CityLife

Jerry Dammers' Spatial Aka Orchestra

Jerry Dammers’s Spatial AKA Orchestra
Bridgewater Hall
March 30, Tuesday

When cult ska band The Specials reunited to national acclaim in 2008, the notable absence was that of Jerry Dammers, the band’s keyboardist and principal songwriter.

Officially, The Specials say, “the door is always open” to Dammers, but a spokesperson for Dammers has said they “fail to mention that Jerry has been driven out every time he has attempted to get involved over the last year." Robbie Williams can probably sympathise.

In retaliation, Dammers is busily touring his Spatial AKA Orchestra, a project that bears only phonetic similarities to his former band: it’s a 19-piece orchestra that started out as a tribute to cosmic jazzman Sun Ra and evolved into what Dammers tellingly calls “a tribute to outsiders,” embracing funk, jazz, reggae and exotica. 

The show began with the masked musicians trooping in through the audience, making their way to a stage decked with mannequins and mummies. Dammers stood at stage right behind a bank of 13 keyboards and synthesisers, and quickly declared his intention to take us “backwards in time, forwards in time, into the depths of space and back into ourselves.” 

There followed two and a half hours of impeccable musicianship and wilful weirdness, incorporating numerous Sun Ra songs, a couple of Alice Coltrane covers, a reggae-fied take on Mike Oldfield’s Theme From The Exorcist and a jazzy reading of the Batman theme. The Specials’s hit Ghost Town was reworked as Ghost Planet, fitting the show’s loose themes of space, aliens and the human mind. This was brilliantly inventive stuff, full of bombast and colour, but not for those with a fear of the extended sax solo. 

Ending with Sun Ra’s Space Is The Place, the band paraded out to the foyer, where they continued to play as the crowd dissipated. As they did, it became clear why Dammers has been ostracised from The Specials: they’re on different planets entirely.