Terry Hall, lead singer of The Specials and former member of Fun Boy Three and the Colourfield, has died aged 63, his Specials bandmates have confirmed.
“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing, after a short illness, of Terry, our beautiful friend, brother and one of the most brilliant singers, songwriters and lyricists this country has ever produced,” the band tweeted.
“Terry was a wonderful husband and father and one of the kindest, funniest, most genuine souls. His music and performances encapsulated the very essence of life…the joy, the pain, the humor, the fight for justice, but above all love.
“He will be sorely missed by all who knew and loved him and leaves behind the gift of his remarkable music and deep humanity. Terry often left the stage at the end of The Specials’ life-affirming shows in three words… “Love Love Love”.
The band asked for respect for Hall’s family’s privacy.
Hall joined the first incarnation of the Specials, then called the Automatics, shortly after the Coventry band formed in 1977, replacing vocalist Tim Strickland. After a spell as Coventry Automatics, they became Special AKA, known as the Specials. The pioneering 2 Tone band grew with the support of Joe Strummer, who invited them to support the Clash live, and BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel.
They released their debut single, Gangsters (an Al Capone reworking of Prince Buster) in 1979, which reached No. 6 in the UK Singles Chart. They would dominate the Top 10 for the next two years, peaking with their second No. 1 single and calling card, Ghost Town, in 1981. The lyrics, written by the band’s main songwriter Jerry Dammers, were about decadence British urban, unemployment. and disenfranchised youth.
Its popularity peaked in the early summer of 1981 when riots broke out between black youths and the police across the UK in response to racist discrimination and the use of stop-and-frisk tactics. It remained at No. 1 for three weeks, spending 10 weeks in the Top 40, and is widely considered one of the greatest pop albums of all time. “It stands in the past, brooding and watching us, its extraordinary, dark power unquenched,” Guardian critic Alexis Petridis wrote in 2020.
The Specials: Ghost Town – video
Hall was born in Coventry on 19 March 1959 into a family that worked mainly in the car industry. He was an academically gifted boy as well as an outstanding footballer who was invited to try out for West Bromwich Albion, an opportunity his parents turned down due to the inconvenience of traveling across the Midlands. After passing the 11-year-old exam, his parents also declined his place at a nearby grammar school.
“Suddenly they were expected to understand books and a school uniform,” he told Fantastic Man. “I just walked to school dressed in my football team. So there’s always been a bit of that in the back of my mind. Not being polite. I wonder what would have happened if I had gone” .
In 2019, Hall told comedian Richard Herring that at the age of 12 he was kidnapped by a pedophile ring in France, an incident he had previously touched on in Fun Boy Three’s 1983 single Well Fancy That!, which he blamed on a test teacher: “You took me to France with the promise of teaching me French”, he sang.
Hall “kept it under wraps” and didn’t tell her parents. “They both worked in factories. They paid them in cash. My father was a heavy drinker. They had their own life, you know?
This led to Hall being medicated during his teenage years and living with depression and manic depression. “I was on Valium when I was 13 and it took my life away for six months,” she told the Big Issue.
He dropped out of school at the age of 14 and felt pushed towards non-conformism. “I can laugh about it now, but it changed something in my head, and it’s like I don’t have to do it, and that’s when I started not listening to anybody.”
Pioneer… The special ones. Photograph: John Rodgers/Redferns
His political awakening came in his teens “when I discovered that workers’ clubs had a colored bar on their doors. You could only enter if you were white. This shocked me a lot. I couldn’t solve it.”
After working as a mason, among other jobs, he joined his first band, the punk group Squad, inspired by the Clash and the Sex Pistols. “I realized it didn’t look that hard,” Hall said. “They didn’t seem to be able to play very well either, so the thing was to form a band and then work on it. This is what we did.”
His older sister and guiding influence Teresa introduced him to Trojan Records, while it was David Bowie’s 1975 album Young Americans that pushed Hall to become a singer, he told the Guardian in 2009 . “I come from a gypsy-spirited family and everyone was singing in the pubs, whether you liked it or not. I didn’t want to be that kind of singer. Then, when I was 16, this album gave me a look, a sound and a way to support himself. Apparently all his clothes were from WalMart at this point. He put a blonde streak in his hair and we’d do the same.”
Then came the specials. The band released their self-titled debut album in October 1979 and received massive praise for combining a punk sensibility – and sharp lyrics about the degradation of modern Britain – with the traditional Jamaican ska sound, even explicitly updating hits the likes of Toots and the Maytals, Prince Buster and Dandy Livingstone.
Tony Stewart of NME wrote that the album “embraces two decades of black-and-white music, gives it perspective and then reflects modern rock’n’roll culture… It’s the kind of album that’s musically unfathomable and will likely establish the Specials”. as genuine hopes for the ’80s. At the very least, this debut is essential for anyone who wants to know what’s going on in rock’n’roll today.”
Today, the album is widely considered a landmark recording: it was ranked number 42 on Pitchfork’s list of the greatest albums of the 1970s, and number 260 on NME’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, released in 2013. The band released an even darker second album, More Specials, in 1980.
The multiracial group was active in the Rock Against Racism movement, held benefit concerts for anti-racist and anti-nuclear organizations, and also supported the 1978 Right to Work march to protest unemployment. “The leaders of our government are not interested in knowing how people feel,” Hall told the New York Times. “If they were, they would just resign, because they are not helping anyone. Children cannot go to the Prime Minister and say, “We are unemployed, what are you going to do to help us?” There is no way they can approach people like that. So they express themselves by breaking things”.
After the success of Ghost Town in 1981, the band acrimoniously broke up that July. “It felt like the perfect time to stop the first part of the specials,” Hall said. “We had gone from seven kids in the back of a van to being presented with gold records and I was never too comfortable with that.
Chart hit… Fun Boy Three in 1983. Photo: Steve Rapport/Getty Images
Hall formed Fun Boy Three with Specials bandmates Lynval Golding and Neville Staple. They also enjoyed chart success for several years, collaborating twice with girl band Bananarama, on It Ain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It) and Really Saying Something. Hall would also score a Top 10 single with Our Lips Are Sealed, a song he wrote with the American indie star, and later with his romantic partner, Jane Wiedlin for his band, The Go-Go’s.
Hall would form another band, The Colourfield, in 1984, which had a hit with Thinking of You. He became a frequent collaborator over the following decades, working with Ian Broudie of the Lightning Seeds, American actress Blair Booth, Toots and the Maytals, Lily Allen, Damon Albarn of Blur – and later with his band Gorillaz- and Dave Stewart of Eurythmics. with whom he formed a duo known as Vegas in 1992.
Hall was not part of a Specials reunion, the Specials Mk 2, which lasted from 1993 to 1998. He released his debut solo album in 1994, Home, produced by Broudie; a follow-up, Laugh, came in 1997.
In 2008, inspired by the Pixies’ 2004 reunion, Hall announced that he would reform the Specials for a tour and new music, albeit without founding member Jerry Dammers, who he claimed had been forced out. “The Specials was this big hole that took up four years of my life,” Hall told the Telegraph. “More than anything, I really wanted to see these people again.”
They embarked on a 30th anniversary tour in 2009 and performed at the closing concert of the 2012 London Olympics, but faced the death of drummer John Bradbury and the departure of vocalist Neville Staple and guitarist Roddy Radiation during the next few years.
The gang would find themselves in the news again in 2017, when Saffiyah Khan, an 18-year-old from Birmingham, was photographed confronting protesters at an EDL march while wearing a Specials shirt. “It felt like a vindication of everything the band had set out to do,” Hall said.
In 2019, they released a new album, Encore, which featured Khan performing a new song, 10 Commandments. It went to number 1 on the UK Albums Chart, his highest album position. “Having a first No. 1 album in our 60s restored our faith in humanity,” Hall told the Quietus.
Hall struggled to write lyrics for a follow-up, he said. “The arrival of the pandemic affected me enormously. I spent about three months trying to figure out what was going on. I couldn’t write a single word. I spent my time trying to figure out how not to die.” Instead, they covered historical protest songs and released Protest Songs 1924-2012 in 2021, which peaked at #2.
Hall was still struggling with his mental health, he admitted around that…