A MESSAGE TO YOU
WHILE others used lockdown 2020 to learn baking, sewing or foreign languages, Terry Hall spent it pursuing more esoteric interests. In a year of plague and paranoia, Hall began collecting protest songs. He started emailing back and forth with Horace Panter and Lynval Golding, his fellow Specials, who were locked down in Warwickshire and Seattle respectively. By last summer, the trio had come up with a long list of around 50 songs.
“Protest has been such a key word in the last two years,” says Hall from his garden in Islington. “I wanted to see what kind of impact they had. What you can achieve, what they mean. Do these songs change things? I’m not sure they do, but they do have a role in making people aware of issues. We didn’t really see it as an album, it was more like an interim project where we could talk to teach other and throw around songs. Then we thought we’d record some songs and see what happens.”
They ended up with the 12 which feature on Protest Songs 1924–2012 – the rapid follow-up to their 2019 album Encore. As you might expect for a band who have caught the national mood on more than one occasion, Protest Songs 1924–2012 Specials tune, original or cover, seems to carry some form of a social message. The band themselves are the physical embodiment of a political ideal – inclusive, progressive, vocal, committed. “They represent something positive about Britain and offer a commentary on what’s shit about it,” says guitarist Steve Cradock, who played on and . “They’ve always made protest music and they’ve always done it in an effortless and important way. They stand up for things and they make people think.”
