Remembering Ranking Roger

Ranking Roger would have been 63 this weekend.

Roger Charlson was born in Birmingham on Feb. 21, 1963, and was still a teenager when his band — the Beat, or the English Beat, as we knew them in North America — started clocking out ska-inspired hits. Ranking Roger, whose parents were from Saint Lucia, was the toaster along singer Dave Wakeling, and was the focal point even when he wasn’t on mic.

Here’s Roger leading the Beat at the US festival in California in 1983, with Ranking Full Stop:

The Beat were ambitious in just three albums, which came along quickly: ska, reggae, new wave, guitar pop, a bit of calypso and Roger’s own taste for reggae. I still regularly play songs like Mirror in the Bathroom, Too Nice to Talk To, Stand Down Margaret and I Confess, among others.

They flamed out too soon; Wakeling and Ranking Roger quickly formed General Public, which made a couple of albums before packing up (apart from reuniting to record a cover of I’ll Take You There in the mid-Nineties for the movie Threesome).

General Public might have been a bit of a supergroup. Mick Jones from the Clash had joined; his guitar work is all over their hit Tenderness, but he’s nowhere to be seen, as he left the project before it was even finished.

[The other band to come out of the Beat’s ashes had more success. Guitarist Andy Cox and bassist David Steele teamed up with singer Roland Gift to form Fine Young Cannibals.]

Roger would go on to lead a reformed Beat in more recent years.

Ranking Roger was battling lung cancer and was found to have had two brain tumours weeks before he died, at 56, in 2019.

There’s some disagreement online about his date of birth. I’ll go with the Beat themselves, who are led these by his son, Ranking Jr.; in a post last year, the band wrote:

Despite what Wikipedia may say… today is actually Rogers birthday. Happy Heavenly Birthday Radical ❤️

I made the gif at the top by snipping together a few scenes from the Beat’s video for one of their most popular hits, Save It For Later.

The image of a gloved Roger banging a tambourine in a club of pseudo-intellectuals never, ever gets old. Here’s the full song.