Listen to this track by dual-frontman outfit and pop-music-with-a-head-for-wordplay purveyors General Public. It’s “Tenderness”, their biggest hit as taken from the debut record in 1984, All The Rage. The song would make them more of a chart draw in North American showings than in their native UK, with top forty play and heavy video rotation too.

General Public was something of a Two Tone and British second wave ska survivor band, featuring members of The Beat  and The Specials. This new band also included members of Dexy’s Midnight Runners and even, briefly, Mick Jones of the Clash before the record was released. The two primaries would be Ranking Roger and Dave Wakeling who had been the lead vocalists for the aforementioned Beat, a band that had made a lot of headway in North America through college radio before fragmenting by 1983.

This song was the second single from their debut album, with the self-referential “General Public” being the first. And it made a cultural impact in a hurry, being a part of soundtrack albums (Weird Science), and on MTV  that got the song heard by new audiences.

And speaking of audiences, what did the success of this song mean where the cultural landscape in North America was concerned? Read more