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Featured Artist on "Was It Worth It?" from Shakespears Sister available on the album Songs from the Red Room

Jeordie Shenton, a co-ordinator for Tonic Rider, says that Hall’s work will not be forgotten. “Legendary lives leave legacies. Terry is going to leave a legacy in music, culture and health. There are lots of Specials fans who talk about mental health through Terry talking about it. The legacy of Terry Hall is so widespread. There’s a realness to it,” he says. The Specials are about to release a new album, Protest Songs 1924-2012, featuring the 2-Tone champions’ typically heartfelt take on protest music from the past 100 years. The band put their unique stamp on activist anthems and songs of grievance by The Staples Singers, Bob Marley, Leonard Cohen, Frank Zappa and Talking Heads, spanning a succession of unpopular wars and righteous causes. Their famously dour frontman, however, remains pessimistic about the power of song to affect real political change. 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. All my condolences and sympathies go out to his wife and family.” Filename G:\EAC What\Terry Hall - Laugh... Plus (1997)\02. Terry Hall - Laugh... plus - Sonny and His Sister.wav

Tears For Fears

Hall remained active with The Specials into this year, with their last show together taking place at Escot Park in Devon on August 20. The band’s last release with Hall was the compilation ‘Protest Songs 1924-2012’, which arrived last September.

The Specials, Fun Boy Three, The Colourfield, Terry, Blair & Anouchka, Vegas (with Dave Stewart)… throughout his career, Terry Hall has collected bands the way that kids nowadays collect Pokémon cards. In 2008, inspired by the Pixies’ reunion in 2004, Hall announced that he would be reforming the Specials for a tour and new music, albeit without founding member Jerry Dammers, who claimed he had been forced out. All the same, there still seems something unlikely about finding the Specials in such a cheery mood. For all their celebrated live shows, and the brilliance of their slender oeuvre, an aura of darkness clings to the Coventry band's story. Eight years ago, I interviewed the band's ex-members. They expressed plenty of pride in their achievements, but there was nevertheless a sense that all of them had been rather traumatised by the experience of being in the band. The Official Charts Company – Dub Pistols Featuring Terry Hall". Official Charts Company . Retrieved 31 May 2009.Just reaching out, are you OK?” the song goes. It continues with what sounds like a mental health manifesto that Hall would wholeheartedly endorse. “Time is tight, life’s a fight/ Now’s the time, get it right/ People laughing, people crying/ Can’t you see we’re really trying?/ So goodbye to sorrow… Say hello to tomorrow.” We knew Terry had been unwell but didn’t realise how serious until recently,” he wrote. “We had only just confirmed some 2023 joint music agreements together. This has hit me hard and must be extremely difficult for Terry’s wife and family.” Hall was born in Coventry on 19 March 1959 to a family who predominantly worked in the car industry. He was an academically gifted child and also a noted footballer who was invited to try out for West Bromwich Albion – an opportunity his parents declined based on the inconvenience of travelling across the Midlands. After he sailed through the 11-plus exam, his parents also declined his place at a nearby grammar school. Ever the laconic contrarian, Hall closed Laugh with a deadpan but faithful cover of Todd Rundgren’s FM radio staple, I Saw The Light. Then came the Specials. The band released their self-titled debut album in October 1979 and received mass acclaim for blending a punk sensibility – and sharp lyrics about the degradation of modern Britain – with the traditional Jamaican ska sound, even explicitly updating hits by the likes of Toots and the Maytals, Prince Buster and Dandy Livingstone.

Hall struggled to write lyrics for a follow-up, he said. “The arrival of the pandemic affected me enormously. I spent around three months trying to figure out what was going on. I couldn’t write a single word. I spent the time trying to figure out how not to die.” Instead, they covered historic protest songs and released Protest Songs 1924-2012 in 2021, which peaked at No 2. And so the last at least five years have been unbelievably brilliant and [I’ve been] appreciating things on a different level which I never thought I would. Like, really simple things. On the way here, I saw a folding bike and that has made my day – that you can fold a bike to that size. It’s like origami. If I get one thing like that every day then I’m so happy. So happy,” he said. But Hall, he says, helped to spearhead a change in attitudes. “People are more aware now of their own health, and people are starting to realise that their wellness is really important being on tour,” says Ficek. In recent months artists including Arlo Parks and Sam Fender have cancelled shows to focus on their mental health. Terry Hall’s catalogue is a series of immaculate burning bridges, reflecting the listeners fear and longing, appearing different at sunrise than sunset. “Come here,” I’d say to the stone-faced man from the Midlands, as I kissed to them.

never miss a release.

Filename G:\EAC What\Terry Hall - Laugh... Plus (1997)\08. Terry Hall - Laugh... plus - For the Girl.wav In 2019, they released a new album, Encore, which featured Khan performing on a new song, 10 Commandments. It charted at No 1 in the UK albums chart – their highest-ever album placing. “Achieving a first No 1 album in our 60s restored our faith in humanity,” Hall told the Quietus. Taking to social media, the ska icons confirmed that the influential singer had passed away from a “brief illness” at the age of 63. They honoured him as “a beautiful friend, brother and one of the most brilliant singers, songwriters and lyricists this country has ever produced”. A special edition of the album was released in 2009 by Edsel record label. The new version featured all of the B-sides from the two singles along with liner notes by Rhoda Dakar. The Specials in New York, 1979 … (L-R) Roddy Radiation, Sir Horace Gentleman, Terry Hall, Neville Staples, Lynval Golding, John Bradbury and Jerry Dammers. Photograph: Images Press/Getty Images

Roberts, David (2006). British Hit Singles & Albums (19thed.). London: Guinness World Records Limited. p.519. ISBN 1-904994-10-5. Perhaps the final word should be about Hall’s music. October saw the release of one of the last – if not the last – recorded song that he had a hand in. It was called Emily Smiles and it appeared on The Lightning Seeds’ latest album See You in the Stars. Hall co-wrote it with his old pal and Lightning Seeds frontman Ian Broudie. The lyrics couldn’t be more apt. They speak to the hope, the openness and the communication that Hall deemed so important. They suggest that life, although bruised, is beautiful. His political awakening came in his teenage years “when I discovered that working men’s clubs had a colour bar on their doors. You could only get in if you were white. That really shook me. I couldn’t work it out.”Relations within the band became fraught, exacerbated by a punishing work schedule - "we played everywhere," says Bradbury, "including a caravan park in Crosshands, which, with all due respect to the people who live there, is a little out of the way" - and the kind of arguments that bands with a less determinedly political stance might never face: there was much heated discussion over the ideological correctness of travelling by limousine. a b c "The Official Charts Company – Fun Boy Three". Official Charts Company . Retrieved 10 March 2009.