Tim Hughes talks to ska legend Neville Staple abut his tearaway youth, growing older, wiser and how The Specials kept him safe from harm

Neville Staple laughs as he tells me about the labyrinthine twists and turns of his career in music.

“I was a real rude boy!” he grins, swapping his Warwickshire accent for a rich Jamaican patois. “The original rude boy!

“I would have got into so much trouble on the streets if I hadn’t got into music. The Specials kept me from harm.”

He may have been a tearaway in his youth but this 2Tone legend, a former member of The Specials, Fun Boy Three and his own Neville Staple Band, is now an elder statesman of ska – albeit with a devious sense of humour and healthy contempt for those unworthy of his respect.

Born in Jamaica, and raised in Rugby from the age of five, he moved to nearby Coventry as a teenager, getting into a variety of scrapes before making his move into Caribbean music with his own Jah Baddis sound system – a fixture at the city’s Locarno ballroom.

Hearing Jerry Dammers and his band Coventry Automatics rehearsing one day, he stuck his head around the door and asked if he could join as a roadie. The band of Dammers, Horace Panter, Silverton Hutchinson, Lynval Golding, Roddy Byers and Terry Hall became The Specials, and Neville found himself propelled into the big time.

Their debut single Gangsters, based on Prince Buster’s Al Capone, was a Top 10 hit – the first of many. It was followed by A Message to You, Rudy; Rat Race and the chart-topping Too Much Too Young and Ghost Town – the latter an anthem of unemployment and violence in their West Midlands hometown.

“Jerry helped me get off the streets,” he says. “He had his own concept of what he wanted, not what the record industry wanted.”

He added: “It all happened very quickly. One minute we were watching Top of the Pops and then we were on it with Gangsters.”

When The Specials broke up, he and former members Terry Hall and Lynval Golding set up new wave pop act Fun Boy Three – scoring six Top 20 hits, including The Lunatics (Have Taken Over the Asylum), Tunnel of Love and Our Lips Are Sealed. They are also widely remembered for teaming up with new girl group Bananarama for the hits It Ain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It) and Really Saying Something.

The Specials have been through two break-ups and three reunions, Neville lending his vocal talents, and acclaimed Jamaican ‘toasting’, from 1993 to 2001, and again from 2009 to 2012 when he quit after having an epileptic fit on stage – a condition arising from a stroke and serious car crash a year earlier.

“I used to get fits because of the flashing lights,” he says. “That time it was in front of 20,000 people. The only people who looked after me were my friend Trevor who was a roadie, and Lynval.

“The rest just walked past me. They thought it was because I was on drugs. But I was on drugs... because I had had a stroke – not the other kind! There was no love there, so I went back to my own band.

“The worse bit was finding out the band didn’t care about each other any more. There was no love in the band.

“They have always said the door is always open, but it looks like they have lost the key.”

Despite success, Neville has remained loyal to his hometown, and still lives in ‘Cov’.

“I went to America for 10 years but missed it because I grew up around here,” he says. “I have always been a joker. I messed around in school and made the other kids laugh. I have been an entertainer since then. My dad kicked me out for being ‘too rude’! He said ‘If you think you’re a man, get out the house’.

“So I rented a room for 2/6 and after that, moved to ‘Cov’. It was an adventure.”

He found a city in the midst of great social upheaval. It’s motor and engineering industries were dying, leading to soaring unemployment, and the former Phoenix city which had risen just a few decades earlier from the ruins of devastating wartime bombing, was already falling apart. And it was rough.

“You had to look after yourself in Coventry,” he says. “It was different from Rugby. Three of us came from Rugby together and we had to stick together as we were from a little town. We got into scrapes to show that we had arrived, and that we could stick up for ourselves.”

That included confrontations with the far right National Front – which received a righteous pasting from the anti-racists of the 2Tone movement.

“We’d walk down the street and see skinheads and wonder if they were ska fans or the NF,” he says. “There were skinheads who were into our music,” he recalls. “You couldn’t tell who was who!”

So has the city improved since the days of Ghost Town? “No, it’s worse!” he says glumly. “It’s worse than a ghost town – it’s an apocalypse.

“All the clubs have been closed down,” he says, quoting the lyrics. “When Ghost Town came out, it was only some of the clubs – now it’s all of them. Even the Locarno has gone.”

He rails against the venues that exist and the glut of trendy bars. “There’s nowhere for people to engage with music,” he says.”

This month Neville and his wife, and backing singer, Christine ‘Sugary’ Staple and their band are talking to the road to do just that: engage.

The tour, which reaches Oxford next Friday, comes as he releases a double album, Return Of Judge Roughneck (and Dub Specials). Christine will perform a short set of songs from her own new EP Rude Girl Sounds, produced by Neville – who provides backing vocals.

So who are his fans these days? “Younger people and older ones,” he says. “The older ones come with their kids who get told about 2Tone and grew up listening to their dads’ records.”

Now 61, Neville looks younger than his years – and he knows it. “I don’t look my age,” he smiles when I mention it. “It runs in the family; good genes. I can’t run around like I used to, though. My knees are knackered from jumping off all those speakers –though I can still do a bit.”

And he is proud of what he helped achieve. “Being in The Specials and getting a chance to do what we did was good,” he says. “We met a lot of people from different nationalities and enjoyed everything about it.

“Now I just want to keep on playing music and doing what I am doing –and still be a rude boy!”

Neville Staple plays The Bullingdon, Cowley Road, Oxford, next Friday. Tickets are £16.50 from wegottickets.com