Terry Hall, lead singer of the Specials and of ‘Ghost Town’ fame, dies at 63
Ghost Town #GhostTown
LONDON — Terry Hall, the British musician and lead singer in the late 1970s’ ska-punk band the Specials, has died at the age of 63, the group announced Monday.
The songwriter — who left school at 15 and became a global icon of the British punk scene by the age of 22 — died following a short illness, according to the band’s statement. The cause of death was not disclosed.
Hall’s best known hits with the second-wave ska revival group include “Gangsters” (1979), “Too Much Too Young” (1980) — and “Ghost Town” (1981), a track whose bleak lyrics came to embody the sense of alienation gripping England’s postindustrial towns and cities, and a haunting soundtrack to the summer of riotous unrest that gripped the country’s inner cities one month after its release.
Thousands of mostly Black young people clashed in riots with police officers in more than 20 British cities that summer, as unemployment rates soared and tensions with police boiled over, resulting in the arrests of more than 1,200 people.
As well as his role as the Specials’ front man, which disbanded in 1981 before reforming in 2009, the British lyricist and singer performed with Fun Boy Three, the Colourfield and Vegas.
In a statement announcing his death, the Specials described Hall as “one of the most brilliant singers, songwriters and lyricists this country has ever produced.”
“His music and his performances encapsulated the very essence of life … the joy, the pain, the humor, the fight for justice, but mostly the love.” The statement continues, “Terry often left the stage at the end of The Specials’ life-affirming shows with three words … ‘Love Love Love’.”
“This news has hit hard and must be extremely difficult for Terry’s wife and family,” bandmate Neville Staple said, according to a statement shared by his manager. “In the music World, people have many ups and downs, but I will hang onto the great memories of Terry and I, making history.”
“Ghost Town,” which catapulted the Specials to global recognition, was recorded over 10 days in April 1981 in central England’s Leamington Spa, according to a history of the band shared on its website.
“It captured how we were feeling — not just in Coventry, but we were touring in the north and saw all these factories closing down, all these people becoming unemployed,” Hall told the Big Issue magazine in a 2021 interview.
The track, which spent three weeks as United Kingdom’s No. 1 in July 1981, was ultimately what led the band to breaking up — a decision made its members in a dressing room following a live musical appearance on the television program “Top of the Pops,” the Specials said.
“We were expected to get a gold disc for that record but I found that pretty horrible. Why do we need that reward?” Hall recalled in the 2021 interview. “Our country’s in a mess, do you like my gold record? It felt like the perfect moment to stop.”
“We’d gone from seven kids in the back of a van to being presented with gold discs and I never felt massively comfortable with that.”
English musician Elvis Costello also paid tribute to Hall, whose voice he described as “the perfect instrument for the true and necessary songs on ‘The Specials’. That honesty is heard in so many of his songs in joy and sorrow.”
The Specials fused elements of 1950s-era ska — with its roots in Jamaican dance music and imported American R&B — with British punk. The resulting 2-Tone movement, which took the country’s radio stations by storm in the late 1970s, became known as ska’s “second wave.”
As well as creating a soundtrack that captured the mood of the late 1970s, the Specials were one of Britain’s most prominent multiracial music groups, with many of their songs grappling with contemporary racist violence.
“Just because you’re a Black boy, just because you’re a White boy, it doesn’t mean you’ve got to hate him, it doesn’t mean you’ve got to fight,” Hall sang in “Doesn’t Make it Alright,” one of the Specials’ slower tracks.
In a 2021 interview with the Financial Times, he described how the band’s music gigs were targeted by racist hooligans.
“It got really extreme,” Hall recalled. “We were playing with Madness in a university town somewhere, we walked offstage and there were casualties all over the dressing room. People who had been cut and slashed. It looked like an emergency room. It was heartbreaking, the last thing we wanted to see.”
British musician Billy Bragg described the Specials as “a celebration of how British culture was invigorated by Caribbean immigration,” in a Twitter tribute posted to Hall. The musician’s onstage demeanor, he added, “was a reminder that they were in the serious business of challenging our perception of who we were in the late 1970s.”