The Beat were just one of a number of ska bands who formed a broad anti-racism movement in Britain in the early 1980s. Highly successful at first, their reputation was gradually eclipsed by their more family-friendly rivals Madness. This compilation, however, shows that they wrote plenty of great pop songs themselves, and venomous singalongs such as Twist and Crawl and the over-optimistic Stand Down Margaret have stood the test of time pretty well. This is an entertaining retrospective which shows that music and politics can mix - as long as there's some humour there to sweeten the pill. Just one complaint: at twelve tracks it's not nearly long enough.
