The Beat goes on for ska singer Dave Wakeling

He's been resident in California for 40 years since the original line-up of the Two Tone group split up but still retains a strong Birmingham accent and a dry English wit.

His decision to settle in the States, he says, was partly motivated by the fact that he had found an audience there but also the fine weather. "Sometimes it wasn't much deeper than that," he deadpans. "I felt happy in California. When you opened the windows and blinds the sun was shining – for no apparent reason, just shining – and it made me go, ‘ooh, a little stroke of optimism’. I like rain, it can be poignant, it can be great for walking and writing lyrics – which I suppose is why there's been such beautiful poetry out of Yorkshire over the years – but the sunshine is nice in the mornings.

"Also, The Beat were just starting to become popular in America as we split up, whereas in England we were already starting to decline. The New Romantics had kind of taken over and utilitarian songs about unemployment marches were not fitting the bill. We were like ‘support the miners’ (and others were going ‘Yes, but can we pretend we’re on a yacht with some supermodels first?’"

This year is the 45th anniversary of The Beat's formation in Birmingham. Wakeling recalls that he and guitarist Andy Cox had begun writing songs in spring 1977 while they were working in the Isle of Wight fitting solar panels and living "a very rural, agrarian life" in Blackgang Chine. He says: "There wasn't much to do but there was songwriting in front of open fires downstairs and we started practising songs I’d started – Save It For Later, Best Friend and End of the Party. End of the Party is about that particular location – the ‘gold on the hill’ was the gorse bushes that sort of smelt of coconuts."

Looking to expand the band, they placed an advert in the local paper saying "Bass player required – shake some action?", to which David Steele was the only respondent. Cox was pleased to notice that Steele, who had a bright green neon sweater on and curly hair, "looked a bit like Joe Strummer", and from their first practices they knew they were "on to something". "He’d just been in a punk band that had two bass players and one drummer and that was it. He played the high melody bass, Tina Weymouth-style, and the other bass player did the Busta Cherry Jones parts."

At Steele's behest, they moved back to Birmingham where they found a drummer, Everett Morton. Their earliest gigs were at "Christmas parties in factories, sometimes student-y shows, sometimes reggae clubs – where thank heavens there were some reggae songs in the set or else we’d have died – and some punk shows where faster songs were immediately accepted and the reggae songs were more accepted than you might have thought because there had been punk shows with a reggae band or two on to give everybody a breather between the frantic thrashing.

"The Punky Reggae Party had started to become a thing in London and in Birmingham. Andy's idea was to get both elements of it into one three-minute pop song."

The Beat's first single, a cover of Smokey Robinson's Tears of a Clown, came out on the Two Tone label. Wakeling says his band felt a "reluctant" kinship with labelmates The Specials and The Selecter, from nearby Coventry.

He recalls: "David Steele walked into Andy's place with a Melody Maker opend up at some certain pages and very dramatically threw it on the floor and said, ‘It's too late , somebody else has already done it!’ And we looked and said, ‘And they’re from Coventry’, which kind of rubbed salt in the wound.

"We were despondent, thinking they’re way ahead in the game here, we’re never going to catch up. We did talk about it seriously, now somebody else has had the idea, should we just pack it in? But we thought we might as well carry on, they might be a flash in the pan, so we decided on balance we might as well give it a go – not knowing that we’d meet up with Jerry Dammers not so long later. Less than a year afterwards, he came to our show, a Tuesday night residency at a pub called The Mercat Cross built onto the side of the new Birmingham meat market...(that had) started off with about ten people, then 20 and after a few weeks it was packed. Luckily after about eight weeks, by the time Jerry Dammers arrived, there was a line of people outside trying to get in.

"But we were surprised (that Tears of a Clown ended up as their debut single on Two Tone) because Mirror in the Bathroom was the song that everybody mentioned after seeing us live. It stood out. Like Twist and Crawl it had got a two-two signature, not four-four, which gave it a kind of dull insistence. It's in regular timing but it just makes it sound different, there's twice as many emphases in the bar. We’d all that was going to be the single, but then we were disappointed to find that Chrysalis was going to own that song forever and we couldn't own it on any records of ours for at least five years until we asked and then they might (let us have it).

"We thought we don't want that because we agree that's probably our best one at the moment, so we want that one on our album. I think it was a sort of pressure, if it was a hit you’d have to sign an album deal with Chrysalis if you wanted your own song on your own record. So we baulked at it, and we insisted on Tears of a Clown instead. Then I said, ‘You can argue with Smokey Robinson about whose song it is’.

"But we did end up with trouble and we’re still going through it now. We’re just finishing a re-licence of The Beat catalogue of all the songs and videos, and we’re just having to grapple now with a clause where this new record company is going to have to licence Tears of a Clown and Ranking Full Stop from Chrysalis should you want it in a greatest hits package, which is why it didn't show up on the first Beat album. That was the cost of being on Two Tone, was that Tears of a Clown and Ranking Full Stop weren't on the first record."

The bEAT and Annabella Lwin's Bow Wow Wow play at Leeds Beckett University on Friday June 2. http://englishbeat.net/