Terry Hall
For my generation he meant so much
Late November 1979… I have just finished the entrance exams for Cambridge University. I am free, never really to work that hard academically ever again. The weekend following is full of music. Saturday night I go to see the Psychedelic Furs; Sunday night it’s the Two-Tone tour at the Lyceum with the Specials and The Selecter. Sadly, Madness are on the road elsewhere, replaced on the bill by some as yet unknown outfit - Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Monday night, to the Rainbow to see The Jam supported by The Vapors.
18 December 2022… Forty-three years later and I hear that Terry Hall has died. On social media and in the press, so many people of my generation express the same deep sadness that I feel. This was about more than music. Coming of age in the late seventies, we saw The Specials as the living embodiment of the end of racism. How naive we were.
His subsequent work was poetic, tuneful, sometimes danc-y and often profound. I loved The Colourfield but there is plenty I didn’t know about, so I am thankful to Mark Lamarr for tweeting this, a beautiful song about Terry’s first wife and mother of his two older children.
It comes from an album, ‘Home’ which is comedian and podcast host Richard Herring’s favourite. Do listen to him interviewing Terry in 2019. You can hear in Richard’s voice just how much this man meant to people of a certain age.
I had no idea of the horrific trauma young Terry had been through, being abducted to France and abused, which led to him missing a year at school and all sorts of turmoil later in life.
I remember him singing ‘I got one Art O Level, it did nothing for me’. (To rhyme with ‘you've got a Ph.D’) in the song Rat Race. About the same time, Jimmy Pursey of Sham 69 was opining in Hey Little Rich Boy that he ‘I didn't get no GCE, it makes you think you can't talk to me’. GCE refers to O Level exams children took at 16 that were later combined with CSE to become GCSE.
It appears that Terry had passed the 11+ exam to gain a place at a prestigious grammar school but his parents didn’t send him there because it involved a bus journey. I realise how fortunate I was to have the opportunities I had. I wonder how many other girls and boys are missing out through no fault of their own?
Before going up to Cambridge in October 1980, I lived for four months in Handsworth, Birmingham, driving a lorry for Community Transport. This gave me an education that no amount of O Levels could have provided. I will write about that another time.
One Saturday, I took the train to nearby Coventry, where the Two-Tone sound had emerged. I don’t know what I expected to find. I just wandered around and went into a record shop, hoping to soak in some of the ska vibe.
Terry Hall does seem to have found relative peace in later life, understanding himself a little better and finding appropriate remedies. His recent interviews reflect that. This one from 2019 with the excellent Pete Paphides, as The Specials were about to set off on tour, is particularly heartwarming. In it Terry reveals that one of his sons is an accomplished lute-maker and the other has a masters in maths from, um, Cambridge.