The good spirit of 1979

In winter four years ago they were back on stage in London. Terry Hall was clutching his microphone stand like a weary barricade fighter, wearing a camouflage jacket and singing "Too Much Too Young". The song was 40 years old like his band, the Specials, he was approaching 60.

The return of the specials worked like a miracle. While the Prime Minister, then called Theresa May, was tinkering with Brexit to make Britain more British and England more English again, Terry Hall conjured up his own Britain and another England. It wasn't just the right wing who longed for the old days. The left, too, dreamed back to a time when whites and blacks shared subcultures, liked punk and reggae, and whether they were white skinheads or black rudeboys, proudly flaunted the proletarian, whether they were truly proletarians or not . It was the attitude.

So four years ago Terry Hall reassembled the band, or at least the rest of the Specials, at the famous 100 Club under Oxford Street. On the blood-red walls behind glass hung the concert posters of the past 50 years: "100 Club Punk Special", September 1976, with the Sex Pistols, The Clash, the Buzzcocks, Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Damned. And those of the veterans who were still alive had gathered back in the basement to celebrate the singer and band who missed punk but made the best of it: ska.

Now, unfortunately, the specials will never exist again. Terry Hall is dead, he died on December 19, as the bereaved of his band tweeted, after a short illness.

Terence Edward Hall was from Coventry in central England. There he dropped out of school at the age of 14, worked as a bricklayer and everything else, founded a punk band called Squad, the Coventry Automatics and finally the Specials. "When you were 12 in 1979, the Specials were the biggest band in the world," Mark Lamarr, the disc jockey and comedian, once wrote. Which was also because in just two years they sang everything that could be sung against Margaret Thatcher and the life of young people in the cities at that time. Too Much Too Young and Rat Race, Concrete Jungle and most notably Ghost Town, originally about the youth riots in Liverpool and London. “Ghost Town” was topical with every comeback of the specials: when the banks collapsed, when the spirit of Brexit was around, when the pandemic emptied the cities.

However, in the music of the specials, in the specials themselves, there was also an older spirit. The spirit of 1968/69. 1968 was the year British Minister Enoch Powell gave a speech on Adolf Hitler's birthday to warn of the "bloodstreams" of migration and to awaken dormant fears of the black man in older whites. For younger whites in cities like Coventry and London, the black man was the friend next door in the slim-fitting suit with Trojan Records' ska and reggae records. The Specials also saw themselves in this tradition. They played "A Message to You, Rudy", a Trojan classic by Dandy Livingstone, they played "Monkey Man" by Toots

Jerry Dammers, who formed the band with Terry Hall in Coventry, also ran the 2 Tone Records label for recording the specials. The two tones stood for the duple time in the ska beat and for black and white. The record sleeves were checked in black and white. Black and white were the musicians on the specials. Jerry Dammer's battle cry was: "Music is politics!" Terry Hall saw it that way too, but never as a dogma. Hall and Dammers split: Dammers released "Free Nelson Mandela" under the name Special AKA, Hall formed the band Fun Boy Three with Neville Staple and Lynval Golding of the Specials four years ago, from which the Specials emerged again and again for the last time.

The Specials' last album was called Encore, the encore after four decades without recording as a band - the intervening years Terry Hall had spent making his own records and collaborating on tracks for Bananarama and the Go-Go's, as well as his own fashion line to design for Fred Perry. On "Encore," the specials returned to classics like The Valentines' "Blam Blam Fever" and The Equals' "Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys." "10 Commandments" was the name of a song that also referred to a ska classic, Prince Buster's "Ten Commandments of Man", the ten commandments for women in the service of men. The Specials' "10 Commandments" was Jamaican music's revision for the 21st century. A women's rights activist, Saffiyah Khan, sang her Ten Commandments. On stage at the 100 Club in London, she wore the Specials' comeback t-shirt. Terry Hall listened to her.

He still wanted to make an album with the specials. Before they could begin, the pandemic came. Terry Hall also fell seriously ill with Covid, he postponed writing new songs until after Corona and recorded a cover album with protest songs with the Specials. Bob Marley and Frank Zappa, Rod McKuen and Big Bill Broonzy, Leonard Cohen and Malvina Reynolds. Songs, not just for Fred Perry polo shirt wearers, as the musicians explained when "Protest Songs 1924-2012" was released last fall. The Red Specials album was their very last.

Without Terry Hall, the band dies too. He was 63 years old.