Scotsman Obituaries: Terry Hall, lead singer and songwriter with The Specials

Terry Hall, singer and songwriter. Born: 19 March, 1959 in Coventry. Died: 18 December 2022, aged 63

With his sharp suits, harsh buzzcut, brooding brow and hard stare, Terry Hall was one cool customer. The beloved frontman of The Specials and Fun Boy Three has died aged 63, another leading light of the punk era gone but fondly remembered by his bandmates as “one of the kindest, funniest, and most genuine of souls”.

The Specials were the leading lights of Two Tone, a UK-centred ska revival which emerged from punk’s enthusiastic embrace of Jamaican reggae. The punky reggae party centred on West London but Two Tone was birthed in Coventry, appearing first as a record label named for the racial mix of its founders before spawning a nationwide youth movement.

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Debut album The Specials and follow-up More Specials chimed with many young men and women leaving school with grim prospects in Thatcher’s Britain. Hall was barely out of his teens yet possessed the angry young man authority to deliver the politicised lyrics of band founder Jerry Dammers.

Terry Hall of The Specials performs at the Glastonbury Festival in 2009 (Picture: Jim Dyson/Getty Images)Terry Hall of The Specials performs at the Glastonbury Festival in 2009 (Picture: Jim Dyson/Getty Images)
Terry Hall of The Specials performs at the Glastonbury Festival in 2009 (Picture: Jim Dyson/Getty Images)

Dammers paid tribute to Hall, saying “beyond our punky start on stage, it was in the studio with Elvis Costello producing, where Terry was able to sing quietly, that I think his hidden strength came out, a delivery which brought out the melancholy in some of The Specials’ songs, and which I think a lot of people could relate to.”

The Specials put their idiosyncratic stamp on cult Jamaican ska numbers Al Capone and Birth Control – which they repurposed as Gangsters and Too Much Too Young – and added their own classics to the canon. The immortal Ghost Town often tussles with The Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen for the title of greatest UK Number One single of all time. This eerie requiem for Britain’s inner cities was said to have been inspired by a drive around a forlorn, post-industrial Glasgow, while the line “too much fighting on the dancefloor” has been claimed for a raucous gig at legendary Glasgow venue Tiffany’s.

As a multi-racial band backing the Rock Against Racism movement, The Specials were perpetually countering the racist skinhead element who gatecrashed their shows. But it later emerged that Hall was fighting his own mental health demons as a result of childhood abuse. At the age of 12 he was abducted by a teacher and delivered to a paedophile ring in France. While he did not talk about it publicly for decades, the Fun Boy Three’s Well Fancy That! is a candid account of this traumatic episode: “The hedge that you dragged me through led to a nervous breakdown.” Following a suicide attempt in 2004, Hall was diagnosed as bipolar.

The charismatic scowling frontman revealed a softer artistic side in subsequent bands The Colourfield, Terry, Blair & Anouchka, and Vegas before The Specials reunion kept him busy from 2008 onwards.

He was born Terence Edward Hall in Coventry, where both his parents worked in local car factories. Hall was academically gifted and a talented footballer. He was invited to try out for West Bromwich Albion and offered a place at grammar school, but both opportunities were turned down by his parents, who remained in the dark following his abuse. Hall was prescribed valium and stopped attending school. “That’s when I started not listening to anyone,” he told Richard Herring’s podcast in 2019.

Leaving school in his mid-teens, he tried bricklaying and hairdressing while immersing himself in Coventry’s gig scene. He joined punk band The Squad before replacing the original frontman of The Automatics. Renamed The Specials, they were invited to tour with The Clash. With support from DJ John Peel, they scored an instant hit with debut single Gangsters.

Along with The Selecter, The Beat and the poppier Madness, they turned the charts two-tone for the next two years before splintering at the peak of their success. Dammers reconstituted the band as The Special AKA while Hall formed the Fun Boy Three with his bandmates Neville Staple and Lynval Golding, delivering the first of many musical left turns with their quirky 1981 debut single The Lunatics (Have Taken Over the Asylum). The following year they partnered with a new all-girl trio called Bananarama, covering the jazz tune It Ain’t What You Do (It’s The Way That You Do It) and The Velvelettes’ Really Saying Something, and returned to the top ten in 1983 with pop classic Our Lips Are Sealed, co-written by Hall and Go-Go’s guitarist Jane Wiedlin about their brief tour romance.

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Hall then formed two more trios, pastoral pop outfit The Colourfield and the more manicured Terry, Blair and Anouchka, before collaborating with Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart as Vegas, covering Charles Aznavour’s She. Further solo efforts failed to trouble the charts but Hall forged happy partnerships with the likes of Iain Broudie of The Lightning Seeds and Blur frontman Damon Albarn, and released the acclaimed world music mash-up, The Hour of Two Lights, with rapper Mushtaq in 2003.

To the delight of middle-aged Two Tone disciples across the land, The Specials reformed (without Dammers) in 2008, and embarked on a joyous decade of touring before topping the charts once more with a new album, Encore, released in January 2019. In 2021 they released the trenchant covers collection Protest Songs 1924-2012 and were reportedly preparing to record a new album in LA in November when Hall was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

His bandmate Horace Painter said: “The world has lost a unique voice, and I have lost a good friend.” Hall is survived by his second wife Lindy Heymann and three sons, Theo, Felix and Orson. Apparently his last words to his family were “love, love, love” – his traditional sign-off at Specials concerts.

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