Mojo - The Music Magazine

The face and the beat of The Specials take on their history, and face down their critics.

SITTING IN A NORTH LONDON Café with Specials singer Terry Hall and drummer John Bradbury, the true import of the Specials' reunion hits home. These two men have been sorely tested - Bradbury survived a recent, self-styled "brush" with cancer, while Hall takes medication to control longterm manic-depression - and you're struck by the role in their separate rehabilitations of the band they helped start 30 years ago. They both have much to thank the Specials for (Bradbury met his wife of 30 years at the band's first London gig) even if it has sometimes felt more like an albatross than a medal round their necks (It can get fucking annoying," says Hall, "like when you get a plumber round and he clocks you and the quote suddenly doubles"). Together, they are sterling company, although you can't help feeling the imposing Bradbury sees his role partly as "protection". Hall's reputation for fragility precedes him, yet his disarming frankness and doleful humour make such apprehensions dissolve. He is certainly sturdy enough to face down the brunt of criticisms by former bandmate Jerry Dammers, whose opposition to the Specials reunion, based partly on well-grounded suspicions that his input isn't welcome, has focused on Hall and manager Steve Blackwell's alleged "takeover" of the band he formed and fuelled with his ideas.

How are you finding the tour treadmill, '09-style? I'm sure I recall you slagging off festivals not long ago...
TH: Festivals are still horrible. But it's been interesting to see how other bands operate.

What have you learned?
TH: That most bands are stupid.

How does that stupidity manifest itself?
TH: They go on stage.

JB: I never thought we were a festival band. But it's where a whole new generation of fans get to see us, and they seem to like it.

So what's your problem with festivals? Hippies? Patchouli?
TH: Glastonbury is like Fort Glastonbury, with that big old fence. It's like Berlin. The patchouli's well gone.

JB: "Abandon hope all ye who enter here!"

The age range in your audiences is quite staggering.
TH: Obviously you can spot the original fans. But in Japan we played to audiences, average age of about 25, and they were singing along. That was really lovely, I thought.

JB: Lynval said to an audience in Osaka, 'Where are your parents?' But we do have our rock solid supporters club, and they really make the atmosphere in a lot of places. Thank God we never did stadiums - the O2 or whatever. Every show we've done has been spot on. I've had friends come and say, Best thing I've ever seen, and they're talking about the audience.

TH: That was the original idea [of the reunion] - to celebrate with the people who bought the records and still want to see us do it live. They're crucial to it. We wouldn't tour for the sake of touring. I couldn't do that... It's to embrace something. Friends.

What have the biggest challenges been?
JB: It was worth working and training and getting in shape for, but it wasn't easy. I'm a 56-year-old bloke doing a 90-minute football match. You have to be aware of that. When you're a kid you do it on adrenaline. Now I think we're all fit enough to do it and it shows. We've still got the energy in the performance.

TH: I found it life-affirming. There are moments when you look at each other on stage and you realise that what you have done is valid and will live on. I think that's really important. A big reason for making records over the years has been so that they could live on after me. So that people could discover something I've done the way I have discovered things, like Nick Drake or whatever, that I wasn't around for first time round.

Did it require a big change of mind to go back, Terry? Your solo career has been so much about moving on, not looking back.
TH: But I think I can do it precisely *because I've moved on. We had a meeting in King's Cross in 2007, and I just wanted to go to a meeting with all the members. At that point that would have been enough for me, to see them all and be able to tell them all what I thought of them.

Both Brad and myself have been through these life-altering experiences in the last five years, and when you go through that you tend to reassess everything, not just with your band but with your family and your friends, everything. It was important for me to do that - it was a massive chunk of my life, what I did with the Specials and what I did with Neville and Lynval afterwards. And it was at a very impressionable age. I just wanted to look at it all again. And then to say, Well, shall we celebrate what we've done? It just made sense really.

Were either of you asked to be in Specials Mk 2?
JB: I didn't want to do it. I wouldn't have done it without Terry, simple as that. It can't work without Terry. As far as I am concerned, the front line has got to be there. Other members... of course we're all important. People are kind enough to say that my sound is the Specials sound. Fine, I'll take that. I won't get big-headed about it. But I'm proud to be part of it, part of the chemistry.

How did it feel to be playing together again?
JB: Whatever was said back then is almost meaningless from the moment you walk back into a room with your compatriots and strike up the music. That changes your mind for you. You have to be there doing it to realise it. When people left the Specials for whatever reason, it was a tough time for everyone. We were worked to the bone. It finished us off. Whatever people said, at the time they may have meant it, or they may not have meant it, but it was induced...

How hard did you try to get Jerry Dammers on board?
TH: We rehearsed a couple of times with Jerry. We rehearsed down here [in London] and in Coventry but the question was, We're rehearsing, now what do we do? I think Jerry just wanted to rehearse, but we didn't want to just rehearse, we wanted to *do something. You can get lost in a rehearsal room. It's like in a studio, making an album - you can just get lost. But that wasn't the point. We wanted to play these songs with the people who had both the records. Jerry never seemed keen on that idea, but me and Lynval were *very keen on that idea. And that's where it fell apart. But at no point did we say to Jerry, You shouldn't do what we wanna do. But he chose not to.

Jerry wanted to do something new with the songs?
TH: We didn't think doing it again should be about experimenting with music. After The Specials, that's when I experimented with music, for my own thing. So I wasn't into the whole idea of deconstructing the first two Specials albums. I thought it was a pointless exercise. But the thing is, there is room for everything! There would have been room for Jerry to do his Arkestra *and this... Just as there's room for my banging on about manic depression and lost love. I'm not about to say, Ghost Town, can we make it a bit more about relationships? Leave it be.

What relit your enthusiasm for a reunion
TH: I went to see the Pixies at Brixton [in June 2004] and it was everything I wanted from a gig. It meant something, to see them playing those songs again. The thing was, you didn't expect it from the Pixies. You'd expect it from *Racey. The memory of that spurred me on to wanna do this again, because it made sense.

Later on, I saw Patti Smith doing Horses, and Sparks doing Kimono My House. I wanted to see Sparks do that because I missed it the first time around, and the last time I saw Patti Smith doing those songs was in Birmingham [in 1976]. Horses was such an important album for me. But it was also about a night out, do you know what I mean? A night to remember.

The Pixies kind of made reunions acceptable...
TH: It's not so frowned on to be an old git either. Now the record business is crumbling... they need us! Declining record sales, and Playstations, it's destroyed the business. It's what we dreamed of when we were young punks, and now it's actually happened. At the same time, gigs seem more important than ever. Going to see bands now is the equivalent of opening up that album when you got it home. That pleasure has mostly gone now.

Why is it, do you think, that Specials still seem relevant?
JB: The Specials get called timeless. Part of it I'm sure is the socio-political resonance. Times don't seem to have changed that much, or maybe they've swung back to how they were when we were singing about this stuff the first time around.

TH: I think we were beautifully naive. It sounds a bit wank, but the people who bought our records knew where we were coming from. Growing up in Coventry in the '60s and '70s it was rough as hell. There was a big connection with the people who came to see us. That ended up being reflected in the stage invasions and the fans sleeping on our floors. We couldn't do it any other way. The Specials was like going to the football - just something you did.

How is being in the Specials different to how it was before?
TH: Emails. Emus...

JB: Onstage it's no different, or better. Perhaps because it's the second bite of the cherry and we know what's at stake... We just react to the way the people who own us set us up. Every gig, they've demanded of us the performance of a lifetime.

The band certainly seem well-drilled...
JB: What we haven't needed so far is an MD [Musical Director]. We've managed to do this amongst ourselves. Whereas before we never really tried, and much of it was dragged away from us. We've discovered an ability to get on with it, to produce ourselves.

TH: You have to trust each other to do what you do. I've seen artists get MDs in, but why? Because they haven't got time - because they're designing wallpaper or something - to sort their own band out. That's terrible, man.

Terry, how has medication changed your life?
TH: The drugs I take keep me level. I couldn't have done this a few years ago. I'd just duck out of everything. I'd make a record, take it to the label and they'd ask, Are you gonna tour? No! Are you gonna promote it? No! It's allowed me to open my heart up a bit, to appreciate the people who spend 35 quid on a ticket to come and see you. You should never take that for granted.

People think this is like Prozac, like happy pills, but it's nothing like that. If you took my medication it wouldn't affect you at all. This just brings me up to normal levels. I was anti-medication for a long time. I'd seen my mum go on it... and besides I thought there was nothing wrong with me. But there was. Something terribly wrong.

But you struggled on?
TH: I just got used to people saying, Christ you're a miserable cunt. Yeah, I am, nice of you to bring it up. But what happened was that five years ago there was a huge crash, where I didn't have any choice. I chose not to address it for years, and self-medicated, turned into a total gin head and became *so ill.

How much did your illness influence your career?
TH: Totally! If there was an interview set up, I'd just disappear. TV slots went to the wall, because I couldn't handle it. I'd said what I needed to say on the record and couldn't work out why I should talk about it again. From a record label's point of view this was very difficult. They'd invested x amount of money or time in me as an artist and I'd just turn around and say, Cheers, but I don't want anything to do with you.

When I first went on medication it was amazing what it did to me. I'd get up every morning and moonwalk to the bathroom. And I started driving again. I got stopped on Oxford St by the coppers. I hadn't realised they were trying to pull me over. I'd gone through two red lights, up a fucking bus lane... I was being booked when the older copper says to the younger one: "You don't know who this is, do you?" And he let me off...

Read Part 2. Being a rumination on how being in the Specials drives you mad, and how Terry nearly wrote a musical about Queen Victoria...