The Specials

In memory of Terry Hall (1959-2022)

Late Seventies. Somewhere in the West Midlands, something new is being born, destined to leave an indelible mark on the present and the future. On the outskirts of a country torn by unresolved conflicts, sliding into the Thatcher era without suspecting it would stay there for a long time, there's a music scene that makes inclusivity and the blending of styles, influences and genres its defining trait — in some ways a political statement too, in its desire to inject, almost flaunt, a multiculturalism that mirrors the environment this music comes from. A challenge to racism and to a certain deep-rooted England, if you want to look at it that way. It all starts in one very specific place, Coventry, from a newly born label, Two-Tone Records, and (also) from the band in which the label's founder plays keyboards: his name is Jeremy David Hounsell Dammers, and his group has recently decided to call itself The Specials. The bond between the city, the label and the bands animating its scene, however seemingly small, however theoretically peripheral, gives rise to a new movement that injects into British rock agents that until not many years before were foreign to it — ska and its descendants, reggae and rocksteady — in a formula that would later be called second wave ska or, more simply, 2 tone.

Another major protagonist of this story is Terence Edward Hall, known to everyone simply as Terry, frontman of the Specials. Years later, it would be him who would explain what it meant to grow up in Coventry in those years, and, in a sense, why the 2-Tone movement was born precisely there: "Coventry was built on immigrants because it was an industrial city looking for cheap labour. I don't think it's a coincidence that a band like The Specials came out of that context." Formed in that same 1977 when punk exploded, the band debuted in 1979 hand in hand with Two Tone Records, which released the single "Gangsters". The track was an immediate success — once again with a helping hand from John Peel — and was quickly followed by the self-titled debut album, "The Specials", produced by none other than Elvis Costello. The lead single, still well known in our part of the world today, is a cover of an English reggae forerunner, Dandy Livingstone: "A Message To You Rudy".

It's an explosive start, complete with a number one spot on the UK charts. Two years later, however, it's already all over for The Specials. Friction and tension within the band have overtaken the initial enthusiasm, and before long the project will split up. There's still time, though, for one last hit to release on the market, one that will indeed stay — at home, at least — at number one for eleven consecutive weeks. It's called "Ghost Town", and better than any other track of the era it captures the spirit of the times, thick with urban unrest, clouds on the horizon, post-industrial futures in which cities like Coventry now seem out of place, decontextualised. Ghost towns, precisely, populated by shuttered venues, by brawls staged in places where people once used to dance, with a chorus that says it all: "Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town? We danced and sang as the music played in any bathroom". A frontal attack on the new powers-that-be, in what is perhaps the most political song the band ever wrote.

The same spirit of anger and frustration, tinged with a drop of condescension and self-satisfied irony, also runs through the single's B-side, and in particular through a track destined, in hindsight, to remain one of the most iconic in the Specials' catalogue: "Friday Night, Saturday Morning". It's Terry Hall's journey to the end of the night, a chiaroscuro postcard sent straight from the working-class belly of Britain — happy only on the surface. As if in one long tracking shot, the Specials' singer rides a ska/reggae groove that's never sounded so bittersweet, only vaguely carefree, to line up a series of snapshots depicting the English working class's weekend at the turn of the 70s/80s, dominated by the stereotypes of a quick, hollow kind of fun, inevitably giving way, perhaps, to feelings of boredom and apathy.
The opening verses already say it all: the early alarm, the job that drives you out of your mind within a few hours, a Friday night that arrives finding the hypothetical protagonist in the state of a zombie ("I can't talk and I can't walk"), yet still determined to seek fun at all costs (“But I know where I’m going to go/ I’m going watch my money go/ At the Locarno”) within an imposed script that's always the same ("that's what I do at weekends").

Periodically interrupted by an easy-to-memorise, chant-like chorus, propelled by the bassline and framed by a splendid organ solo, the sequence of images Terry Hall frames in "Friday Night, Saturday Morning" keeps relentlessly describing, in a few but effective words, a routine that seems to keep sliding downward, even as the narrating voice keeps confusing a fun born of dazed stupor ("I like to venture into town/ I like to get a few drinks down") with a merciless reflection on the state of things ("I don't like life when things get dull").
After sifting through every single moment of the night unfolding before our eyes like an ordinary yet, in its own way, mythical saga, two o'clock in the morning strikes, and for Hall it's time to "leave this paradise". But it's not yet time to close the curtain. There's a stop at the chip shop to eat while stumbling over someone else's vomit from a little earlier, daydreaming of having had a romantic encounter ("Wish I had a lipstick on my shirt") only to find instead piss stains that have somehow ended up on one's own shoes. It's now Saturday morning, and the ritual — at once personal and collective — is over, at least until the following weekend.

Terry Hall passed away in November 2022, at the age of 63. After his time with The Specials, with whom he would later reunite on several occasions, he went on to found various other projects, most notably Fun Boy Three and Vegas (with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics). Above all, he never turned down a collaboration of any kind, working with everyone from Lily Allen to Gorillaz. And it's the latter, more than anyone, who seem to have inherited the spirit of Two-Tone and brought it into the present, courtesy of a Damon Albarn who has always spoken of Hall as his true, great mentor. Just a few hours after the news of his death broke, in November 2022, a video appeared on the social channels of the Blur frontman showing Albarn picking out the unmistakable notes of “Friday Night, Saturday Morning” on the piano. The caption, a chill-inducing farewell: “Terry, you meant the world to me. I love you”.

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18/04/2026