Soul Salvation - A Gen X Love Letter To The English Beat: The End

Hi! It’s Marc Wasserman! It’s been a minute. But I’m glad to be back.

Welcome back to the Ska Boom podcast and welcome to Soul Salvation, a limited edition series about the English Beat and their third and final album Special Beat Service that was released in 1982.

I have a question for you? Can music save your life?  I believe it can. Not surprisingly, many great thinkers across the ages have considered this question. The 18th century German romantic writer Jean Paul Friedrich Richter said “Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life” More recently, Bob Marley sang, “One good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain.”

I think the combination of the ideas shared by these two philosophers form the core of my thinking on how music can save us. In my case, it was the music of the English Beat and the love of a girl at the dawn of the 1980s that saved me from the gloomy night of life that had enveloped me.  And it was the songs from Special Beat Service that were my missing moonlight. 

And so, this new limited edition podcast series about the English Beat and Special Beat Service are based on my new book Soul Salvation which is my Gen X love letter to the band that helped to save my life.

In this first episode we start at the end of the band, for as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said, “Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.” I’ve long felt that it was my destiny to write a book about the English Beat, but with a specific focus on their end which coincided with my new beginning.

Soul Salvation will be published by Diwulf Publishing in August 2024 and available from the Diwulf.com website and from Amazon.  

The music clips included in this podcast fall under the “Fair Use Doctrine” as defined by Section 107 of the Copyright Act. The law allows for use of music clips for purposes of criticism, comment, and news reporting.