#26: Tenderness by General Public
City: Regina, SK
Radio Station: CJME
Peak Month: January-February 1985
Peak Position in Regina ~ #3
Peak Position in Vancouver ~ #14
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #27
YouTube: “Tenderness”
Lyrics: “Tenderness”
General Public was a new wave band formed in 1983 in Birmingham, UK. It was co-founded by Dave Wakeling and Ranking Roger. Wakeling was born in Birmingham in 1956. He learned how to play guitar and formed a second-wave ska band in Birmingham in 1978 called The Beat. They successfully covered Smokey Robinson & The Miracles 1970 hit “Tears of A Clown” which reached #6 on the UK singles chart in 1979. In 1980, “Hands Off…She’s Mine” topped the pop chart in Ireland. This was followed by “Mirror In the Bathroom” which was a Top Ten hit in both Ireland and the UK. In 1983, The Beat covered Andy Williams 1963 hit “Can’t Get Used To Losing You”. It became a Top Ten hit in Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands and the UK.
Fellow bandmate in The Beat, Ranking Roger, was born Roger Charlery in 1963 in Birmingham. In the late 70s he was a DJ at reggae clubs, and was a drummer with the Dum Dum Boys in 1978. The Beat disbanded in 1983.
When Wakeling and Roger formed General Public in 1983, they added keyboardist Mickey Billingham from Dexys Midnight Runners. Guitarist Mick Jones from The Clash, who was born in 1955 in greater London, had been expelled from his band. He was recruited to join General Public. Jones only stayed through part of the recording process on General Public’s first album before he left. However, he was in the recording studio for “Tenderness”. Bass guitarist Horace Panter, formerly with The Specials, was born in Croydon in suburban London in 1953. He also joined General Public early on. Andy “Stoker” Growcott, from Dexys Midnight Runners, was on drums.
In January 1984, General Public released their debut album All the Rage. Their debut single was “General Public”. It was a minor hit in New Zealand and the UK. A second single release from the album, “Dishwasher”, was a minor hit in the Netherlands. A third single, “Tenderness”, was their most commercially successful single in the 1980s.
“Tenderness” was written by the bandmates in General Public. Dave Wakeling spoke to Songfacts.com about the song. He said, “I used to like traveling with the trucks that carried the gear. I’d always been a big fan of that TV show Cannonball when I was a kid, and thought that the idea of American trucks was very romantic. So when we came on tour, I used to love to drive overnight with the truck drivers and talk rubbish on the CB in there. And so it was as if the trucks were driving in what’s called ‘the endless gray river.’ And the notion was that you were driving around in there in America searching for the tenderness, whereas, of course, it’s in your heart all the time. So it’s like you’re looking in the outside world for something that can only be discovered in yourself, because love is a verb, not a noun. That was the notion of it.”
Wakeling notes the third verse starts with the phrase “Whistling in the graveyard.” He says “It was a phrase of my father’s when I would disagree with him and try to stand up to him as I was growing old. He’d be like, ‘You’re just whistling in the graveyard.’ So it was like he was accusing me of a false sense of courage, like I was trying to act more bravely. I think the phrase was actually whistling past the graveyard. He said it to me as, ‘Oh, you’re just whistling in the graveyard.’ I actually stick quite a lot of my dad’s little phrases and witticisms in songs. And I suppose in Birmingham they had a sort of colloquial history that most people’s dads would have said to them. But it was trying to build up a false sense of courage and call up your girlfriend, knowing whatever it was that she was going to catch you at because you weren’t telling the truth.”
Wakeling also told Songfacts, “There was a darker side to the song, because it came out in that period of AIDS, fear of AIDS. Nobody really knew much about it, and everybody was all of a sudden terrified to touch a door handle. Being a terrific hypochondriac, and everybody was always having colds on the road on tour, it’s like any time anybody sneezed, I was like, could that be AIDS? So it was to do with that, but in sort of non-obvious way.”
“Tenderness” peaked at #1 in Annapolis (MD), #3 in Regina (SK), #5 in Boston, #7 in San Diego, #8 in Ottawa, and Burnaby (BC), #9 in Hamilton (ON), and Sherbrooke (PQ), #10 in Toronto, #11 in Montreal, and San Jose (CA), and #13 in Sydney (NS), Philadelphia, and San Francisco.
Internationally, “Tenderness” reached #11 in Canada, #27 on the Billboard Hot 100, and #50 in Australia.
“Tenderness” appeared in the soundtracks to the films Sixteen Candles (1984) and Weird Science (1985). It later was featured in the 1995 movie Clueless, and in the horror film Devil’s Due (2014).
In 1986 General Public’s song, “Taking the Day Off”, was featured in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. However, the second album, Hand to Mouth, was commercially disappointing. Consequently, the band split in 1987.
In 1994, General Public reformed and released Rub It Better. The single “I’ll Take You There”, a cover of the Staples Singers number-one hit in 1972, became a Top Ten hit in Canada and New Zealand. It climbed to #22 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Sales were less than earlier albums, however, and Roger became tired of traveling to America, and they soon broke up again.
Since 2004, Dave Wakeling has toured the US with a full backing band as the English Beat. They often perform General Public tracks.
Mickey Billingham went on the play in a ref0rmed iteration of The Beat with Ranking Roger and Everett Morton. In addition, he began to teach singing and performance techniques at Dudley College in Dudley in the West Midlands. The city is about 13KM from Wolverhampton and equal distance from Birmingham.
Stoker Growcott transitioned into a career as an audio engineer, working on various albums.
Horace Panter went on to co-found a Blues band called Box of Blues. He is a full-time member of the reformed Specials and is also in a blues combo, called ‘Blues 2 Go’. He has also played with Malik & Pettite (formerly The Tones), and is in the process of getting together a ska orchestra called ‘The Uptown Ska Collective’ who began touring in 2014. Panter has been playing with The Dirt Road Band since 2022.
During the 1990s, Panter qualified as a teacher and taught art to special needs children at Corley Special School in North Warwickshire from 1998 to 2008. As well, Panter has wrote his autobiography, Ska’d for Life. In it he describes his involvement in the creation of the punk-ska hybrid that became known as ‘2-Tone, and described his experiences since the band’s creation.
“Ranking” Roger Charlery died at his home in Birmingham on 26 March 2019 at the age of 56.
January 30, 2026
Ray McGinnis
References:
Chris Arnot, “School reunion: Mr Panter, art teacher, is once again to take to the stage as Horace Gentleman, bassist with the Specials,” Guardian, February 3, 2009.
“Bio: Dave Wakeling,” davewakeling.com, September 15, 2010.
Peter Mason, “Ranking Roger: Obituary,” Guardian, March 27, 2019.
Top 30 CJME 1300-AM Regina (SK) February 2, 1985
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