An archive from 1959: Terry Hall cracks a smile

I walk in a bar and immediately I sense danger

You look at me girl as if I was some kind of a, a total stranger

Where did you get that blank expression on your face?

Where did you get that blank expression on your face?

Yeah, Terry, where did you get that doleful blank expression on your eerie white face? You're looking into the middle distance (or nowhere?) while 25 people jostle you on stage at a chaotic Specials gig in Middlesbrough/Leeds/Reading. It's early 1980, 2-Tone "fever" is sweeping the country. Jerry Dammers is smiling maniacally, Neville Staples is booming out his Jamaican patois, Lynval Golding is skanking with his low-slung guitar. But you're unmoved. A (slightly swaying) statue, blank, cut-off.

A riot of his own: Terry Hall at a Specials gig

Hmm, am I slipping into rather tired "appreciation" mode when it comes to Terry Hall's death? Maybe. As I said a few years ago with Pete Shelley's demise, these days there's almost a mini-industry of immediate online commentary when an "iconic" figure from the musical past sings their final note/plays their final chord. Some of it's reasonably well-written and fair-minded (today's Alexis Petridis piece on Hall for example), but it's always a slightly queasy business wading through it. Anyway, I guess that's the world we live in, and in my own (extremely minor) way I'm only adding to the noise and general boomer-era emoting. But yes, Terry Hall's role in the Specials and Fun Boy Three (the rest is not important in my opinion). Some of it's summed up in Petridis' piece: the slightly weird sense of an isolated figure in a crowd, the flat unemotional singing, a general Warholian affectless, youthful good looks and a world-weary demeanour, a hint of campness, and also a suggestion of suedehead swagger/bovver boy aggro (the signet ring, the unhooked braces, the DM shoes and white socks). Also, with those big sloping eyebrows and sunken vaguely haunted eyes, to my mind Hall always had a touch of a silent-era film actor (hapless villian?, doomed romantic lead?) about him. Someone given plenty of "atmospheric" make-up before going on set. 

Yeah man, I'm getting off the point (music) but maybe also getting very much to the point - Terry Hall as unlikely pop star. I guess, in fact, he only became a pop star with The Lunatics (Have Taken Over the Asylum) and It Ain't What You Do (It's the Way That You Do It). In the Specials he was part of the group, less prominent and less talked about than the super-confident semi-genius Dammers. In the ironically-named FB3 he was the back-combed-hair'd semi-smouldering gentle pop hunk - the non-macho mate of Staples and Golding and the potential "boyfriend" figure in videos with Bananarama (move over Robert De Niro). Either way, from a Specials gig in Coventry in 1980 to an early FB3 show in Birmingham in 1981 (I think, first tour anyway), I also definitely got pulled into this convulsive ska-pop-doom-skank world, fuelled by Top Of The Pops and The Face-era magazine hype. The Specials dominated the final year at our school in north Coventry (eclipsing punk) and the city's new-found centrality in pop music culture quickly became totally normal. For years afterwards I always found it faintly dull to hear people going on about Coventry and 2-Tone, but - as I've pointed out in blogs on Coventry City's not-entirely-comfortable appropriation of 2-Tone and on the interesting-but-rarely-screened Three Minute Heroes TV film - there's a solid core of musical importance at the heart of this: the dynamic ska-punk fusion and the (re-)introduction of reggae and Jamaican sounds into pop. I saw someone on Twitter today saying that Terry Hall and the Specials made it "cool" to say you were from Coventry - both then and now. Er, I don't know about that, but I'm quite happy to have been around when this stuff emerged in Coventry and I still rate quite a lot of the music and the ethos around it. So Hall's death, announced on the same day as Martin Duffy's, is another marker in the inevitable obliteration of everyone and everything associated with the 70-80s pop world. Hall, at 63 (like Billy Childish an archive from 1959), is a comparatively "young" casualty of that era, but then Joe Strummer died at the age of 50 and countless others much younger. We're all gonna die and there's absolutely nothing we can do about. But - cliché alert! - Terry Hall's deadpan, unsmiling anti-fun demeanour will live on. Except, what's this? Terry Hall cracking a smile as Fun Boy Three burn an American flag at the end of a completely over-the-top version of the Doors' The End on Scottish music show The Switch in 1983? Now that's quite funny ...