the music for what it is, and having a good time.

Seeing ska bands live has always been a joyous experience for me. I have a vivid memory of seeing The Selecter in 2021 at Godiva festival in Coventry, Pauline Black and Co coming out on stage in these 3-piece grey suits (which by the end of the set were at least two shades darker). Me and a girl I met in the crowd got pulled into a mosh pit so aggressive we didn’t realise it was actually just a full-on scrap, but we laughed it off; in that moment we just wanted to dance to On My Radio.
I think that ska is best served in the summer, outside, drenched in sun and sweat and booze. Seeing the Selecter was proof that ska is music that moves people, if not emotionally then definitely physically, and
infectiously.

While the Beat are a band that have proved themselves, like the Selecter, to be a ska band capable of evolution rather than a legacy act, the audience that watched them at the Hare and Hounds were largely longtime fans: they were the sorts of people to have seen them over
and over again almost religiously since they were teenagers, a feeling that was confirmed by Murphy’s closing statement. ‘See you next year’. While I strongly believe that long-term supporters are crucial for the success of the band, I also think that this show of theirs was probably a very different experience than if I were to see them at a festival, in a crowd of people who may only half-know a song or two, but would be much more willing to be taken away by Ranking Junior’s mesmerizing performance.

They are a band I would love to see again and would recommend to anyone see who has heard Mirror in the Bathroom and found themselves captivated by the almost haunting saxophone, or to anyone who is in desperate need of a boogie.