Happy Halloween – here’s Lankum’s haunting cover of The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’

Lankum have shared a haunting, creepy cover of The Specials’ 1981 classic ‘Ghost Town’ – check it out below.

• READ MORE: Lankum: “This generation of Irish artists have a confidence to stand up and be themselves”

The track will be released as a standalone 12” single via Rough Trade Records on January 30, with an elaborate etching on the B-side. You can pre-order your single here.

The Dublin experimental folk band originally covered the song as a contribution to Oona Doherty’s dance show ‘Specky Clark’ at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre earlier this year, and they have now unveiled a video for the eight-minute track, shot in County Wicklow and directed by Leonn Ward.

The single stays true to Lankum’s signature ‘folk drone’ style initially, with a crawling, insidious pace and discordant strings lending extra menace to the song’s legendary anti-Thatcherite lyrics, before it erupts into a cacophonous, electronic climax. Watch the video here:

Lankum have said: “’Ghost Town’ came to us through some curious circumstances. Oona Doherty, who we were familiar with through her phenomenal dance work on the video for Gilla Band’s ‘Shoulderblades’, contacted us and told us about a new show she was putting together. It was about her great-great-grandfather being sent to Belfast as a child to live with his aunts and work in an abattoir. She wanted a new piece of music for the show, for a party scene set on Halloween night, and told us she wanted it to start out indistinguishable and woozy, before developing into the very recognisable track by The Specials.”

“At first we were slightly reticent, since a cover of a ska tune wasn’t something we’d usually ever consider, but after a bit of deliberation we decided we’d give it a shot, and the result took us on an incredibly enjoyable journey that had us gleefully playing with synthesisers and drum machines in Hellfire Studios, trying to come up with the scaldiest 90s sounding techno for the outro section of the track.”

“We’re very excited with the end product and delighted that Oona approached us and challenged us to step out of our comfort zone. It’s an honour to be releasing a version of this iconic tune, and it feels eerily relevant to be referencing yet again themes of urban decay, economic hardship and working class frustration. Enjoy responsibly.”

Doherty added: “I was listening to Lankum and it inspired me to write this dance theatre play called ‘Specky Clark’ using a lot of their music. But for one scene which happens on Halloween night Samhain, I asked the band could they make me a cover of ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials. And they bloody did. ‘All the clubs have been closed down’. I think this line still hits hard all these years later and in a dub accent speaks to housing crises, the poverty, the privatization of Ireland.  They also managed to make the track rip through this physical plane of existence and dance in the other world…. only Lankum can do that.”

Lankum released their fourth studio album ‘False Lankum’ in 2023, picking up Mercury Prize and Ivor Novello nominations. Guitarist Daragh Lynch told NME last year that the album’s success had been “very unexpected”, adding: “We spent the last four albums just really dedicating ourselves to what we want to do. We thought the last album was one of the weirdest and most inaccessible that we’ve done so far, but for some reason it’s the one that everyone picked up on. Maybe we just need to get weirder and weirder!”

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