Gangsters / The SelecterThe Special A.K.A. vs The Selecter

Every label has a number one, but few wear it as plainly as 2 Tone. TT1 is Gangsters: the first record on an imprint that Jerry Dammers founded in 1979 and ran from the front room of his flat at 51 Albany Road, in Earlsdon, Coventry. Not an office, not a headquarters: a room. One of the most recognisable record labels of the twentieth century started there.

Gangsters was recorded that January in Studio One at Horizon Studios in Coventry, for about £700 if the story is to be believed. With that money the band, still billed on the record as The Special A.K.A., could only cut one side. The second came from a tape that already existed: drummer John Bradbury suggested a demo that he, Neol Davies and Barry Jones had recorded in 1977, The Kingston Affair. Renamed The Selecter, it carried its own catalogue number, TT2, which was common on ska and reggae singles of the time. The single came out on 4 May 1979 as a double A-side: TT1 and TT2. Where those singles came from, and how Jamaica reached Coventry, is the subject of the deep cut From Rocksteady to 2 Tone.

This is where the single stops being just a single. The flip side went on to have a career of its own: Davies formed a band around the name, with Pauline Black as singer, and The Selecter had On My Radio out on the label that October and the album Too Much Pressure in February 1980, both recorded at Horizon, in the same studio, in the same city. A record made to fill a gap ended up giving a second band its name and its start.

Heard today, Gangsters keeps the tension of something made quickly and cheaply: the offbeat rhythm, the edgy vocal, a production that hides nothing. The Selecter, an instrumental, is the other half of the argument: leaner, darker, a demo that stands on its own. Together, the two sides already read like a label's manifesto.

Then there is the object, and for a collector that is the part that matters most. The first 5,000 copies went out through Rough Trade in plain white sleeves that the band stamped by hand. When Chrysalis took the label on, the sleeve became the die-cut one with the mascot printed on it: Walt Jabsco, whom Dammers drew from a photograph of Peter Tosh on the cover of The Wailing Wailers, taking the name from an American bowling shirt. Early copies carry Walt on a chequerboard paper label; later ones moved to a silver plastic label. That change is the first thing a 2 Tone collector learns to read.

At the Coventry Music Museum, in the 2 Tone room, there is also a Gangsters sleeve printed with the titles reversed, which the museum describes as unique. Horizon Studios no longer exists: according to the museum, its site is where the bollards now stand at the entrance to the Central Six retail park, opposite where the Rocket pub stood.

It is not the label's best-known record; that remains Ghost Town. But it is the one where everything begins, and the right copy, in the stamped sleeve, is the hardest to recognise. That is exactly why it is the grail.