Album By Album – Terry Hall

One of British pop’s finest, Terry Hall helped pioneer a whole new movement with The Specials before utilising his famously deadpan talents in numerous equally intriguing bands, side projects, supergroups and solo releases

The Specials – Specials (1979)

Formerly known as The Coventry Automatics, The Specials turned their West Midlands hometown into an unlikely cultural hub towards the end of the 70s, infusing the music of Jamaica with a distinctly British punk spirit to pioneer the sound that became known as 2 Tone.

Featuring the guitarists Lynval Golding and Roddy ‘Radiation’ Byers, bass player Horace Panter and, eventually, drummer John Bradbury, as well as roadie-turned-singer Neville Staple and poker-faced vocalist Terry Hall, the band had been formed by chief songwriter Jerry Dammers with the intention of putting Coventry on the map. And after being discovered by Joe Strummer, leading to a support slot on The Clash’s Out On Parole Tour, the seven-piece soon achieved their goal.

Of course, The Specials didn’t always paint the city in the most flattering light, the majority of their original material reflecting on the hardships of suburban life during the early years of Thatcherite Britain. Concrete Jungle was written by Byers about being chased by the National Front, while It’s Up To You and Doesn’t Make It Alright both further tackle the band’s experiences of racism head on. And Too Much Too Young, a live recording of which would later give the band a controversial No.1, is a kitchen sink vignette in which the band show their blatant disdain towards an adolescent mother.

A Message To You Rudy

Although The Specials were admirably keen to call out society’s prejudices, this rhetoric could sometimes tip over into sexism. Amid the chatter and chinking glasses of Nite Klub, Hall declares “All the girls are slags,” for example. And Little Bitch is downright nasty, berating a young girl for her appearance, bed-wetting tendencies and suicidal cries for attention. It’s little wonder the group soon dropped the track from their set.

While not all of the band’s lyrical themes have aged particularly well, a telling sign of their late teenage years, the music still remains positively thrilling. The Specials were particularly skilful in adapting ska classics for the New Wave crowd, with Stupid Marriage downgrading the murder charges of Prince Buster’s Judge Dread to vengeful vandalism (with a little help from Chrissie Hynde to boot) and Do The Dog turning Rufus Thomas’ original into a commentary on the rising levels of subcultural violence.

Elvis Costello, meanwhile, was the perfect choice of producer, his unfussy approach brilliantly recapturing the raw energy of the band’s live shows. As opening mission statements go, this was pretty special.

The Specials – More Specials (1980)

As its title suggested, The Specials’ second LP initially appeared to be more of the same. Side One was bookended by repurposed covers, with music hall standard Enjoy Yourself turned into a pogo-inducing ska anthem about the increasing likelihood of nuclear attacks and the kitsch Northern Soul of Sock It To ’Em J.B. updating the James Bond references of Rex Garvin’s original.

The gloominess of life under a Tory government was still the default theme. Terry Hall’s first writing credit Man At C&A ramped up the Cold War paranoia further. Hey, Little Rich Girl charted the fortunes of a young woman whose big city dreams are exploited by the porn industry. And in case you still hadn’t twigged that the Coventry outfit weren’t the picture of contentment, Pearl’s Cafe, a collaboration with future The Special AKA member Rhoda Dakar – explicitly declared “It’s all a load of bollocks.”

Enjoy Yourself

However, with Dammers itching to broaden the group’s horizons – “I didn’t want us to end up like Bad Manners,” he told Uncut – Side Two knocked everyone, including his own bandmates, for six. Inspired by the hotel lobby music that became an inadvertent soundtrack of their previous tour, Dammers pursued an intriguing melting pot of easy listening styles worlds apart from the 2 Tone that had gone before.

Stereotype/Stereotypes Pt.2 throws in everything from bossa nova to Bach while depicting how an average man’s life descends into STD-contracting, alcohol-heavy and police-evading chaos. International Jet Set ventures into Middle Eastern psychedelia, concluding with the harrowing final cries from a passenger plane about to crash land. There’s even a calypso instrumental, Holiday Fortnight.

More Specials has been credited with both pioneering trip-hop and foreshadowing the lounge music revival, while it also repeated the Top Five success of its predecessor. Yet it proved the death knell for The Specials’ original incarnation. Frustrated at Dammers’ “my way or the highway” approach and the pressures of the industry treadmill, the band splintered shortly after the era-defining single Ghost Town gave them a second No.1.

Fun Boy Three – The Fun Boy Three (1982)

“The sound of three people sent mental by being in The Specials,” was how Terry Hall described the 1981 offshoot he formed with Golding and Staple to The Guardian in 2009. Fun Boy Three’s self-titled debut album does indeed have a One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest vibe, from the deranged assortment of animal noises and football whistles that pervade Funrama 2 to the fact that its lead single – an attack on either the Thatcher/Reagan special relationship or their new musical foe, Jerry Dammers, depending on your own interpretation – was titled The Lunatics (Have Taken Over The Asylum).

But there was also method to their madness, with the trio – now sporting Persil-white singlets rather than two-tone suits – firmly subscribing to the theory that less is more across 11 tracks, eclectic as they were sparse.

Although its musical palette, co-produced with regular Specials cohort Dave Jordan, rarely expands beyond primitive percussion, inexpressive chants and Sprechgesang, The Fun Boy Three still manages to both intrigue and innovate.

Taking Over …

Faith, Hope And Charity finds the boys tiptoeing onto the dancefloor with a rhythmic blend of metallic funk, distinctly British hip-hop, and early minimalist techno. I Don’t Believe It adopts nursery rhyme melodies and paranoia-soaked reggae to rally against the surveillance of Black Britain, while Best Of Luck Mate is a dub poem about a debt-ridden man whose attempts to escape poverty are thwarted by his daily trips to the bookies.

Of course, Fun Boy Three’s most invaluable contribution to the pop culture of the early 80s was its introduction of the era’s biggest girlband. Bananarama, discovered by Hall thanks to an article in The Face, lend their nonchalant tones to four tracks including the haunting Gregorian vibes of opener Sanctuary and world-weary closer, Alone. But it’s on the playful cover of Top Five hit T’aint What You Do (It’s The Way That You Do It), a jazz standard recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, where Siobhan, Keren and Sara make their presence known. “Where do we go to from here?/ What kind of sound do we follow?” FB3 ask on Way On Down. Minimalistic, mysterious and mischievous pop appeared to be the answer.

Fun Boy Three – Waiting (1983)

After returning the favour on Bananarama collab Really Saying Something and also covering the George Gershwin standard Summertime, Fun Boy Three dramatically ended their run of five straight Top 20 hits with The More I See (The Less I Believe), a bleak meditation on The Troubles that facetiously finished with the punchline, “Does anyone know any jokes?”

Luckily, the trio’s second album had a few more bankable hits up its sleeve, namely the unexpected tango of The Tunnel Of Love and, most notably, Our Lips Are Sealed. This co-written gem with The Go-Go’s Jane Wiedlin, with whom Hall had a short-lived romance, went on to be a hit for her own girlband, too.

Helmed by David Byrne, apparently the group’s second choice of producer after Brian Eno turned them down, Waiting isn’t as big a leap forward as its predecessor.

Murder She Said finds the trio paying homage to the theme from Margaret Rutherford’s Miss Marple films of the 60s, perhaps a sign Dammers’ penchant for easy listening had rubbed off more than they’d admit. The Pressure Of Life (Takes The Weight Off The Body), meanwhile, harked back to the bouncy ska of The Specials’ debut.

Perhaps mindful they’d run their course, Terry Hall again moved on, leaving Fun Boy Three as one of the decade’s most curious two-album wonders.

The Colourfield – Virgins And Philistines (1985)

Named after a mid-15th century form of abstract artwork, The Colourfield (initially The Colour Field) saw Terry Hall distance himself slightly from the monochromatic persona that had guided his previous two outfits to chart success. He could still rival Morrissey when it came to lyrical bitterness, of course. “But me and the cat own the lease on the flat and nothing you do will ever change that,” he sneers at an ex-girlfriend for having the audacity to leave on Take. And he can hardly contain his resentment on the animal activism of Cruel Circus (“Fur coats on ugly people/ Expensively dressed up to kill/ In a sport that’s legal/ Within the minds of the mentally ill”).

However, joined by guitarist Toby Lyons and bass player Karl Shale, who’d both plied their trade in another Coventry-based ska act, The Swinging Cats, Virgins And Philistinesalso offers some light to go with all the shade. “I don’t detest everything, just most things,” Hall said on Music Box TV, arguably the closest he ever came to expressing a sense of optimism.

Pile On The Agony

Album opener Thinking Of You, which features backing vocals from big fan (and apparently studio cleaner) Katrina Phillips, surrounds its pleas for a lost love with the kind of orchestral pop that made Burt Bacharach and Hal David the most in-demand songwriters of the 60s. Castles In The Air combines open-road soft rock with flourishes of flamenco, while Hammond Song turns folk rock trio The Roches’ original into a lushly harmonised affair that’s reminiscent of vintage Simon And Garfunkel.

Although much of Virgins And Philistines harks back to the sounds of Hall’s youth, there are shades of the jangle-pop movement that just a year later would coalesce on the C86 cassette, perhaps a sign that Hugh Jones had more of an influence than fellow co-producer Jeremy Green.

Appearing to believe this was one musical reinvention too many, a select few Hall fans reacted to The Colourfield’s first live shows with constant heckles. A philistine response, you could say, to an album which painted the eternal miserabilist in refreshingly expressive strokes.

The Colourfield – Deception (1987)

Terry Hall had called it a day with his previous two outfits at a point in which audiences were left wanting more. The fact that The Colourfield’s difficult second album barely scraped the UK’s Top 100 and, in a career first, spawned zero Top 40 singles suggests that the musical wanderer should have pressed the cease-and-desist button even earlier third time around.

The band appeared to have been just as dissatisfied as their fans. Shale left the project midway through recording, while Hall failed to establish a connection with both the session musicians brought in as his replacement and producers Jeffrey Lesser (The Chieftains) and Richard Gottehrer (Blondie).

Deception’s troubled backstory, therefore, suggests that it’s an album of car crash proportions. But while it’s undoubtedly slicker and glossier than anything its frontman did before – and after, too – it also boasts several tracks worthy of gracing a Hall Best Of.

Confession, one of the two tracks on the LP that feature Tears For Fears’ Roland Orzabal, and Heart Of America both echo the well-crafted pop that would turn cult heroes Aztec Camera and Prefab Sprout into chart concerns just a year later.

Running Away

Adding to Hall’s list of unlikely cover versions, the emphatic funk of Sly And The Family Stone’s Running Away proved he could still push himself out of his comfort zone. And Miss Texas 1967 is a gorgeously melancholic piece of lounge pop about an old-school beauty queen, which suggests that the great pessimist Hall was an ardent viewer of prime-time television soap opera, Dallas.

There are signs elsewhere, however, that Hall had lost his mojo, and not just the glum front cover portrait, either: the album’s anodyne cover of The Monkees’ She, for example, or the synthetic soul of Digging It Deep which succumbed to all the worst excesses of late-80s productions as well as the ‘moon in June’ approach to lyrics (“Oh how I wish I loved the human race/ Oh how I wish I had a pretty face… I’m glad and lazy/ And you’re sad and crazy”). After six albums in eight years, Hall perhaps wisely took a lengthy break toward the end of the decade that he’d helped to define.

Terry, Blair & Anouchka – Ultra Modern Nursery Rhymes (1990)

For “people who can hum a tune whilst hoovering”. That’s how Blair Booth, who, alongside future psychoanalyst and writer Anouchka Grose joined Terry Hall’s most carefree side project, described their sole album Ultra Modern Nursery Rhymes.

It’s a fair comment. Bonded by their love of 60s pop – their first single was a cover of Captain & Tennille’s Love Will Keep Us Together – Terry, Blair And Anouchka served up a sound as refreshingly simple as their moniker and often, every bit as catchy as the Shake’n’Vac jingle.

The opening title track, for instance, is a reassuring piece of fatherly advice on the pressures of life which threatens to burst into the theme to Red Dwarf. Lead single Missing is the kind of witty kitchen sink portrait The Beautiful South topped the charts with that same year. And Three Cool Catz is a doo-wop take on Leiber & Stoller’s standard whose title essentially sums up the whole project.

Indeed, so out of the cultural loop, Anouchka initially thought it was Jerry Hall who wanted a guitarist and declined. Blair, who would later form Break From The Old Routine hitmakers Oui 3, was impressed that she didn’t know who Terry was. However, together they appear to be having a blast on a retro flight of fancy which charms and delights in equal measure. And remarkably, so does Terry.

Vegas – Vegas (1992)

Out of all Terry Hall’s many creative endeavours, Vegas appears to be the one lost to time. Only a handful of its 10 tracks have racked up more than a few thousand Spotify streams, and it’s largely been impossible to obtain a physical copy since its 1992 release. That’s a little surprising considering it did spawn his final UK Top 40 hit (Possessed) and was spearheaded by a man who, back in the early 80s, had done for synth-pop what Hall had done for ska.

Vegas was born out of a songwriting session with Dave Stewart for the Ramones, but there’s little in the way of primitive rock’n’roll on an album which is more Caribbean island than CBGBs.

Walk Into The Wind is a hushed reggae number which reunites Hall with Siobhan Fahey to haunting effect. Wise Guy evolves from stately chamber music to beachside dub complete with a chuckling toaster pontificating on the fleeting nature of fame. Whisper it quietly and Take Me For What I Am could even be mistaken for UB40 back in their chart-topping prime.

More in keeping with Stewart’s Eurythmics days, the squelchy electronica of The Thought Of You and a curious rendition of Charles Aznavour’s classic chanson She appear to have wandered in from a different side project altogether. But while hardly Hall’s most essential album, Vegas still strikes it rich.

Terry Hall – Home (1994)

After 15 years and five different group projects, Terry Hall finally decided to go solo in 1994, albeit with a little help from many of his peers. Indeed, Home’s credits read like a who’s who of 1980s guitar pop, with Nick Heyward, The Smiths’ Craig Gannon as well as XTC’s Andy Partridge all joining producer Ian Broudie on songwriting duties and The Icicle Works’ drummer Chris Sharrock and Echo And The Bunnymen’s bassist Les Pattinson lending a hand in the studio.

The Britpop movement, that in the wake of Definitely Maybe and Parklife was fast reaching its commercial zenith, was also keen to get on board, too. Blur’s Damon Albarn guested on Chasing A Rainbow, the soaring indie-pop number added to its special edition a year later, while Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker remixed opening lead single Forever J, a bittersweet paean to Hall’s soon-to-be ex-wife Jeanette which immediately set the classicist pop tone.

Despite its star-studded pedigree, the LP once again saw Hall languishing in the lower reaches of the UK’s Top 100, perhaps the biggest chart injustice of the journeyman’s career considering how effortlessly it aligned with the Cool Britannia era.

The More You Get, The More You Want

Sense, a slightly grittier version of The Lightning Seeds tune he had co-written two years previously, was also robbed of a Top 40 place. But the album’s true highlights are elsewhere: the sweeping cinematic power pop of What’s Wrong With Me, the ode to loneliness of grammatical nightmare I Don’t Got You, the bitter kiss-off I Drew A Lemon in which Hall proves he’s not entirely averse to the odd dad joke (“I thought we’d last forever/ But you drew the curtains/ And pulled yourself together”).

The coquettish female harmonies that permeate No No No and First Attack Of Love bring to mind the vocal interplay of The Human League. While You boasts one of Hall’s finest zingers (“If ifs and ands were pots and pans, you’d be a kitchen”). On paper, Home is only a minor footnote in the restless creative’s career, and yet, as his most consistently strong body of work, it’s arguably something of a lost classic.

Terry Hall – Laugh (1997)

Having waited such a long time to go it alone, Terry Hall struck while the iron was relatively hot by releasing his second solo album just three years after his first. Co-produced with Craig Gannon together with future Rolling Stones cohort Cenzo Townshend, the ironically-titled Laugh is a little more downbeat than its predecessor, no doubt reflecting the fact the star was still recovering from a painful divorce.

Adding The High Llamas frontman Sean O’Hagan to his impressive list of collaborators, Happy Go Lucky is a mournful piece of chamber pop which plays out like a relationship post-mortem. Channelling Pulp in their Britpop prime, Ballad Of A Landlord is a scathing riposte to a former lover who’s discovered that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side (“How I long to taste the secrets/ From your land of phoney tears”). The title of Damon Albarn co-write A Room Full Of Nothing, an unhinged waltz which captures the Britpop comedown as effectively as Blur’s self-titled LP from earlier in the year, says it all.

I Saw The Light

Even the songs which on the surface appear to be full of hope are, in fact, drenched in despair. The Byrds-esque Summer Follows Spring sound is tailor-made for a romantic walk in the park, but is yet another smackdown to a cheating ex. And the similarly jangly Sonny And His Sister, co-penned with long-time fan Stephen Duffy, is about a man left so adrift by a break-up that he seeks advice from a teen magazine’s problems page.

Laugh does end on a slightly more optimistic note, a buoyant cover of Todd Rundgren’s soft rock serenade I Saw The Light which is perfectly in keeping with the album’s classic radio vibes. But failing to find catharsis in such soul-baring (“I thought, ‘Why am I putting myself through this?’” he later told The Guardian. “I mean, I can avoid doing this”), Hall acknowledged that the singer-songwriter approach wasn’t for him. Indeed, although Laugh became his highest-charting LP since The Colourfield’s debut, his solo career met the same two-albums-and-out fate, now his forte.

Hall & Mushtaq – The Hour Of Two Lights (2003)

Perhaps inspired by regular collaborator Damon Albarn’s world music ventures, in 2003 Terry Hall teamed up with Mushtaq of ethno-techno outfit Fun-Da-Mental for an audacious East-meets-West affair released through the Blur frontman’s Honest Jon’s label.

The Hour Of Two Lights also roped in everyone from 12-year-old Lebanese singer Nathalie Barghach and 70-something clarinettist Eddie Mordue to Algerian blind rapper Oujdi and Polish gypsy folkies Romany Rad on 11 eclectic tracks living up to the “contemporary nomad music” promised by the duo.

Hall occasionally takes centrestage, as on A Tale Of Woe, a sardonic oompah band ditty about life under an oppressive regime, and the brooding trip-hop of Stand Together, which exemplifies the pair’s idealistic approach to world politics. But it’s the globe-trotting guest vocals – Abdul Latif Assaly’s haunting cries on The Silent Wail, in particular – as well as Mushtaq’s multi-cultural production that leaves a lasting impression.

Therefore, Hall often finds himself in the rare position of being a supporting player on his own LP, the last to bear his name for 16 years. Still, this daring collision of sounds proved that nearly a quarter-century into his career, he was still anything but predictable.

The Specials – Encore (2019)

After they reunited – without their founding member Jerry Dammers, of course – in 2008, The Specials spent over a decade traversing down memory lane before realising, as Horace Panter succinctly put it to Bass Player magazine, they “were in danger of becoming the Best Specials Tribute Band In The World.”

2019’s Encore was the remedy, a hotchpotch of cover versions, re-recordings and originals which added to their discography for the first time since 2001’s Conquering Ruler.

Only Panter remained from that album’s similarly trimmed-down line-up, with Terry Hall and Lynval Golding replacing Neville Staple and Roddy Byers on 10 tracks which unexpectedly returned Coventry’s finest to the top of the charts. While the public welcomed Encore with open arms, Dammers was far from happy, believing that any fresh material not blessed by his presence would destroy the ska legends’ legacy.

Embarrassed By You

With several new songs that would sit comfortably on any greatest hits collection, that certainly didn’t turn out to be the case. As its name suggests, B.L.M. is a powerful anti-racism anthem which finds Golding reflecting on his father’s experiences as a Windrush immigrant. 10 Commandments answers back to Prince Buster’s same-named display of misogyny with defiant spoken word from Saffiyah Khan, the political activist who famously rallied against an EDL demo sporting a Specials T-shirt.

Meanwhile The Life And Times (Of A Man Called Depression) sees Hall dissect his own mental health on a woozy mix of spoken word and 60s lounge.

Apart from the taut funk of The Equals’ Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys, the more familiar offerings are less inspiring. Renditions of Fun Boy Three’s The Lunatics… and The Valentines’ Blam Blam Fever, the latter already tackled on the band’s previous LP, suggest they were cherrypicking from a limited songbook, too.

Yet there’s nothing here to besmirch The Specials’ name. Indeed, as closer We Sell Hope, a wistful reggae number which essentially summarises their whole ethos (“We’ve gotta take care of each other/ Do what you need to do/ Without making others suffer”) draws to an end, all but their former leader may well be left shouting “Encore”.

The Specials – Encore and Protest Songs 1924–2012 (2021)

After the double whammy of writer’s block and the global pandemic put paid to a planned album of roots reggae, The Specials instead chose to follow their unlikely studio comeback by essentially holding up a collection of musical placards.

Unlike Chumbawamba’s similarly themed 1988 album English Rebel Songs, the trio mostly looked across the pond for protest inspiration: hence campfire spiritual I Don’t Mind Failing In This World sits alongside Bob Marley and The Wailers’ call-to-arms Get Up, Stand Up, Rod McKuen’s anti-Vietnam War tale Soldiers Who Want To Be Heroes and The Staple Singers’ gospel classic Freedom Highway.

The Specials’ “urge to rail against what is wrong with the world” also veers into some unlikely places. Quite how Jerry McCain’s My Next Door Neighbor, a prime slice of rockabilly whose only gripes concern the borrowing of household appliances, fits the theme remains anyone’s guess. Meanwhile, Leonard Cohen’s Everybody Knows, treated to a smoky jazz rendition here by Hall at his most debonair, is only here due to its prominence in an Australian anti-smoking ad.

Ain’t Gonna Let No Hatred, Turn Me ’round

Protest Songs works best when it provides an element of surprise: the band have never sounded as energised as on the straightforward garage rock of Trouble Every Day, Frank Zappa’s dissection of the Watts Riots in Los Angeles. Bradford vocalist Hannah Hu helps turn the anti-imperialism of Talking Heads’ Listening Wind into a ghostly blues-folk number which evokes PJ Harvey at her most intense.

And the oldest composition here, civil rights favourite Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Us Around, is given the handclap a capella treatment before being skanked up halfway through.

Tragically, this century-spanning affair ended up serving as Terry Hall’s swansong: 14 months on, he died from pancreatic cancer at just 63, leaving behind a remarkable body of work that was continually shifting in scope and sound. “Our beautiful friend, brother and one of the most brilliant singers, songwriters and lyricists this country has ever produced,” remarked Golding and Panter in a tribute that few could protest.

Read More: Celebrating 2 Tone Records with those who made it happen