“That really blew me away”: the performance that inspired Terry Hall to become a musician
In this age of modernity, we are constantly being reminded that everybody has the means of cultural production at their fingertips. Countless now world-famous musicians got their start recording music alone in their bedrooms, but this DIY approach to music-making has not always been commonplace within the industry. In the days before the punk rock boom of the mid-1970s, rock stardom was seemingly reserved only for a select few untouchable figures, something that a young Terry Hall struggled to come to grips with.
By the mid-1980s, Terry Hall was a regular feature of the pop charts. After providing a voice to the unity and rebellion of the two-tone movement, fronting The Specials, the vocalist found pop stardom with the breakaway group Fun Boy Three. After that, Hall enjoyed an expansive and enduring career in music, recording alongside the likes of Gorillaz, The Lightning Seeds, and Shakespears Sister to name only a handful. This legendary career in music would, at one point, have seemed unimaginable to the singer.
After all, Hall grew up during the 1960s and 1970s, when pop music was unattainable for most ordinary people, particularly those from industrial cities like Coventry. “Music didn’t ever seem accessible,” the singer once recalled to Mojo. “My dad used to play records by Piaf and Paul Robeson; when I got into Roxy Music and Bowie, it seemed too massive because it was on telly.”
These expectations of music were reaffirmed by Hall’s early experiences in live music, too. “The first outdoor big gig I went to was Pink Floyd at Knebworth in 1975,” he remembered. “Trying to relate to that at 13 was like, impossible.” Although seeing peak-era Pink Floyd at Knebworth was undoubtedly a special experience for the future Specials frontman, it certainly did not provide him with a method or any inspiration for breaking into the music industry himself.
This all changed when punk rock hit the airwaves around 1976. In the UK, groups like the Sex Pistols, The Clash, and The Damned led the way when it came to establishing the rebellious sounds of this grassroots revolution throughout the nation. For the first time, it seemed as though anybody could write and record music, so long as you had something to say and a basic knowledge of two or three guitar chords.
Hall tended to prefer the punk sounds emanating from New York City, where the likes of Patti Smith, The Ramones, and Television were ripping up the cultural rulebook from within the graffitied walls of the CBGB club. Within that scene, one artist in particular took Hall’s fancy. “I saw Richard Hell, and that really blew me away. The first time, I thought, I really love that band,” the vocalist shared.
Explaining the appeal of Hell and the other groups emerging from Manhattan, the ‘Ghost Town’ singer said, “They were a lot older – here there was like lots of bands like [mild disdain] Eater, that were, like, kids singing about being on the dole, but then bands like Talking Heads and Patti Smith were talking about something else, they weren’t talking about working in a factory in Burnley.” Adding, “I found that really interesting.”
Pretty soon, Hall used this newfound inspiration from the likes of Richard Hell to form his own punk band in Coventry. Eventually, the singer found himself in the punk outfit The Coventry Automatics, which morphed into the early incarnation of The Specials before too long. The rest, as they say, is history, but it seems as though Hall’s extensive career in music might never have happened without songs like ‘Blank Generation’.
