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Filename G:\EAC What\Terry Hall - Laugh... Plus (1997)\06. Terry Hall - Laugh... plus - A Room Full of Nothing.wav Just reaching out, are you OK?” the song goes. It continues with what sounds like a mental health manifesto that Hall would wholeheartedly endorse. “Time is tight, life’s a fight/ Now’s the time, get it right/ People laughing, people crying/ Can’t you see we’re really trying?/ So goodbye to sorrow… Say hello to tomorrow.” 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." In 2008, inspired by the Pixies’ reunion in 2004, Hall announced that he would be reforming the Specials for a tour and new music, albeit without founding member Jerry Dammers, who claimed he had been forced out. “The Specials was this big hole which took up four years of my life,” Hall told the Telegraph. “More than anything, I really wanted to see these people again.”

Terry Hall’s catalogue is a series of immaculate burning bridges, reflecting the listeners fear and longing, appearing different at sunrise than sunset. “Come here,” I’d say to the stone-faced man from the Midlands, as I kissed to them. Hall struggled to write lyrics for a follow-up, he said. “The arrival of the pandemic affected me enormously. I spent around three months trying to figure out what was going on. I couldn’t write a single word. I spent the time trying to figure out how not to die.” Instead, they covered historic protest songs and released Protest Songs 1924-2012 in 2021, which peaked at No 2. Jerry Dammers, Terry Hall, Lynval Golding, John Bradbury, Roddy Radiation, Horace Panter, Neville StapleSelected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s and Hall’s former partner wrote that she was “gutted”. “He was a lovely, sensitive, talented and unique person. Our extremely brief romance resulted in the song Our Lips Are Sealed, which will forever tie us together in music history. Terrible news to hear this,” she tweeted. 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. (2/4) Taking to social media, the ska icons confirmed that the influential singer had passed away from a “brief illness” at the age of 63. They honoured him as “a beautiful friend, brother and one of the most brilliant singers, songwriters and lyricists this country has ever produced”. a b c "The Official Charts Company – The Specials". Official Charts Company . Retrieved 10 March 2009.

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. Filename G:\EAC What\Terry Hall - Laugh... Plus (1997)\15. Terry Hall - Laugh... plus - Bang Went Forever.wavFilename G:\EAC What\Terry Hall - Laugh... Plus (1997)\03. Terry Hall - Laugh... plus - Ballad of a Landlord.wav

The Specials' success had been sudden and immense: five top 10 singles and two No 1s in under two years between 1979 and 1981, with a whole youth movement, 2-Tone, effectively forming in their wake. Their concerts were regularly disrupted by violence (Hall and Jerry Dammers were arrested and charged with incitement to riot after one particularly bloody confrontation between fans and bouncers in Cambridge) and the attentions of the National Front: the band had begun playing ska in the hope of short-circuiting the far right's concerted effort to co-opt the burgeoning skinhead revival, and recruiting fans instead to their left-wing, anti-racist credo.The fuse gets lit all the time, but someone's able to stamp it out now," says Bradbury. He frowns. "Of course, there'll probably come a time when we're not able to. I don't want to be tempting fate in this article." Across the table, Terry Hall laughs again. "Being in the Specials," says Golding firmly, "is wonderful." Hall was born in Coventry on 19 March 1959 to a family who predominantly worked in the car industry. He was an academically gifted child and also a noted footballer who was invited to try out for West Bromwich Albion – an opportunity his parents declined based on the inconvenience of travelling across the Midlands. After he sailed through the 11-plus exam, his parents also declined his place at a nearby grammar school.