The Duff Guide to 2 Tone

Stephen Shafer

US

ISBN 9780578744773
Book
Released: 2020

The Duff Guide to 2 Tone
The Duff Guide to 2 Tone
The Duff Guide to 2 Tone
The Duff Guide to 2 Tone


The Duff Guide to 2 Tone features over 70 reviews of reissues of 2 Tone and related albums from The Specials, The Special AKA, The Selecter, The Beat, Madness, The Bodysnatchers and Bad Manners, as well as write-ups of more recent records, gigs, books, and movies. Ska music writer Stephen Shafer was Moon Ska Records' marketing director during the 1990s and the American 'Third Wave' of ska. With a foreword by Gaz Mayall, The Duff Guide to 2 Tone draws from over 12 years of Shafer's reviews from his extensive and popular Duff Guide to Ska blog.

I really enjoyed Stephen's book. He writes very well, with a personal touch and with great passion about the bands and releases while not shying away from being critical when he feels something is not quite up to scratch. One thing he does which I enjoyed a lot is give a lot of emphasis to the lyrics, something maybe we here at 2-tone.info are guilty of not doing.

The book is a guided trip through many of the 2 Tone and post-2 Tone releases which you can mostly check out as you read about them on Deezer or Spotify or wherever you stream your music from these days. As someone who hadn't checked out a lot of this music, Stephen's book was a great guiding hand and I found some very interesting music along the way.

In addition to the new music he cites, he drops lots of great titbits of info and anecdotes that even those of us who have been around the 2 Tone block will find new and interesting.

I've read a few 2 Tone related books this year and The Duff Guide to 2 Tone is right up there with them. Definitely one worth picking up.

You can pick it up from Amazon