Terry Hall

Terry Hall was a complete inspiration to me from the second I heard The Specials live in Brighton at The Kingswest complex, onwards.

I remember being thrilled once to see him walking out of Selfridges on London, tall and magnificent, his hair sprouting triffid-like from his head, doleful eyes lined in bright green eyeliner. What a dude.

About 18 months ago before I left my job, I was playing protest songs to a group of students who were difficult to get through to post pandemic. One of the songs was Ghost Town. They fell silent afterwards, and gradually turned to me. 'What was that? Who are they?', they asked. I told them about Two-Tone, and how well it had worked alongside Rock Against Racism, to change the toxic narrative that was bubbling up after Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech. If you read the obituaries, you'll see how he was determined to put a different model of band together, because he simply thought racism simply wasn't fair. Brave of him and his mates. Our destiny as a generation was literally changed by pop music.

Terry Hall was a really important part of that. His vocal delivery was part of the message: I often used him as an example of a vocalist who didn't 'sing': he vocalised an emotion through lyrics rather than trying to make an aesthetic statement. I loved The Fun Boy Three too. Imagine making all that music out of such a childhood lacking in opportunity. Punk did that for people too.

Much more than David Bowie or Prince, he felt like a fellow traveller. It feels sad today.