The Specials are about to release a new album, Protest Songs 1924-2012, featuring the 2-Tone champions’ typically heartfelt take on protest music from the past 100 years. The band put their unique stamp on activist anthems and songs of grievance by The Staples Singers, Bob Marley, Leonard Cohen, Frank Zappa and Talking Heads, spanning a succession of unpopular wars and righteous causes. Their famously dour frontman, however, remains pessimistic about the power of song to affect real political change.

a b c "The Official Charts Company – Fun Boy Three". Official Charts Company . Retrieved 10 March 2009. Unfortunately, the band were possibly enjoying themselves too much, and a combination of drink and drugs with an intense work schedule made relationships fractious. “For the first album, we were all drunk, and we had a lot of fun,” says Golding. “By the second album, we were falling apart. It was very painful to make.” Filename G:\EAC What\Terry Hall - Laugh... Plus (1997)\05. Terry Hall - Laugh... plus - Misty Water.wav But Hall, he says, helped to spearhead a change in attitudes. “People are more aware now of their own health, and people are starting to realise that their wellness is really important being on tour,” says Ficek. In recent months artists including Arlo Parks and Sam Fender have cancelled shows to focus on their mental health.

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In 2019, they released a new album, Encore, which featured Khan performing on a new song, 10 Commandments. It charted at No 1 in the UK albums chart – their highest-ever album placing. “Achieving a first No 1 album in our 60s restored our faith in humanity,” Hall told the Quietus. Almost 22 ago, Terry Hall followed up his debut solo album Home with 1997’s Laugh an album which featured collaborations with the likes of Stephen Duffy and Damon Albarn. It is released on vinyl for the first time next month.

In addition, there's the feeling that the Specials reunion has to do with the band's members reconciling themselves with the past, putting a final positive spin on their turbulent history. All of them struggled with life in the shadow of the Specials' legacy. After the split, Hall, Golding and Neville Staple had success with the Fun Boy Three, while Bradbury and Dammers soldiered on together through another Specials album, In the Studio, which spawned the hit single Free Nelson Mandela, but seems to have been even more traumatic to make than its predecessors. But it gradually became apparent that nothing they did for the rest of their lives would ever quite measure up to what they had achieved for two years in their early 20s. I don’t believe music can change anything,” says Terry Hall. “All you can do is put your point across, really.” Horace (left) and Terry Hall from The Specials during the filming for the Graham Norton Show at the BBC Television Centre in Wood Lane, London in April 2009. Photograph: Isabel Infantes/PAI didn’t realise I was spending the first 50 years of my life in this bubble called depression, and people told me about it but I had no idea what I was doing,” he told the DJ. “And then 10 years ago I had to get attention because of an incident and I found a doctor and she’s got me out of this bubble and said, ‘You know, you’ve got an illness but we can deal with it.’” Filename G:\EAC What\Terry Hall - Laugh... Plus (1997)\03. Terry Hall - Laugh... plus - Ballad of a Landlord.wav

Relations within the band became fraught, exacerbated by a punishing work schedule - "we played everywhere," says Bradbury, "including a caravan park in Crosshands, which, with all due respect to the people who live there, is a little out of the way" - and the kind of arguments that bands with a less determinedly political stance might never face: there was much heated discussion over the ideological correctness of travelling by limousine. Filename G:\EAC What\Terry Hall - Laugh... Plus (1997)\06. Terry Hall - Laugh... plus - A Room Full of Nothing.wav Everything that newspaper did wrong in diminishing him was erased by another young woman, 23 years later. The photo was endlessly shared of Saffiyah Khan, a Birmingham Asian girl wearing a Specials T-shirt, looking amused and calm in the shouting face of an EDF racist. I’m so glad he lived to see that. He was touched enough to call Khan and ask her to collaborate in a reworking of Prince Buster’s problematic 1963 song Ten Commandments Of Man – for the Specials’ first album of new material with Terry Hall in nearly 40 years [Encore]. No, they say, Dammers wasn't ex-communicated by the other members. Golding and Bradbury both claim they spent vast amounts of time trying to convince Dammers to take part and that it was his own intransigence that caused the split. "I spoke to Jerry night after night all the way through 2008," says Bradbury, "and at the end there just wasn't a meeting of the ways. A little more give and take, a few more people skills, it could definitely have worked out better.""He wanted to do one date, in Coventry, in front of 30,000 people, at the football stadium," says Hall. 'I thought that was a bit of a Take That thing. We wanted to play 2,000- to 3,000-sized venues. I don't think he likes the idea of touring, to be honest. I think he hid that a bit in his statement. But apart from that, I have no idea why Jerry isn't doing it."The last man I loved was a highly intelligent man from the Midlands whose childhood trauma had left him with an unreadable face. That’s how you take them with you, your first childhood idol, you carry them into middle-age love. I couldn’t explain to this boyfriend (who was younger than me) why Terry Hall’s premature passing at 63 made me cry so much because, to him at his age, Hall wasn’t that important. Just like the article I wrote, that wasn’t actually what I wrote, but did have my name beside it, that made Hall feel unimportant. Even their greatest achievement is mired in gloom: the 1981 No 1, Ghost Town, remarkable not just for its brilliantly original, impossibly bleak musical content but the way its tenure at No 1 coincided with some of the most serious urban rioting of the 20th century; and the fact that the band celebrated its success by splitting up in the dressing room at Top of the Pops. I was honoured to play a gig for the charity @tonicmusicmh with @libertines where Terry Hall was a patron & campaigner recently. Not just a legendary musician but someone who cared deeply about helping people with mental health struggles. He’ll be very sadly missed. a b c "The Official Charts Company – The Specials". Official Charts Company . Retrieved 10 March 2009.

Hall was still struggling with his mental health, he admitted around this time. In 2003, he had begun self-medicating with alcohol. In the last decade of his life, he sought medication, having been wary of it since being put on Valium as a teenager, as well as taking up art therapy. Terry was a wonderful husband and father and one of the kindest, funniest, and most genuine of souls. His music and his performances encapsulated the very essence of life… the joy, the pain, the humour, the fight for justice, but mostly the love.

Beyond our punky start on stage, it was in the studio with Elvis Costello producing, where Terry was able to sing quietly, that I think his hidden strength came out, a delivery which brought out the melancholy in some of The Specials’ songs, and which I think a lot of people could relate to. All my condolences and sympathies go out to his wife and family.” Hall remained active with The Specials into this year, with their last show together taking place at Escot Park in Devon on August 20. The band’s last release with Hall was the compilation ‘Protest Songs 1924-2012’, which arrived last September. They released their debut single, Gangsters (a reworking of Prince Buster’s Al Capone) in 1979, which reached No 6 in the UK singles chart. They would dominate the Top 10 over the next two years, peaking with their second No 1 single, and calling card, Ghost Town, in 1981. The lyrics, written by the band’s main songwriter, Dammers, dealt with Britain’s urban decay, unemployment and disfranchised youth. They embarked on a 30th anniversary tour in 2009 and performed at the 2012 London Olympics closing concert, but faced the death of drummer John Bradbury, and the departure of vocalist Neville Staple and guitarist Roddy Radiation over the next few years.