By Andrew Perry Last Updated: 4:43PM BST 29 Apr 2009  A quite extraordinary atmosphere of jubilation has enveloped Birmingham's Academy venue. The densely packed crowd are dancing, shouting, singing, hugging, and kissing, and the band haven't even arrived on stage yet.  These excitable scenes have been prompted by the return of the Specials, the dance floor-filling, chart-topping giants of the post-punk era, whose music was an inspirational fusion of punk's furious energy, and the exuberant Jamaican rhythms of ska, rocksteady and reggae.  The newly regrouped ensemble are touring for the first time in 27 years, and the response has been beyond any expectations.  Back in the late Seventies and early Eighties, the band were worshipped by their mod-attired teenage fan base. They would often perform with fifty or a hundred uninvited punters up on stage, thus dissolving any sense of separation between band and audience.  The Specials's songs cut right to the quick of young people's daily experiences in Britain's cities. Their deceptively skilful narratives told of teenage pregnancies and street violence, all set to a sound, which defied racial division – an idyll embodied by the band's Anglo-Caribbean personnel.  For three turbulent years, the Specials were, quite simply, the coolest band around, providing the definitive soundtrack to inner-city life here. Their tunes have continued to resonate across subsequent generations, echoing on through the work of present-day devotees such as the Streets and Lily Allen.  So, even amid the recent glut of reunions, their return has generated a feverish buzz. The Birmingham show, a virtual homecoming for the Coventry-based ensemble, sold out in four minutes.  "There are two routes," says the band's singer, Terry Hall, when I meet him before the show, along with Lynval Golding (guitarist), and John Bradbury (drummer). "You can take this route, or you can take the Spandau Ballet route. I prefer this route – it's that basic, really."  Hall's withering put-down, as ever, hits its target square-on. Spandau Ballet, who also reformed lately, were sworn enemies until a vast financial incentive lured them back together for a money-grabbing arena tour. The Specials have also had to set aside some deeply embedded resentments. Theirs was always a volatile, fractious union of seven strong characters, all from different social and racial backgrounds.  After their acrimonious split, at their very peak, in July 1981, Hall was the only member to eek out a successful career in music. He was always the sticking point in any putative reunion, until 2004, when he took his eldest son, Felix, to see the regrouped Pixies at Brixton Academy. That night, Hall imagined a similar "route" for the Specials – a series of intimate, exciting reunion gigs, which might prove less lucrative than a quick trawl around the nation's enormodomes, but more satisfying for band and fans alike.  When I met him that summer, Hall, by repute a laconic and withdrawn character, effusively told me that he'd "found himself". He'd started a new life in London, with his second wife (a massive Specials fan), and had been receiving treatment for manic depression. "You get stuck on medication," he said, "and you get a certain amount of clarity. The Specials was this big hole which took up four years of my life. More than anything, I really wanted to see these people again."  In 2007, Golding, who now lives near Seattle, contacted Hall with an offer from Lily Allen, for them both to sing the Specials's Gangsters with her at Glastonbury. They did so, and were blown away by the reaction, and, by early 2008, a near-complete Specials line-up were rehearsing together in Bradbury's basement in London.  "My Mum had just died," says Golding, "and Roddy [Byers, guitarist]'s Dad had died, within the same week. I'd just come back from the funeral in Jamaica, and we started playing together." He smiles at the memory. "Playing our music was the best therapy for me, and for all of us."  Last Summer, the six-strong ensemble, which also included Staple, and Horace Panter [bass], made an unannounced toe-in-the-water appearance at Bestival. Says Bradbury, "Horace said afterwards, I don't think we perhaps realise quite how popular we are. Now," he continues, referring to their experience on the current tour, "now we know. We know that we belong to a lot of people. We are a property, owned by the audience."  The Specials touched each and every fan deeply, and lastingly. This writer, as an early teenager in 1979, lived in Torquay, where racial disharmony was hardly a pressing issue. Golding and Staple were, in a sense, the first black people in my life, and the band's music furnished me with the enlightened attitudes towards skin colour, which prepared me for adulthood in multicultural London.  Talking to my heroes now, I get a strong sense, that they had all come to view the Specials's short, eventful life as a trauma, which they had systematically blotted out in their minds – until now. Bradbury, who until recently was drifting between jobs in shops and on building sites, merrily recalls a sweaty night at London's Hope & Anchor, where a skinhead handed him over a pint of beer, mid-song, while he was drumming. "Obviously, I shouted, No!, and then he put both his pints on my floor tom [drum], like it was a table. People felt so much a part of what we were doing, it was almost like the music wasn't actually coming from us."  These, though, were brutal times: Golding chillingly remembers being beaten up by right-wing extremists in West Hampstead and suffering three cracked ribs. In a separate incident, he was stabbed and almost died in hospital. "My vibe was, we're a multiracial band," he says softly, with his ever-benevolent smile, "and that's not going to stop me. You'll have to kill me!"  Times have changed, to some degree. These days, the stage invasions of old could never happen, due to Health & Safety regulations. The shows on the tour have been entirely free of violence, too. Yet, today, the Specials feel alarmingly relevant: with a recession biting, just as it was in the late Seventies, their eerie swansong, Ghost Town, feels like a spooky premonition, as do other cautionary tales about knife crime and binge drinking.  The only cloud in the sky for the six reunited Specials is their original keyboard player and architect, Jerry Dammers, who has chosen not to join them, and has lambasted them in the media. The six have laudably refrained from sniping back, but clearly now feel vindicated by the astonishing reactions their gigs have elicited.  "The other night," says Bradbury, "I spoke to a couple from Somerset – a guy called Pete and his wife. She said, I suffer from depression, and, after the gig, I felt like I used to feel before I had depression."  Bradbury's eyes have filled with tears. As he pauses to wipe them away, Hall takes over for him: "It's working for me as well. I'm an excellent advert for someone with acute manic depression, who can beat it. Music and lithium – I find them very therapeutic."  "So," concludes Bradbury, his voice trembling with emotion, "if you ask me why we do it, we do it for that, we do it for the fans, and we do it for our kids – we've got our families travelling with us, so they can see what their Dads did in the war, kind of thing. It's all about getting well, and what you can do to help other people get well."  If ever proof were needed of the healing power of music, the Specials, once again, are delivering it in spades.
The reunion tour of the Coventry two-tone pioneers The Specials is proving to    be an ecstatic affair for Terry Hall, Lynval Golding and John Bradbury.