TERRY HALL

In the summer of 2001, in a little house in Coventry, I was studying for my final year school exams. In an empty living room, while everyone else was at work or school, I sat on the floor and scribbled endless notes for exams in English Literature, History, French, Science and Maths, with three CD albums on a continuous loop. Those albums were Losing Streak and Hello Rockview by Less Than Jake, and The Singles by The Specials.

There was a reason for this.

The year before, my mam had taken me to the Belgrade Theatre to see a musical play called Three Minute Heroes, written by Bob Eaton, which told the story of 2-Tone through the lives of five teenagers grappling with the racial tensions that defined their time and city. I loved this play, was captivated by it, lit up by it; not just by the music (which I was hearing for the first time) but by the attitude, the fashion and the politics it presented fearlessly to the world. The stories of these characters, their dialogues and principles in life, gave voice to something instinctive in me. They were people who felt about the world like I did, who cared about music like I did. It was during this show, for the first time in my short life, that I was struck by a profound realisation: This Happened Here.

So, how, in the burgeoning months of a new millennium, did I find myself watching this play, which would change my life forever?

Probably, it went something like this:

Not long before, I’d gotten into ska/punk through my mate Alex. We played music together in and out of school, and even started a short-lived punk band in the mold of our modern heroes. I was fifteen: music was tribal and I had found – after some searching – my tribe. So it stands to reason that my mother, who loves music, would’ve heard those off-beat reggae chords and brass sections on the albums I was listening to in the house and put them together with the music of her own youth. Somehow I had absorbed the descendants of a music founded in my hometown without ever having known its lineage. So, off to the theatre we went.

In the Belgrade that night, I fell in love with The Specials, and my relationship to the city I was born in changed.

It didn’t happen immediately.

The Coventry I grew up in felt, to a teenager like me at least, a violent place. You got punched there, mugged there, or punched-then-nearly­-mugged-because-you-didn’t-give-your-money-over there. It was a city with its shoulders up, hardened at the edges, wartime grey at the centre. When I started listening to The Specials, I realised it had been this way a long time. But there were moments in the lyrics of this band when (to paraphrase Alan Bennett’s beautiful observation on reading), a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you – is suddenly right there, set down by someone else, a person you have never met… and it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.

Some of those lyrics belonged to a previous time, and wouldn’t make much sense to me until later. Lyrics like:

“You plan your conversation,

To impress the college bar,

Just talking about your mother

and Daddy’s Jaguar,

Wear your political tee-shirt and sacred college scarf,

Discussing the world’s situation,

But just for a laugh…”

Unsurprisingly, Ghost Town hit my young ears and lit a fire under me fast. This was something so unlike the American ska bands I’d been listening to, drawn as it is in the slow, defeated brass of its overture and the dreary, elemental melody of Terry Hall’s opening vocal.

This. Tao-own. Is coming like a Ghost Town.

Then, like vaudeville:

Do you remember the good old days before the Ghost Town?

In the brittle agony of youth, it gave me something to cling to; a sense of identity forged in the grey disappointment of the inner city. Forty years before they put out this single, Coventry was in ruins, and in the intervening years there’d been little effort to rebuild it kindly. A glimmer of hope, perhaps, when Elton John or David Bowie came through town, and then—recession. Suddenly, the thread of a string, unfurling all the way back to the pubs and clubs my mam and dad had drank in; the city my mam had gone out in when the library wasn’t the library but a nightclub called the Locarno.

At university, my friends and I clung to The Specials in the nightclubs and indie nights of an East Midlands city as an émigré might grow flowers in the garden to remind her of home. A Message to You Rudy and Too Much Too Young, sung passionately on busy dancefloors, with our arms around each other’s shoulders as if to proclaim, We Are From There!

Just as they did for those who watched them at Tiffany’s or the Locarno in ’79 and ‘81, The Specials came to represent something essential in us all. We played them in our twenties, at house parties and at Christmas; at Cov games at the Ricoh, then at Wembley, not once but twice; at festivals, in a shower of beer and euphoria, or in venues across the country, with a stall promoting hope not hate. My brother and his wife carved out a little section of songs by them at their wedding reception in Vancouver, in tribute to our home. At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve 2020, Steph and I played Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think) on YouTube because we’d been stuck inside - as were we all – for nine months and we wanted to dance.

Place is a strange thing: it’s important or it isn’t. The reasons people all around the world love Terry Hall and The Specials aren’t intrinsically linked to Coventry, and the ingredients for such a revolutionary collision of sounds and cultures and ideas are rooted in the soil of anywhere that dares to dig a little deeper in the earth – but I’m glad for what that band of ours, and all its fellow travellers, stands for.

I don’t know when my feelings about my hometown changed for the better. I’ve always been proud of my family, my friends, the simultaneously disparaging and prideful view we take of the place we come from – but more recently, first in Manchester and now in Vancouver, I watch it with a kind of reverence. In spite of the violence and the bigotry and the aggression I felt sometimes growing up, everyone I know from there is great – and those who aren’t still can be. I wonder about the future of the place and the talents it will bring.

In recent years, the darker forces of the twentieth century have proven that they won’t loosen their grip on our collective fight for freedoms easily – and it’s easy to think that art, in all its stark complexity, is useless to the struggle. I don’t think it is. At a time when the prevailing tactic of the right wing is to draw lines, rewrite history and stir divisions, it’s heartening to see the legacy of Terry Hall in the music of so many anti-racist, political artist. Some of them I am proud to call friends.

The Specials songs I go back to most are all on that Singles album I got back in 2000/01. I love Gangsters and Nite Klub, Rat Race and Stereotype, and there’s a special place in my heart for Nelson Mandela, which I always found trite as a teenager but realise now is actually very important and good. My absolute favourite is Do Nothing, which is so beautiful that I love it without knowing what it’s actually about. Terry’s voice has never sounded more soulful in my ears.

But does it all come back to Ghost Town?

Well, yeah. I think it’s probably the greatest single recorded by any artists in the history of pop music.

Which is difficult.

But it’s true.

Undeniably, irrevocably true.

No black and white about it it.

Oh, wait.

Nevermind.

Rest well, Terry Hall.

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