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Newcastle upon Tyne, 21 December (talk) Terry Hall, who died of a short illness at the age of 63, was the face of The Specials, the iconic band that bridged youth in the late 1970s and early 1980s Subculture and mainstream pop, embodying the disaffected voice of Thatcher Britain.
Born and raised in Coventry, Hall brings a unique gesture and sound to British pop music.
Lead singer of The Specials and Fun Boy Three, his simultaneously deadpan but melodic voice, laced with his native Midlands accent, belies the eclecticism that underpins his music.
Likewise, his sarcasm is a filter through which he reflects a sense of national and personal alienation.
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He suffered from mental illness after being kidnapped by a child abuse gang at the age of 12, which he later referenced in the Fun Boy Three song Well Fancy That.
By the age of 15, he had left school and worked a range of jobs, including bricklayer and hairdresser, before being drawn to music, first punk and then ska.
It’s the latter that particularly infuses the sound of The Specials, originally formed as The Coventry Automatics in 1977 by keyboardist and songwriter Jerry Dammers, joined by Hall shortly thereafter.
Early hits mixed Dammers work such as Too Much Too Young with covers of ska classics such as A Message To You Rudy, led by Hall and Neville Staple, who emigrated from Jamaica to England when they were five.
The hybrid elements of The Specials and later Fun Boy Three were not just an element of their sound.
This is a mission statement that divides the country. 2 Tone refers to the genre that fuses ska, reggae, punk and new wave – The Specials are the main representatives – but it’s also the name of the record label they founded with Dammers.
The band arose in tandem with Rock Against Racism, a movement that responded to the rise of the far-right National Front in the mid to late 1970s, and more specifically Eric Clapton’s comments in support of former Birmingham MP Enoch Powell, whose inflammatory and racist remarks fueled tensions in the Midlands and across the UK.
The politics of disillusionment that captures the broader mood is most vividly illustrated on The Specials’ number one single, Ghost Town, where Hall’s brooding vocals provide melodic punctuation amid the band’s wails and eerie, melancholy-laden accompaniment.
The song’s evocation of job loss dovetailed with the unruly mood of the time, when race riots accompanied deindustrialization and unemployment hit a postwar high of 2.5 million — approaching 3.5 million by the mid-20th century. .
The politics of ghost towns are clear and resonate widely. Future Labor deputy leader Tom Watson described its effect:
I was 14 – the summer after the infamous 1981 Tory budget. Ghost towns speak to me and every other teenage kid.
I remember my school career officer telling me that if I didn’t get smart I wouldn’t get a job at the local carpet factory. My ghost town is Kidderminster, but it could be any town in the Midlands.
We all wear our Fred Perrys and adore The Specials.
Things weren’t much better at The Specials camp. In addition to the tension within the band, their tour was marred by audience violence and confrontations with the National Front.
Hall recalled that he had to leave the stage to stop the fight, and “there were casualties throughout the locker room.”
At the peak of their initial success, things fell apart. Hall, Staple and guitarist Lynval Golding quit the band the same night they recorded Ghost Town for Top of the Pops.
While the Dammers would resurface as The Specials AKA, the trio launched under the name Fun Boy Three and enjoyed another string of chart hits.
personal and political
Here again Hall’s various musical influences come into play. Fun Boy Three’s duet with girl band Bananarama included covers of Motown records and jazz classics from 1939, reconfiguring sparse pop compositions.
As before, though, the pop sensibilities are punctured with plenty of sarcasm and lyrical bite, like on their debut single The Lunatics (Have Taken Over the Asylum).
Fun Boy Three disbanded after releasing two albums, but Hall’s output remained steady. In 1984, he went on to form Colourfield, which became a hit with Thinking of You.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, he worked actively with the likes of The Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart and Damon Albarn before launching a reformed version of The Specials (minus the Dammers) in In 2008 began to tour and release new music. Their last album topped the charts in 2019.
He is perhaps best known as a voice for the turbulent times he lived in.
But Hall’s political commitment has run throughout his career, from his initial shock at the adoption of color bars — whites only — in some working men’s clubs in Coventry in the 1970s, to the reflective elements of the more recent Specials album . As he put it, describing the impetus for voting me in 2019:
I grew up in a very staunch Labor union household and it was almost pantomime. There are good guys and there are bad guys. And now, I can’t find many good ones.
Terry Hall, who left the stage too young, will always be remembered for his musical exploration, a sound and attitude that embodied the aesthetic of the British depression of the 1980s, when pop met protest. (dialogue)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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