Terry Hall: fun boy free
Dorian LynskeyPodium politics took the Specials to number one. But Terry Hall is relieved to have got off his soapbox, he tells Dorian LynskeyTerry Hall asks if we can delay the first question until he's had a cigarette. He's not a big small talker, so there's an awkward silence while he fiddles with his rolling papers and tobacco on a sofa in the London flat of his friend Dave Stewart. With his long lugubrious face, he looks a bit fed up, but then he's looked a bit fed up ever since he found fame with Coventry ska heroes the Specials 25 years ago.
"I got stopped in Camden by one of those students who wear aprons for different charities," he says. "And this was from the mental health charity Mind. I've suffered from depression quite heavily for years. And he had a clipboard and said, 'Come on cheer up.'" A look of disbelief. "That's not how you approach someone who's got an illness. 'Cos I've had 'cheer up' since I was fucking four. You've got to think about how you're going to approach people."
Hall tells this anecdote to illustrate the thinking behind The Hour of Two Lights, his first project for six years. It's a bold and challenging piece of work, recorded with producer Mushtaq (formerly of Anglo-Asian rappers Fun-Da-Mental) and released on Damon Albarn's label. It features a multi-racial spectrum of musicians, and makes its points by crossing musical borders and not by taking to the podium.
"There was a huge political statement being made with the Specials," says Hall. "You just had to look at a photo and you got it. That's exactly what we feel about this. If you have Arabic and Hebrew on the same record you've made a political statement. I've been through the whole standing-on-a-box thing and it's great, but it gets sort of dangerous. The idea of suggestion sometimes is good."
When Hall left the Specials immediately after their number-one single Ghost Town, and returned to the charts just five months later with Fun Boy Three, he looked set to become one of the great British frontmen. This was not, however, part of his plan. He has spent the past two decades hopping from project to project: his bands the Colourfield, Terry, Blair & Anouchka and Vegas (with Stewart), appearances with Tricky, Gorillaz and the Lightning Seeds, and just two solo albums. After his last one, 1997's Laugh, he had no desire to be a solo artist again.
"I was in the middle of a divorce as I was trying to promote it, so it was pretty impossible," he says. "I just allowed myself to fall apart I think. Just let it go. Doing a solo record, you try to write about who you are and what you know, and if life's overtaken that it's very difficult to explain it. It becomes such a painful process. I thought, 'Why am I putting myself through this? I'm talking about divorce and loss and all this shit. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, I can avoid doing this.'"
Does he not find it cathartic writing about personal turmoil? "I have done. There was a song [Well Fancy That!] on the second Fun Boy Three album that dealt with me being sexually abused as a kid and that really helped. But the idea of being a tortured soul day in and day out doesn't appeal at all."
Hall's frankness is charming and disconcerting. When David Byrne, who produced that album, heard the song's candid description of Hall's abuse by a teacher, he told one interviewer: "He didn't tell his mum, he didn't tell his friends, but he's going to tell everybody."
At 44, Hall seems relatively happy, living in London with his wife and two teenage sons, and has no taste for musical soul-searching. He met Mushtaq two years ago and found a shared passion for combining musical traditions. After a year planning the record, Hall and Mushtaq sought out the musicians, 90% of whom had never seen the inside of a recording studio. The contributors include a 12-year-old Lebanese singer, a blind Algerian rapper, a septuagenarian Jewish clarinettist and Romany Rad, a band of Polish Gypsy asylum seekers.
"A lot of shit was going on at the same time as us recording this album and that's going to come through," says Hall. "With Romany Rad, we were playing with people who had been firebombed out of their houses in Poland. The stories are very, very upsetting. Things like they don't like bank holidays because their solicitor might go away at the weekend and that's when they swoop and get deported. When I was growing up bank holidays were about ice cream and going to the river."
Most of the musicians on The Hour of Two Lights live in Britain. Mushtaq, a Sufi Muslim, was born in London to a Bangladeshi father and Iranian mother and spent parts of his childhood in both countries. Hall also has tangled roots. "I was presented with a star of David when I was a kid and, 10 years on, I found out that my grandfather was a German Jewish watchmaker. I'm still searching, but there are different stories. I grew up in an environment where you didn't really know where you were from. Coventry was built on immigrants because it was an industrial city looking for cheap labour. I don't think it's an accident that a group like the Specials came out of that."
Towards the end of the interview Mushtaq appears, limping from a football injury. He explains how his three years in Iran as a child inspired the album title. "There's a folklore which prohibits young children from playing out during a certain hour because negative spirits come out. It's the hour of two lights: the end of day and the beginning of night, not quite settled."
Fifteen years Hall's junior and dressed in denim, Mushtaq makes a vivid contrast but the mutual respect is palpable. "I think with Mushtaq we've got quite a deep mutual understanding," says Hall.
"With the Specials, there were seven people in that band. Are you going to tell me we all had exactly the same political beliefs? Well we didn't. Absolutely not. But we were walking on stage each night and saying, 'This is what we all believe.' If you're going to present yourself as a unified thing then you've got to be that. Otherwise, what are you doing?"
Personality clashes drove Hall to leave the Specials, but he also felt that, with Ghost Town, they had achieved what they had set out to do. "With every record, it's a little agenda. If I feel like I've achieved it then I stop it."
The agenda this time is less strident. The last lyrics on the record are: "The word is love." But is Hall stating the obvious? "I used to believe that argument, that we're all the same under the skin," he says. "Well we're not, but it's about recognising that we're not and what we are. Yeah, it is obvious, but it still needs to be said. It really is about that, isn't it?"
· The Hour of Two Lights by Terry Hall & Mushtaq is out now on Honest Jons.
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