Terry Hall, who with his band “The Specials” sang about lightness as perceptively as about decline, is dead.
If the decay has seeped deep enough into people’s psyches, it doesn’t need many words. And please: “This town is coming like a ghost town / All the clubs have been closed down / (…) Bands won’t play no more / Too much fighting on the dance floor.” In addition, the cover: a skeleton at the piano – a second one next to it, sunk on a windy chair. Party over, people broken. Instead: skinheads who roam the streets and contaminate what is still standing with their violence. Awesome song that Terry Hall, who died far too early on Monday, wrote with his band in the early 80s The Specials still wrestled – the formation itself had long been in dissolution at the time.
With their ska, their rocksteady, their reggae, and their cover versions of songs like “Monkey Man” or “A Message to You Rudy”, Hall and his band stood for party and lightness – and at the same time they were the sharpest commentators on social decline. Just by their composition: black and white musicians united in a seven-piece band and surrounded by more and more hate and racism.
And right in the middle is Hall, born in Coventry in 1959, who dropped out of school and worked part-time as a bricklayer and hairdresser. At the age of twelve, he said, he was kidnapped and abused. Depression plagued him throughout his life. The music probably too: a fight against the inner ghost town. In 1981 he left the band and founded Fun Boy Threealong with Dave Stewart were the duo in the ’90s Vegaswas a guest at the Gorillaz, D12at Toots and the Maytals so with the best. In 2008 he brought the specials back again. Its members now reported his death after a short illness. He was 63 years old.