Terry Hall

The band tweeted that Terry often left the stage at the end of their life-affirming shows with three words… 'Love Love Love'

Hall would form another band, the Colourfield, in 1984, which had a hit with Thinking of You. “Achieving a first No 1 album in our 60s restored our faith in humanity,” Hall told the Quietus. “It felt like the perfect moment to stop the Specials part one,” Hall said. He dropped out of education at the age of 14 and felt pushed towards non-conformism. “They didn’t seem like they could play very well either, so the thing was to form a band then work it out. Hall was born in Coventry on 19 March 1959 to a family who predominantly worked in the car industry. It remained at No 1 for three weeks, spending 10 weeks in the Top 40, and is widely considered one of the greatest pop records of all time. “Terry was a wonderful husband and father and one of the kindest, funniest, and most genuine of souls. They released their debut single, Gangsters (a reworking of Prince Buster’s Al Capone) in 1979, which reached No 6 in the UK singles chart. After a stint as the Coventry Automatics, they became Special AKA, known as the Specials. “He will be deeply missed by all who knew and loved him and leaves behind the gift of his remarkable music and profound humanity. Terry often left the stage at the end of The Specials’ life-affirming shows with three words…

As the pioneering 2 Tone band's lead singer, Hall's impassive style made him a star – and helped him weather the vicissitudes of fame, the changing charts ...

If no one was going to rank 2019’s [Encore](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jan/31/the-specials-encore-review-a-chequered-mix) or 2021’s [Protest Songs](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/sep/26/the-specials-protest-songs-1924-2012-review-genre-hopping-calls-to-action) over Specials and More Specials, they were far better than a naysayer might have suggested a Specials album would be without the input of Dammers, who after all had been the band’s architect, chief songwriter and de facto leader in their heyday. Perhaps they kept going in order to prove that, contrary to popular wisdom, the Specials had been more than a one-man show, or to underline that the Specials’ left-wing, anti-racist message was as relevant in the 21st century as it had been in the late 70s and early 80s: Encore featured both a song called BLM and an appearance by Saffiyah Khan, a young woman who’d been photographed facing down EDL protestors while wearing a Specials T-shirt. From the start, it was dogged by the same fractiousness that plagued their initial incarnation – depending on which version of events you believe, Jerry Dammers was either fired or left after a couple of rehearsals – but it was a huge commercial success: the first set of gigs sold 45,000 tickets in an hour. [2015 death of drummer John Bradbury](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/dec/29/john-bradbury-of-the-specials-dies-ages-62), it reduced the band to a core of Hall, Golding and bass player Horace Panter. Just as the global influence of the Specials became readily apparent, thanks to a wave of American ska-punk bands, Hall had never seemed further from the music they were inspired by. Similarly, there were few takers for Vegas, the electronic duo he formed with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, or indeed for Hall’s 90s solo albums Home and Laugh, despite the strength of their songs – listen to Hall’s version of the Lightning Seeds’ Sense, which he co-wrote with Ian Broudie, or the glorious chiming guitars of Sonny and His Sister. Hall later said that he spent the remainder of the 80s “distancing myself from [the Specials] as much as I could”, and there was certainly a sense of repudiating his past about the next band he formed, the Colourfield, whose debut album Virgins and Philistines dealt almost exclusively in music that would have been verboten under punk and post-punk’s scorched-earth rules, such as gentle acoustic folk-rock and Latin-infused easy listening. He announced his departure from the band backstage at Top of the Pops, where they were due to perform Ghost Town, an eerie and eerily prescient depiction of urban decay that reached No 1 the day after cities across Britain erupted in rioting. “You couldn’t get any space, not even for an hour or two, because wherever you went there were these lads who’d travelled 9,000 miles to see you live and didn’t have anywhere to stay, so you had to put them up in your room and then you had to sit up all night with them, talking about the fucking Specials.” At the latter show, Hall and Dammers intervened in an attempt to stop the crowd fighting with bouncers: both were arrested, charged with incitement to riot and fined £400. Hall’s mordant public image proved so pervasive that a wild rumour circulated playgrounds in the early 80s: he suffered from a medical condition affecting the muscles in his face that left him physically unable to smile. The anguished, undulating cry he unleashes in lieu of a chorus on the 1981 single Ghost Town, meanwhile, wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Public Image Ltd’s contemporaneous album The Flowers of Romance.