The song Terry Hall wanted to be remembered for: “My favourite of all time”
There’s something to be said about when an artist has the utmost confidence in their own work, and while sometimes it can come across as arrogant, when The Specials first emerged at the tail end of the 1970s, Terry Hall and his band must have known they were onto something.
Not every band is blessed with this brazen sense of belief in what they’re doing, and while sometimes it might be better to exercise a display of humility so as to not get in the way of yourself and fall foul of the high mark you’ve already set yourself, with The Specials, their music was so singular for the time and place it was released that there has to have always been some sort of inclination that they were, as their name suggests, special.
However, while early signs were promising, the band would ultimately separate after just two studio albums and reform under the slightly tweaked moniker of The Special AKA, with only keyboard player Jerry Dammers and drummer John Bradbury present from the original lineup. By this point, Hall had chosen to go his own separate ways and formed Fun Boy Three with Neville Staple and Lynval Golding, taking their 2-tone and ska roots forward and transforming them into a more pop and new wave-oriented sound.
While this was also ultimately something that Hall should have displayed confidence in, it was another short-lived project that saw the group only release two albums together, and in 1984, he found himself making another major career transition and forming The Colourfield. Perhaps the least well-received of his projects to date, things were ultimately slipping away from Hall in terms of the chokehold that he’d previously had on the British underground, and while the public weren’t as enamoured by this new identity that he’d forged for himself, Hall’s self-belief was still unwavering.
The Colourfield released their debut album, Virgins and Philistines, in 1985 to a muted response, with only one of their singles, ‘Thinking of You’, making its way into the higher end of the UK charts. Peaking at number 12, it was the high mark of what the group managed to achieve in their brief existence, but that doesn’t mean that Hall ever looked back on it with any sense of remorse or disenchantment at their lowly commercial reception.
In fact, he’d go as far as to say that ‘Thinking of You’ was not just the best song he’d ever written, but claimed during a 1985 interview with International Musician & Recording World that “‘Thinking of You’ is probably my favourite song of all time.”
While the bossa nova rhythm and sophisti-pop sensibilities are certainly a far cry from everything he’d done in his previous projects, ‘Thinking of You’ is perhaps an unusual choice for Hall to select as the best song he’d ever contributed to, let alone his favourite song of all time. Considering the widespread acclaim of tracks like ‘Ghost Town’, and the brilliance of ‘Too Much Too Young’, it’s a rogue selection, but given Hall’s ardent polemicist stances, perhaps it should be too much of a surprise.
