Neville Staple plays Horsham as he celebrates 40 years since Ghost Town

“40 years!” he says. “It feels more like 14 and what is unbelievable is t hat there are still people attracted to the music no matter what their age. I would have been surprised back then. When you're doing an album you don't think ‘well this is going to be a hit!’ You just do it and you just got on with it.”

But with that 40th anniversary it may be an opportunity to reflect how times have changed – and how they haven't.

“40 years ago we had Thatcher and then everything changed and now things are worse. For young people it is definitely worse. You have got 14-year-old boys carrying knives and guns and it's really terrible. It hit home to me when my grandson got killed, four years ago or so. You try to blank that out.

“But in my day I had my dad who said ‘Don't do this and if you do this, this will happen.’ And so we had that figure to live up to, and I suppose I was a father figure to my grandson but not in the same way. You say ‘Don't do this’ and ‘Don't do that’ but they don't listen. I would say ‘Don't hang around there’ or ‘Don't go there’ but he was in that environment and I think that's the big difference between now and then.”

And that’s why Neville released the single Put Away Your Knives – a tribute to his grandson after he was stabbed to death.

The song was a remake of the band’s seminal hit A Message To You Rudy with Neville dedicating it to Fidel and to “everyone else who has been affected by violent crimes.”

“It’s time we take back some control and teach the youth right from wrong and the consequences of their actions,” he said at the time. But there is little sign that we are learning the lessons: “We are seeing what we are seeing and I think it is going to get worse or at least it is not going to get better. You've got 14-year-olds and 15-year-olds and you see them riding around snatching people’s mobile phones and leaning into their cars and nicking stuff. Certainly from that perspective I do think it's getting worse.”

There's a loss of innocence that he laments: “And the music today is just singing about ‘I love my baby.’ People are not singing about what is going on around them. I'm not saying that music should tackle that all the time. All I'm saying is that it is not the same. The government now has got to change what is happening. We used to put down Thatcher but compared to what the government now is like it's completely different. When people put Thatcher down and then you compare it to now you realise that it is even worse.”

But at very least Neville is able to get back to gigging: ”I am not worried about Covid. People are telling us that it is safe to do it and that we can do it.”