Old music: The Equals – Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys

A year after Blue Mink had released their paean to the positive power of interracial relationships with Melting Pot , the Equals offered their own searing take on the subject. The group tackled race head on in their name, their composition (three black members, two white) and in this song. A racially mixed lineup was far from common at the time and even a decade later it was still seen as one of the most remarkable characteristics of 2-Tone groups such as the Specials, the Selecter and the Beat. The Equals were formed on a council estate in Hornsey, north London and comprised a pair of brothers of Jamaican ancestry (Derv and Lincoln Gordon), two white Londoners (Pat Lloyd and John Hall) and a Guyanese guitarist, Eddy Grant, who later won solo fame . It was Grant who wrote Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys, the last of a string of hits that had begun with the million-selling Baby Come Back , but the cheerful, Caribbean-tinged pop of their earlier singles offered little hint of this driving, uncompromising number (although another Grant-penned Equals song, Police on My Back , was later covered by the Clash ). The song explicitly linked its racial theme with the anti-Vietnam war sentiment of the time ("Black skin blue eyed boys/ Ain't gonna fight no wars") and spent 11 weeks in the charts in 1970 and 1971, reaching No 9. While Blue Mink had dreamed of "coffee-coloured people by the score" the Equals proclaimed "the world will be half-breed!" – and defied you not to dance to it.