WHEN TERRY HALL DIED LAST DECEMBER, HIS MID-80s BAND, THE COLOURFIELD, WERE LARGELY OVERLOOKED BY OBITUARIES. NONETHELESS, THEIR DEBUT ALBUM, VIRGINS AND PHILISTINES, REMAINS A HIGHLIGHT IN THE BACK CATALOGUE OF THE MAN THAT DAMON ALBARN CALLED “THE COOLEST HUMAN BEING ON EARTH”.
WYNDHAM WALLACE
Old Misery-Guts Is Back” announced Smash Hits’ Valentine’s Day 1985 edition, welcoming Terry Hall’s latest venture, The Colourfield, in typically irreverent fashion. Perhaps the pop bible thought the Coventry-born singer had cause to be low: a year earlier, following two UK Top 5 albums with The Specials and two Top 20 albums with Fun Boy Three, his new trio’s eponymous debut single had fallen short of the Top 40, with follow-up Take faring worse still. Even when the deceptively charming Thinking Of You returned him to Top Of The Pops, Hall looked impatient to leave, grudgingly immobile in an unpretentious Next For Men outfit, sweater tossed casually around his shoulders.
Terry, however, cared little for commercial success. “I honestly don’t think about it anymore,” he told Music Box TV. “I did with Fun Boy Three because I was trying to keep people in wages and stuff. But the people I work with now... they don’t expect anything. Neither do I.” Anyway, he acknowledged, it was easy to mistake his demeanour. That Easter, on Manchester’s Piccadilly Radio, he introduced himself as ‘Mr. Misery’, a nickname he’d reiterate a fortnight later on Yours Sincerely when their first album, Virgins And Philistines, reached record stores.
Despite being manic depressive (if, at that point, undiagnosed), Hall wasn’t as dour as his hangdog appearance suggested. Instead, he was self-aware, demonstrating – both in person and in lyrics like Take’s “But me and the cat own the lease on the flat/ And nothing you do will ever change that” – a dry wit and a wry cynicism. Asked once why he rarely smiled, he deadpanned, “I’ve never felt it necessary”.
Now Hall was happy, and he didn’t mince his words about why. “I went through a stage at the end of the Fun Boy Three when I detested everything. I’m much better now, though. I don’t detest everything, just most things.” In fact, he’d hated the job right away. Quizzed about dispensing with his ‘mushroom hair’, he divulged that “I felt that I had to look like a complete idiot in order to sell records. We were basically such a crap group.” By the end, he told his Piccadilly Radio listeners, “It made me very ill... My mum wanted me to go on the buses just to hav
