Ranking Roger, a vocalist for the popular British ska band the Beat, performing.Yad Jaura/Handout
Ranking Roger, a vocalist for the popular British ska band the Beat in the late 1970s and early ‘80s who carried on that group’s infectious sound in subsequent bands and solo projects, died Tuesday in Birmingham, England. He was 56.
An announcement on his current group’s website said he had received a cancer diagnosis last year.
Ranking Roger, whose real name was Roger Charlery, was one of two front men for the Beat, along with Dave Wakeling. The group, which was known as the English Beat in the United States to avoid confusion with a California power-pop band of the same name, had a brief but influential run after its founding in 1978, expanding on the ska sound, a lively precursor to reggae that had first migrated to England from Jamaica in the 1960s.
“Ska is their base,” The Boston Globe wrote of the Beat in 1981, “but it’s infused with satisfying pressure-cooker-like tension and cut with reggae, pop and soul elements.” Neil Strauss, looking back on the group’s heyday in a 1995 article in The New York Times, described the Beat’s sound as “Jamaican ska informed by punk rock.”
Mr. Charlery, who was black, and Mr. Wakeling, who is white, complemented each other: Mr. Wakeling was a more traditional vocalist, while Mr. Charlery “toasted,” the Jamaican version of rapping.
The Beat’s best-known songs include a jaunty 1979 cover of The Tears of a Clown, which had been a hit for Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and Mirror in the Bathroom, their biggest hit, which reached No. 4 in Britain in 1980.
Some of the Beat’s songs had a political edge, notably Stand Down Margaret, a critique of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Party policies. “I said I see no joy, I see only sorrow,” the two vocalists sang. “I see no chance of your bright new tomorrow. So stand down Margaret.”
But in a 1988 interview with The Boston Globe (Ms. Thatcher was still prime minister, and would remain in office until 1990), Mr. Charlery expressed some disillusionment about the power of music.
“I sang ‘Stand Down Margaret’ for five years and no one listened,” he said. “She got in, and she got in again, and she’ll probably get in again. It goes to show how blind people are. Basically, I don’t think people ever listen.”
After the Beat broke up in 1983, Mr. Charlery and Mr. Wakeling formed a new group, General Public. It broke up three years later, but the two men got back together for some shows in 1995.
“Goodbye, Rog,” Mr. Wakeling posted on Facebook. “Thanks for all the fabulous years and wonderful memories.”
Mr. Charlery was born on Feb. 21, 1963, in Birmingham to Jean Baptiste and Anne Marie Charlery, who were from St. Lucia in the Caribbean. He grew up in Birmingham and nearby Stechford and attended Tile Cross Academy.
“My parents expected me to go into a factory,” he told the Birmingham Mail in 2016, when he released a new album, Bounce, as the Beat Featuring Ranking Roger. “I didn’t see that. I wanted to be a mechanic or a carpenter if anything.”
His parents were destined to be disappointed.
“Mum, Anne Marie, cried when I was on ‘Top of the Pops,’ ” he said, referring to the British television show, “and I knew I had done something right.”
The Beat was born in part out of frustration with the conservative turn in England’s politics.
“To the English Beat,” Robert Palmer wrote in reviewing the group’s second album, Wha’ppen?, in the Times, “unemployment, ecology and the anti-nuclear movement are not separate issues; they are interrelated.”
“Anyone who would like to understand more about the attitudes underlying Britain’s inner-city rioting,” he added, “would do well to start here.”
Mr. Charlery leaves his partner, Pauline, and five children.
In later years, Mr. Charlery recorded and performed on his own and with variously named groups, among them Special Beat. (Mr. Wakeling had his own Beat-related group.) His most recent album, Public Confidential, again as the Beat Featuring Ranking Roger, was released this year.
Another incarnation, in 2007, was the New English Beat, which included Ranking Junior, his son. In an interview with the Bristol Post of England that year, Mr. Charlery spoke of why he thought his music seemed to have a cross-generational, cross-racial appeal.
“When the Beat were originally going ‘round,” he said, “our audiences were so mixed – black, white and Indian, young people and older heads. It was brilliant, and I think we have kind of achieved that today. It is a bit different, obviously, but it is a very friendly crowd and everyone walks out sweating and happy, and I tell myself that’s the most I could ask for.”