Specials frontman Terry Hall’s unique ability to keep moving creatively makes his sudden death all the more upsetting, writes Euan McColm.
When he stepped out of his teens and into pop stardom in 1979, Terry Hall looked like a skinny borstal boy, haunted by the spirit of Tony Hancock.
The suedehead haircut, Sta-Prest trousers, and polished Weejuns loafers said the frontman of The Specials was a street-smart rude boy; a lad with whom you’d better not mess. The hangdog expression with – from a certain angle, and in a certain light – the flicker of a smile, suggested a deadpan sense of humour lurked beneath the surface.
The young Hall had a face waiting to be completed by jowls. At the age of 63, he was getting there, when cancer cut short his life.
Hall’s death last Sunday led to a massive – and entirely justified – outpouring of sorrow. We have lost one of the greatest practitioners of the high art that is popular music.
To have fronted one incredible band would have been quite the achievement, but Hall’s restless talent took him, creatively, further than most of his contemporaries could have dreamt.
Hall’s need to keep moving was overwhelming
While The Specials’s enduring classic Ghost Town sat at the top of charts in the summer of 1981, Hall announced his decision to quit. Fellow band members Lynval Golding and Neville Staple joined him, forming Fun Boy Three, whose avant-garde pop could be playful – that collaboration with Bananarama on a brilliant cover version of It Ain’t What You Do, for example – and shatteringly dark, as in the case of Well Fancy That!, a song about Hall’s childhood experience of sexual abuse.
Again, Hall’s need to keep moving was overwhelming. After just two years, he called time on Fun Boy Three, re-emerging with The Colourfield, whose 1985 hit Thinking of You stands strong as yet another classic in the Hall canon.
In little more than four years, Terry Hall fronted three truly great bands, each radically different from the last, and each hugely influential to this day.
There were to be many more musical highs for Hall, most notably a writing partnership with Ian Broudie that saw him contribute songs to a number of albums by Broudie’s band, The Lightning Seeds.
In recent years, Hall had been back on stage with a reformed and reinvigorated Specials. This was no mere nostalgia trip; the band produced new material and, in 2019, 40 years after the release of their debut single Gangsters, enjoyed their first number one album with Encore.
Early in his career, as a leading figure in the two-tone scene, Hall used his platform to speak out against racism. His commitment to that cause never wavered. Latterly, having begun to deal with the depression that had dogged his adult life, he also became a strong voice in challenging the taboo surrounding mental illness.
Terry Hall was a great artist and a good man. His sudden, premature death is simply heartbreaking.
Euan McColm is a regular columnist for various Scottish newspapers
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