‘Days after Terry Hall died he walked towards me – it was incredible’ | Music | Entertainment
Terry Hall of The Specials performs on stage at The Roundhouse (Image: Redferns via Getty Images)
Just days after Terry Hall died, he appeared to his close friend and bandmate Lynval Golding in a vision. “I was with my cousin, Alvin, in Jamaica when I suddenly saw Terry,” the Specials guitarist recalls. “He came towards me, and what struck me was that he had the face of the 17-year-old Terry I first knew, but the body of the 63-year-old Terry. He looked at me and smiled that unmistakable smile.
“I said, ‘Man, you look good.’ Then he was gone. I said, ‘Alvin, I’ve just seen Terry’. It wasn’t frightening. It was incredibly peaceful, and I’ve never forgotten it. I knew he’d passed away about a week earlier. That’s why the experience felt so profound.
“Then something else happened that was even stranger. Lindy, Terry’s wife, asked what I was planning to do at the funeral. I’d performed Redemption Song at Brad’s funeral [for drummer John Bradbury] at the same crematorium in Golders Green, with cello, violin and viola, but this time I told her I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the emotional strength. Every time I thought about it, I just broke down.
“A couple of days later, I went back to my room for a rest and when I woke up, I could hear music playing in the living room. It was Andy Williams singing Moon River. The moment I heard it, I knew. I remember thinking, ‘That’s it. That’s what I’m going to sing.’ I rang Lindy and told her I’d decided to perform Moon River.
“As soon as I said the title, she started crying, which completely stopped me in my tracks. She said, ‘You’re a genius.’ I asked why and she told me Moon River had been their wedding song. Not only that, it was the last song she’d played to Terry while he was lying on his deathbed. I hadn’t been at their wedding, and I’d never known that was their song. No one had told me about the music she’d played to him at the end of his life. Yet somehow, that was the song that came to me. I’ve never really been able to explain it.”
Terry’s death from pancreatic cancer in December 2022 devastated generations of fans. But now Lynval and bassist Horace ‘Gentleman’ Panter are celebrating his life, and The Specials’ career, by releasing Live From The Cathedral as a 24-track, three LP set, recorded at the band’s triumphant four homecoming nights in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral in July 2019. The 6CD boxset includes the full recordings from three of those individual nights.
The first time they heard the playback, both men wept. “I don’t put on individual tracks, I listen to the entire performance from beginning to end,” says Jamaican-born Lynval, 75 this month. “At first, I listened to it completely alone because I wasn’t ready to share those emotions with anyone else. I wanted that experience to be mine. Now I can listen to it with a smile. Sometimes I still cry, but mostly I just feel Terry’s presence.”
The vision he’d had of Terry wasn’t unique. Lynval has a psychic awareness, he says, that means he can feel people passing. It happened with his father, and stepmother – he knew they had gone before he was told. His sister Molly calls him her “psychic brother”.
Golding was always close to Hall. “I bonded with him from day one and I took care of him. He had a wonderfully unique, slightly surreal sense of humour that nobody else had. At least twice on stage he said he was going to marry me – that was his humour.”
The Specials lit the touchpaper for the whole 2-Tone movement, topping the charts with ska and reggae hits like Too Much Too Young and the haunting masterpiece Ghost Town.
They were astounded by their reception in America. In New York, Debbie Harry, Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol were among the crowd.
“I’ve never seen so much cocaine in my life,” Lynval laughs. “We owe a lot to The Clash. We learned how to perform from them and how to get messages across. Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, they gave us the tools.”
That 1980 US tour was successful but it broke the band. “We needed time to breathe,” he said.
Lynval, Terry and Neville Staple formed the Fun Boy Three who notched up four Top Ten hits, including It Ain’t What You Do with Bananarama, and three Top 20s in two years.
The Specials Terry Hall with Lynval Golding for a press call (Image: Darren Quinton/Coventry Telegraph)
The first pointer to the horrific childhood abuse Terry suffered was his 1983 song Well Fancy That; at 12, he was abducted by a teacher and delivered to a French paedophile ring. He later said: “The only way I could deal with the experience was to write about it in a song.” He didn’t discuss it publicly until 2019.
When he tried to take his own life in 2004, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. “In Newcastle, Terry decided he couldn’t go on stage that night; I realised he had to take his B12 booster,” Lynval recalls.
The Specials reformed in 2008. “It took me five years to get the band back together to celebrate our 25th anniversary. It was really hard work keeping everyone happy. I was the Henry Kissinger of the band. It was almost a disaster. Jerry Dammers turned up looking like Santa Claus. We’d all grown up, and we were all different. Jerry wanted to jazz everything up, but Terry said ‘No, we have to play exactly as the fans want to hear it’, and that’s why we did it without Jerry. The band got so tight.”
The reunited Specials were successful all over again. Their 2019 studio album was their first to top the charts. 2021’s follow-up, Protest Songs 1924 – 2012 peaked at No 2. They were planning a new studio album when Terry died. “We had the studio booked and everything; we never intended to release the Cathedral shows. We’d filmed and recorded them as part of a documentary we were doing. We had no idea how bad Terry’s health was; we didn’t see it coming.”
Lynval, who Hall called “a beautiful soul”, had relocated to Gig Habor, Washington and had been at home recuperating from spinal surgery on the back of his neck. “The plan was to meet in London and go through the ideas we had for the next studio album. Terry didn’t come to the meeting, which was odd, so we went to his home and Lindy told us he was in bed and not well. I was absolutely shocked to learn he had pancreatic cancer.”
Golding was born in St Catherine, Jamaica, and still considers it his spiritual home. He was 13 when his parents split up and his tailor father brought him to Gloucester. It was quite a culture shock. “We come from rural Jamaica – farming; we were country boys.”
At 18, Lynval moved to Coventry where he would eventually befriend Jerry Dammers who had a dream of forming a band who paired reggae with rock. I was lucky enough to see their first ever gig as The Specials in June 1978, opening for The Clash at Aylesbury Friars (That morning they’d been the Coventry Automatics). They mixed punk attitudes with ska, the punk made danceable, the ska intensified. Their first single Gangsters went Top Ten eleven months later. Hall had been working in a shop selling stamps and coins when Dammers recruited him, saying “philately will get you nowhere.”
Lynval has opened up the incredible moment he saw the vision of Terry (Image: REACH)
Terry Hall and Lynval Golding of The Specials performing at a Teenage Cancer Trust gig (Image: PA)
Lynval says, “I loved all those guys… it would have been our 50th anniversary in 2028 but we couldn’t play without Terry; I couldn’t do it anymore anyway not with my back and my knee.”
Family man Golding is proud of his three children and his grandsons. “I can’t play guitar anymore so I’m passing it onto the next generation,” he smiles.
Coventry no longer feels like home though. Lynval pulls out his phone and shows me shocking footage of a man abusing a harmless bus driver. Lynval was stabbed in the neck at a Coventry nightclub in 1982 and rushed to intensive care; Neville’s grandson Fidel was murdered there.
“The best thing about Coventry now is the M1 out of it,” he says. Is there a solution? “I have one message for the world. It’s love, love, love.”
In Jamaica, nobody knows him, which means Lynval can perform acts of charity – like giving homeless hurricane survivors food and clothes – without being recognised. He isn’t chasing acclaim.
“It’s been an incredible journey,” he says. “I’m so blessed; I’ve had so much fun. I give thanks to Jerry Dammers because it was his vision. And it’s right that you write this Garry. You know the whole history because you were there from the beginning.”
As we hobble down to Kings Cross, with two good eyes, two good ears and just two working knees between the pair of us, Lynval is recognised by a TFL worker who shakes his hand and devours the album sleeve, picking out classics such as Concrete Jungle, Man At C&A and Rat Race. “The Specials meant so much,” he says. “You spoke to us and for us.”
“Songs for a lost generation,” says Lynval, adding, “We’ve released this for Terry. It sums up our whole story.”
“Dear Terry. Such a sad loss. What was he like?”
Lynval smiles. “Terry was simply Terry—and that was what made him so special.”
* The Specials Live From The Cathedral is out now.
