“I ALMOST started writing my memoirs a few years ago,” Terry Hall told Uncut in 2019. “The working title was ‘I’ve Worked With Some Right Cunts’, which didn’t go down very well. But I’ll wait until I’m 70 until I write that.”
Sadly, Hall never got to that stage, but it would have been a gripping read – and one made up of fascinating contradictions. As the focal point of one of the most thrillingloved easy listening. But whether quelling riots on stage with The Specials or crooning ballads later in his career, central to everything was that extraordinarily ordinary voice. While his post-punk peers howled and yelped, Hall sang in a blank, hushed whisper, with a thoroughly Midlands accent, in a way that could be sinister or conversational or tender. “It was in the studio with Elvis Costello producing where Terry was able to sing quietly, that I think his hidden strength came out,” wrote Jerry Dammers in tribute. “His delivery brought out the melancholy in some Specials songs which I think a lot of people could relate to.”
