Too Much Too Young: an interview with Daniel Rachel
The Italian edition of Daniel Rachel’s Too Much Too Young – The 2 Tone Records Story has just been published. We talk about it with the author.
🇮🇹 Italian language version: Too Much Too Young, un'intervista con Daniel Rachel.
Too Much Too Young by Daniel Rachel
Daniel Rachel, born in Birmingham, performed as a musician in the 90s and 2000s, and then devoted himself to writing books. His most recent work is Too Much Too Young – The 2 Tone Records Story (Akashic Books, 2023), the most comprehensive book on one of the most influential labels ever, which I had the pleasure of translating into Italian for Hellnation Libri.
Daniel Rachel had already dealt with the subject in the past, first with Walls Come Tumbling Down (2016) and then as co-author of Ranking Roger’s I Just Can’t Stop It – My Life in the Beat (2019).
In 2021, Daniel Rachel was among the curators of 2 Tone Lives & Legacies, which took place in Coventry, and wrote the liner notes of the anniversary edition of the Selecter’s debut album Too Much Pressure.
As soon as I finished translating Too Much Too Young, I thought of interviewing Daniel Rachel for Garageland #4, the Italian-language magazine born from the collaboration between Crombie Media and our friends at Hellnation Libri.
The following is the original exchange between the author and me.
Interview
Before writing Too Much Too Young, you dealt with musicians like the Beatles, Oasis, David Bowie and the Kinks. These are very different artists, even if they’re connected by one particular thing: for a more or less brief period, they were interested in the mod scene or received its attention. Since the 90s, you’ve been active as a musician with Bripop band Rachels Basement, and then as a solo artist. How did you approach the world of music and, later, writing?
I’ve never considered my love of listening to music or making it as a musician connected to Mod. Although, I recognise the connections you make. I guess, I’ve always resisted labels: Britpop, especially. But retrospectively, it helps to place a time and a place.
I started life in bands as a bass player. Writing songs from the age of sixteen. Then forming my own bands in my twenties. If I could have written a song to match Lennon & McCartney I would have been satisfied. I never did. To me, they are the gold standard.
Then, after, twenty plus years trying to ‘make it’ I locked away my guitar and set out to write a book. Ten years later, and tens books later, I’m still doing it.
My only previous skill was lyrics. So, writing for me is very much influenced by reading: novels; and non-fiction. I’m still just learning.
Your recent works include a collaboration with the Selecter and co-writing the autobiography of Ranking Roger. Can we consider them your springboard for writing Too Much Too Young or was this a job you had been planning for some time?
Writing with Roger was his idea. He read Walls Come Tumbling Down, loved it, and got in touch. I turned him down three times!
At the time, I was writing Don’t Look Back In Anger (about Cool Britannia and the 90s) and working on a David Bowie book, Icon. It tuned into a pretty crazy year. Happily, Roger read the finished book before he died and loved it. I still miss him.
Curating the Selecter re-issue and writing the sleeve notes for Too Much Pressure was very much because I was working on Too Much Too Young. It was a great opportunity to speak to all the members of the band and their producers. Some of the stories made it into the notes, but the best I kept for the book!
How long did it take to research and write your book? Interviewing such a large number of people must have been very challenging, not to mention searching for published articles and archive materials and comparing all the (often conflicting) information.
You could say, I’ve been researching the book since I was a kid. I’ve been reading, buying, and listening to 2 Tone all my life. I spoke to near a 100 people. That was fantastic. I also tried to read all the press ever written about 2 Tone. There’s a lot!
The conflicting stories are wonderful for narrative. They paint a more realistic version of the past. I present multiple versions of the same event and allow the reader to make their own decisions. I try to be non-judgemental.
Overcoming ethnic tensions was an objective for 2 Tone, and not the observation of a fact. Especially in the parts of your book that concern the Selecter, the difficulty of being together between whites, blacks of Caribbean origin and blacks of African descent is underlined. Pauline Black goes so far as to define a certain way of seeing anti-racism as a ‘middle class utopia’, and further declares: ‘You can’t just say, “People should get on. Black and white unite.” Yeah, how? We were saying, “Look, we’re finding it difficult. But we’re doing it.” We weren’t presenting ourselves as a perfect example of harmony. We were putting ourselves forward as a political statement. We’re trying, why can’t you?’
With the exception of the Beat and Madness, the first wave of 2 Tone bands had to face class, gender, race and education differences. It makes 2 Tone the tense, exciting, brilliant movement it was. These struggles on stage and backstage defined the experience for the musicians.
But for fans, the message was simpler and more about listening to great records, dancing to great music, and addressing the social and political expressed within the songwriting.
Too Much Too Young attempts to bridge both worlds i.e. front of stage and backstage and say, this is the real story of 2 Tone. It’s probably an easier read for fans than the participants!
I also found it very interesting that a platform created to fight racism has been used to wage other battles, beyond the intentions of its original creators. Among these battles, there is above all the fight against sexism, desired by some artists but also by women who worked behind the scenes, for example in the 2 Tone office.
Sexism was across 2 Tone. You feel it in many of Jerry Dammers’ lyrics; Little Bitch for example. And some say, Too Much Too Young. But that changes with the release of The Boiler which directly confronted male violence and rape.
This points to The Bodysnatchers, Pauline Black and Juliet in the 2 Tone office (and Selecter’s manager). They were vocal about women’s equity in society. But it’s difficult to gauge how successful that was. Beyond, the obvious: women as role models and doing what few women had done before in rock history.
Again, behind the scenes, all the women of 2 Tone talk about daily struggles, which I felt was important to write about.
Your book has a very modern approach. In the years in which the events took place, little attention was given to mental health, yet in Too Much Too Young there is a lot of talk about depression, burnout, and symptoms of disorders and undiagnosed neurodivergence are described.
I heard Terry Hall’s Well Fancy That as a young teenager. It told me about sexual abuse and grooming. The history was in plain sight. Likewise, Jerry talked about having a breakdown in the press in 1980 and again during the making of In the Studio.
Whether writing about it is a modern approach, I couldn’t say. It was a facet of 2 Tone. It made sense of the story, and therefore had to be told.
You have already given many interviews and made many lectures of your book. Is there any question you’d like answered but no one has asked you yet?
I enjoy talking about the process of writing and researching. But if no one asks about that I guess it’s because no one’s interested!
Well, I think we just did! Good luck with Too Much Too Young and your future works!
One thought on “Too Much Too Young: an interview with Daniel Rachel”