“When it’s at its worst, you can’t even distinguish between objects… I’d reached the end.” Terry Hall (2019)

One morning, says Terry Hall, you wake up and realise that, finally, you’re no longer scared. All the external factors that once conspired to keep you at home — some days not even emerging from your bed — gradually burn away. “It doesn’t happen all at once,” he explains. “It’s more like a slow sunrise. Suddenly you look outside and it’s fine. And you think, ‘Why did this ever bother me?’” Flying is a case in point. An aversion that snowballed into a full-blown phobia after his pop star years kept Hall grounded for years. But then he did a bit of reading around the subject. “You know when you’re on an aeroplane and it hits a spot of turbulence? If you were looking at that same plane from the outside, you wouldn’t even notice it.” A few weeks shy of his sixtieth birthday, the lead singer of The Specials raises his left hand and makes a smooth, slow horizontal motion from left to right. “I can reassure people. What do I say to them? I tell them that only feels bad because we’re inside it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t even know it. So, now I love turbulence.”

The irony of that last utterance isn’t lost on Hall. He’s well aware that, as beacons of zen reassurance go, his careworn features aren’t the first that spring to mind. But then with a default expression sculpted by decades of heavy emotional weather — both before and after his pop star years with The Specials and Fun Boy Three — there’s not too much he can do about that. When we meet at the reception of Universal Music’s new Kings Cross headquarters, it’s Friday evening and the building has emptied out almost entirely. Only the “FREE JAMES BROWN” badge on the lapel of his jacket suggests he might be something other than a janitor or maintenance man. And yet, at the beginning of the day, Encore — the first Specials album in 38 years with Hall joining original members Lynval Golding and Horace Panter in the group’s ranks — was number one in the British album charts. Supplanting it in pole position that day is the new release by Ariana Grande, whose face has been rendered in edible form on dozens of cupcakes that are scattered around the vacant desks.

“I notice that we didn’t get cupcakes,” Hall tells Shane, press officer and fellow Manchester United fan, who also happens to be one of his oldest friends.

“Who on earth would want to eat a cake with your face on it?” shoots back his PR, in the way that an old friend might.

Without taking anything away from the songs on Encore, the story of The Specials’ extraordinary resurgence can’t be explained purely with reference to the music. And it’s not in Terry Hall’s nature to try. The societal schisms that formed the backdrop of the group’s eponymous debut album in 1979 are upon us once again: the rise of the far-right; a Conservative Government seemingly indifferent to the concerns of a generation of first-time voters. Hall felt that at some point a band was going to come along to give a voice to that nascent unrest. “What I didn’t realise,” he says “was that it might be us.” That all changed in 2017, the moment a photograph of Birmingham 18 year-old Saffiyah Khan staring down a protestor at an EDL march went viral. Part of what gave that image its power was the fact that Khan was wearing a Specials t-shirt. For Hall, “it felt like a vindication of everything the band had set out to do.” The bands that matter the most to us are more than their constituent parts. They also function as an idea. And The Specials — an interracial synergy of 60s Jamaican music and post-punk British disaffection releasing music on Dammers’ 2-Tone imprint — were one of the most inspiring ideas of their generation. They were the group that made the young Damon Albarn want to be a singer — a debt audible not just in the music of Blur, but also Gorillaz (on whose 911 Hall did a guest turn) and The Good, The Bad & The Queen’s broken empire lullabies. They were also cited as a huge inspiration by Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse, who covered Hey Little Rich Girl and memorably joined them on stage at the 2009 V Festival. It turns out that while The Specials were resting, their legacy was slowly growing. Well, of course Saffiyah Khan was wearing a Specials t-shirt. What were the alternatives?

The last time The Specials gazed down from the top of the hit parade, Terry Hall didn’t stick around long enough for any celebrations. If you watch footage of the group’s final TV appearance, performing Ghost Town on Top of the Pops, you’ll see a look of demented, absurd glee momentarily creep onto his features as he flings his arms up in the air and sings “Can’t go on no more.” Written about their hometown of Coventry, Ghost Town had been intended to soundtrack the scenes of inner city decline they had witnessed on their recent tour. A song which pre-empted a summer of rioting over twenty towns and cities across Britain was recorded in a string of fittingly combustible studio sessions.

With songwriter, keyboard player and de facto leader Jerry Dammers reliant on the musicians around him to finesse the song’s queasy hybrid of ska and dystopian music hall, Terry Hall had already decided that, whatever happened with Ghost Town, Dammers’ perfectionism and the tension it created was too much for him to endure. Along with guitarist Lynval Golding and co-vocalist Neville Staples, he was already demoing songs for a new breakaway group Fun Boy Three. “It was horrendous,” he remembers, “We were just fighting all the time. Someone tried to kick a wall in during the sessions. Some of the band didn’t necessarily get what Jerry was trying to do. But I have to say in spite of it all, we were close, him and me. I loved his use of muzak on [the group’s second album] More Specials. There was nothing else like Stereotype or International Jet Set. So you had me and Jerry saying, ‘This is great, we should do it’ but other people in the band just as passionately saying the opposite.

Dammers’ absence from this incarnation of The Specials is the elephant in the room and Hall is smart enough to address it from the outset. “It’s sad that he’s not here now. But, y’know, he should be pleased really.” Hall lets slip a half-smile that acts a sardonic drum fill. He knows Dammers well enough to be aware that the chances of his old friend deriving satisfaction from Encore’s success are as remote as a telegram from the Queen. The last time all the original members of the band found themselves in a room together was 2007, shortly after Roger Daltrey — in his capacity as Teenage Cancer Trust emissary — persuaded the seven suited musicians immortalised on the sleeve of 1979’s Specials album to meet in the conference room of the Kings Cross Holiday Inn. The idea was, quite simply, to play a one-off benefit show. Hall hadn’t seen Dammers for 25 years. How hard could it be? “We decided to organise a rehearsal after that, but it was clear that Jerry felt uncomfortable. I don’t know what it was. Was it hard to take direction from him? Yes, I think that might have been part of it. We’re all grown-ups now. We’d all been through a lot. We all had a part to play, do you know what I mean?”

There were times when Hall had wondered if he was ever going to set foot in another recording studio. In the 2000s, he only managed to put his name to one record — a brilliant one-off experiment with Iranian-Bangladeshi producer and percussionist Mushtaq called The Hour of Two Lights. By the time of its release in 2003 though, Hall’s lifelong battle with depression started to take a sharp downturn. Following a painful divorce from his first wife Jeanette, Hall found himself increasingly “self-medicating” with alcohol. That his sense of his own value as a human being reached an all-time low was reflected in his increasingly reckless behaviour. “I was just getting into shit all the time. If I walked past a statue when I was drunk, I’d try and climb it.” One small-hours incident, outside Hamleys on Oxford Street, resulted in police intervention. Police were called to investigate a disturbance in which Hall was trying to break through a window display in order to “rescue” a giant teddy bear. He was blacking out for days at a time, often without the help of alcohol. “I’d get into the car and zone out completely. The fact that I’m sitting here talking to you now is amazing in itself because I’d be stopped by the police and they’d be like, ‘Did you know you’ve been driving in the bus lane and you’ve gone through three consecutive red lights?’ That actually happened one time, in Holborn. And the answer was that, no, I didn’t know. I had to take a breathalyser, but I hadn’t been drinking on that occasion. The worst of it was that one of the coppers was a massive Specials fan. He sort of put his arm around me and said, ‘Watch what you’re doing, eh?’ That was sort of heartbreaking. To see the look on his face.”

And yet, even in his lowest moments, Terry Hall didn’t entirely give up on the idea of making another record. Occasionally, he would add to an ongoing list of song titles, something to return to if the right moment arose. One such title, The Life and Times (Of A Man Called Depression) would eventually evolve into a song on Encore. The opening verse of the song refers to an incident that happened outside Camden Town tube station when a couple of young fundraisers with tunics bearing the imprint of mental health charity Mind attempted to engage Hall. One of them shouted, “Cheer up! It might never happen.” It was the last thing he needed to hear. “When it’s at its worst, you can’t even distinguish between objects. It affected my vision. I couldn’t even walk. I started to experience paranoia. I’d reached the end.”

There’s something odd and slightly dreamlike about watching Terry Hall retrieve some of his darkest, most difficult memories in the unlit conference room of a newly-built glass-fronted office. His face is barely illuminated by the halogen glare of the gymnasium in the block directly opposite. As office workers half our age grapple with cross-trainers, Hall sips tea and talks in halting, resistant tones about the need to make peace with “events that have really shaped my life.” On Missing, the second album released by Fun Boy Three, a waltz-time new wave chanson called Well Fancy That details a school trip to France in which Hall, aged 12, was subjected to a horrific ordeal by his French teacher.

Led to believe he would be boarding the coach with his school friends, he turned up at the agreed meeting point to find only his teacher and his car. Separated from his fellow pupils for the duration of the trip, he was made to share a bed with his teacher and awoke to find himself being sexually assaulted. “The lights went out, I fell asleep,” he sings on the 1983 song, “Woke up with a shock, and your hands on me/I couldn’t shout, I couldn’t scream/Let me out, let me dream/I turned onto my side/I laid there and cried.” Twelve years had elapsed between the incident and the record on which it appeared. Between those points, Hall barely told a soul. “I didn’t go into it fully, because I couldn’t understand it,” he explains, “I sort of kept it hidden really, for a long time, and that was for the best because we lived in a place where you didn’t tell your neighbours anything bad.” Neither, he adds, did it seem appropriate to tell his parents. Why not? “They both worked in factories. They got paid in cash. Me dad was a heavy drinker. They had their own lives, you know?”

Asked what prompted him to put it all in a song, after having kept quiet for so long, Hall credits his time in The Specials as a key factor. If there’s a comparable precedent for what he Well Fancy That, it can probably found on a 2-Tone release which appeared at the beginning of 1982. On The Boiler, Bodysnatchers singer and auxiliary Specials member Rhoda Dakar issued a disturbing first-person account of an incident in which a friend of hers had been raped some years previously. “One thing that The Specials taught me was that songs are a good way to get stuff out. You can sing about things that happened to you and so that’s what I did. It’s incredibly therapeutic and, even now, I can see that what happened affected my life and relationships with people.”

A FEW DAYS LATER, Terry Hall and I arrange to meet in a homely wood-panelled Soho cafe called The Living Room. Joining him for a fag in the alleyway outside is the oldest of his two sons, Felix. The 28 year-old has inherited from his dad the same slightly hunched forward lean and also the attentive gaze which suggests he wants to please you by… really… concentrating… on… every… word… you… say. Felix doesn’t have to be here, but the fact that he has come along simply to “hang with my dad” says a lot about the relative calm of past decade. “Things used to be awful between us,” says Hall Snr. “There was the whole custody thing after his mum and I separated, so on the rare occasions I did see him, I’d have to spend the first thirty minutes telling him that I might not actually be all the things that his mum said I was.”

For a long time, Hall worried that the effect of his divorce might set off a chain of dysfunction that might determine the course of his children’s lives — just as events in his own childhood had done for him. When Felix and his younger brother Theodore started to underperform at school, Hall’s increasing consternation was compounded by the restricted terms of his access to them. Like his father, Felix dropped out of school at the first opportunity. “He started DJing, but by the age of 22, he’d become really unhappy. That was a hard thing for me to watch. But then, what was I going to do? Tell him to get a proper job? I haven’t had a proper job my whole life. I just had to watch him figure it out. He enrolled himself into a college in Tottenham, and it turns out he’s got this scary maths brain. He went on to do an engineering course in Manchester and last year he completed his masters at Cambridge.” While Felix subsidises his postgraduate research with a regular DJ slot playing reggae, dancehall dubstep and grime to the listeners of NTS Radio, Theodore Hall appears to be set upon a similarly singular path. He picked up guitar at an early age and joined French singer-songwriter Charlotte Marionneau in her experimental pop project Le Volume Courbé before undergoing an classical epiphany which led him to swap electricity for a lute. He’s now the youngest professional lute maker in Britain and season ticket occupant of the seat next to his father whenever Manchester United play at home.

For Terry Hall, being able to watch his sons mark out an area in which they could meet their potential has allowed him to allay the what-ifs of his own childhood. In primary school, he was singled out not just for his academic promise but also for his footballing ability. Having sworn allegiance to Manchester United in the wake of their 1968 European Cup victory, he idolised George Best and was invited to trial for West Bromwich Albion, but his parents decided that the inconvenience of the journey from one end of the West Midlands to the other outweighed the possible gain. Although struggling in the lower half of the old First Division at that point, by the end of the decade they were be regularly competing for the title, qualifying for Europe on an annual basis. Under Ron Atkinson’s pioneering multiracial team, they were a footballing equivalent of The Specials, outclassing their opponents with a panache and flair that won them friends all over the continent. It’s tantalising to wonder what might have happened had the young Hall turned up to the Albion training ground when he was given the chance.

In fact, Hall was excelling on all fronts. Encouraged to sit the 11-plus exam, he outperformed almost every other child in his year, but when his school notified his parents that they’d secured him a place at King Henry VIII grammar school nearby, they replied to say that “they didn’t fancy it”. Can he recall the exact nature of their objection? “Well, they didn’t feel comfortable with it,” he says, almost with a shrug, “You had to get a bus, do you know what I mean? And all of a sudden they were expected to buy books and a school uniform. I’d just been walking to school dressed in my football kit. So there’s always been a bit of that kicking around in the back of my mind. Not being educated. Wondering what would have happened if I’d gone.”

It’s important to stress that there’s no visible trace of rancour in Hall when he relays these responses. In fact, he’s keen to stress the circumstantial factors that informed their reluctance to help him realise his potential. “It’s not a sob story,” he explains, “They both worked in factories — my dad at Rolls Royce, in aeronautics; my mother at the Chrysler car plant. I’ve come to an understanding of how he lived and why he couldn’t do this and why he couldn’t do that. But at the time, I didn’t know what was going on. He was from a Romany gypsy family. I remember him carrying dead rabbits around the house. He used to trade them. Horse manure too. That’s how he lived.”

In fact, it’s Teresa, the youngest of his two older sisters who Terry credits as the main influence in bringing him up. “And I’m from that sort of background where you raised yourself, pretty much, and if you’ve got an older sister, she’ll help raise you. That’s pretty much what happened. Teresa was a skinhead, so all the skinhead reggae that came out around 1969, 1970, I knew all of it. All the stuff on Trojan — Desmond Dekker. Double Barrel. Liquidator.” Teresa was also the only person to whom Hall confided any details of what had happened on that trip to France. With no-one else to help him make sense of it all, the collateral damage upon Hall’s psyche was almost irrecoverable. Almost straight away, he suffered a nervous breakdown for which his doctor prescribed a rolling course of valium. “What did it do? Well, it just took me out of life for six months. I couldn’t go to school or anything. I just sat in my room feeling numb.” Didn’t his parents remark upon his absence? Another shrug. “I think they weren’t bothered, to be honest.”

He never quite reintegrated after that. Unsure of what to do with him, his school sent him on work placements from the age of fourteen. First he was sent to a wholesale market where he emptied sacks of potatoes into a “rumbler” — a machine with a rough, rotating cylindrical wall that removed their skins. When they were ready to be released from the machine, “fifteen Asian women sitting at the bottom of the chute would turn them into chips and empty them into sacks” He was fired from that job when his friend enticed him onto a forklift truck and jumped off when the vehicle was at full speed, leaving Hall to crash into a pile of crates. Building walls for his brother-in-law who had a building company was better. He still looks touchingly proud when he recalls satisfaction of creating something out of nothing. But the challenge of shaking off the sense that he had squandered the potential of his early childhood percolated long into Hall’s time in The Specials.

Not only did it percolate into it; in some ways it defined it. Hall’s on-stage manner was key to the band’s appeal. In 1979, any ten year-old boy, if asked to sing in a band, would have carried themselves like Hall, who awkwardly shifted his body weight from one foot to the other, reluctantly holding the microphone like he was looking after it while its owner found a parking space. Along with Suggs and Paul Weller there wasn’t a more relatable singer for working-class kids of that generation. In the 60s, pop stars had talked about enjoying their moment in the spotlight before bowing to the inevitable and getting themselves an office job afterwards. In the post-punk 70s, the looming prospect of the dole queue or forty years of factory work to pay off a mortgage ushered in an incipient sense of futility compounded by the cold war. The zeitgeist was an angelic blank-eyed boy singing, “I’m just living in a life without meaning/I walk and walk, do nothing” on Lynval Golding’s composition Do Nothing. On Rat Race, written by lead guitarist Roddy Radiation, Hall’s nonplussed gaze was a perfect fit for the song’s dismissal of the white collar dream. And when he wrote his own songs for The Specials — Friday Night, Saturday Morning, Man At C&A — they were no less apposite expressions of post-punk working-class ennui.

The problem was, however, that it this was no act. The Specials made Hall a pop star and it horrified him. At the turn of a decade in which Adam & The Ants, The Jam, Madness and The Human League were also making waves in the upper reaches of the chart, that didn’t seem like such a bad thing. But Fun Boy Three weren’t just supposed to be a break from The Specials; they were Hall’s resignation letter from the pop mainstream. By the release of their second album Missing in 1983, the competition was Wham!, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Culture Club. Nothing wrong with any of those, Hall is keen to emphasise, but they were “proper pop stars”. And Hall? What was he? “I don’t know. I’d just see myself staring back from the pages of a magazine and there was a total cognitive disconnection.”

Attempt to figure it out, he wrote The Telephone Always Rings (number 17, 1982) in which real-life Hall has a conversation with pop-star Hall. “It must be wonderful to live like you do,” runs the chorus, “To have respect from everyone that you know/To have surprises waiting outside your door/When you come home to answer your telephone.” On another song, We’re Having All The Fun, each member of the group takes a verse. Hall’s contribution begins “I live in a flat, I like Manchester United/I live with my girlfriend and my cat, we’re really happy/I like watching television wearing pants and moccasins.” Along with the group’s biggest worldwide hit Our Lips Are Sealed — a song about retreating from the scrutiny of the outside world with a soul mate — Hall’s mindset wasn’t terribly difficult to decode. The irony was that the music that resulted from it was getting more and more popular.

Co-written with The Go-Gos’ Jane Wiedlin, Our Lips Are Sealed became a huge college radio hit in America. Tour dates were scheduled; meet-and-greet functions at radio stations and record shops in every city. Backstage, following what would turn out to be the penultimate Fun Boy Three show at the Los Angeles Palace, Hall’s American product manager made the mistake of introducing him to a friend as his “product”. It’s hard to think of another word that could have so instantly flared up Hall’s snowballing self-loathing. “I hit him,” recalls Hall, “Actually, I didn’t punch him that hard, but it was really dramatic because he was at the top of a spiral staircase. I mean, you can imagine.” It was the culmination of what Hall had seen as a series of humiliations. Back in London a few months previously, Fun Boy Three had performed a televised version of The Doors’ The End in which Neville Staple poured lighter fuel on an American flag and set fire to it. “He poured too much onto it actually, and ended up setting fire to his trousers,” smiles Hall. “When we couldn’t get visas as a result of that, I was made to apologise, otherwise the tour would have to be cancelled. But then, on the way over, I was gutted that I’d apologised. So on the opening night in San Francisco, I got another flag and said, ‘You can stick this up your arse.’ Everyone started throwing beer bottles at me — and this was San Francisco!”

IT’S BEEN A GRADUAL RETREAT for Hall during most of the intervening period. The emotional unavailability of his parents seemed to instil in him an almost desperate belief that somewhere out there was a greetings card idyll of love that was worth striving to attain. Noel Coward’s famous utterance about the potency of cheap music found an adherent in Hall, whose final days in Fun Boy Three were spent nurturing an obsession with crooners such as Bobby Goldsboro and Frankie Avalon. Even now, he’ll enthuse about Michael Bublé on the basis that “he just wants to make people happy. There’s nothing fake about that, do you know what I mean?” Throughout the 80s and 90s, some of Hall’s most affecting songs cast him as a true believer in idealised love who nonetheless remains aware of evidence to the contrary. Performing with The Colourfield — the group he formed in the immediate wake of Fun Boy Three’s dissolution — he appeared on the same Top of the Pops as The Smiths early in 1985. While Morrissey refuted the romantic fairytale on How Soon Is Now, Hall was dementedly willing it into existence on Thinking Of You. It’s no wonder that, by his own admission, The Smiths didn’t “sit well” with him. With songs like Castles In The Air and Missing, the single that launched his next (short-lived project) Terry, Blair & Anouchka, Hall came across like a man hellbent on creating the domestic idyll that had been denied to him the first time around. Most of this period was spent living in relative seclusion, first in Derbyshire and then Macclesfield — both commutable distances to his beloved Old Trafford.

Had he been in a better place, he would have been well placed to take advantage of a decade which saw his influences acknowledged by a generation of artists whose formative musical experiences Hall had soundtracked. The interests of trip-hop and Britpop didn’t always tally but Hall was one of the few artists venerated by artists on both sides of the divide. While Damon Albarn sang Hall’s praises at every turn, Tricky was no less effusive, enlisting the services of Hall for his 1996 project Nearly God. But Hall was now in freefall. His obsession with presenting his wife Jeanette with the perfect love song had seen over a decade elapse between the conception and release of his 1994 single Forever J. It remains his most straight-up beautiful composition, but it wasn’t beautiful enough to save his marriage, which was all but over by the time the song appeared. “It was a massive hit in Greece, actually,” he remembers, “I got off the plane. And there were all these teenage girls with cameras waiting for me. It’s one thing to have that in The Specials, but when you’re a 35 year-old dad who’s doing through a divorce, it’s just incomprehensible.”

With hindsight, he sees his depression as something akin to a badly-laid foundation on which a house has been built. “And if you deal with the effects rather than the cause, it’s never going to go away.” For Hall, the effects were his increasing reliance on alcohol — a prop which allowed him to indefinitely put off seeking medical help for his depression. We’re all fated to spend our adult lives attempting to work out who we are in relation to our parents and the things that happened under their care. Hall agreed to see a doctor, who reassured him “there were ways of treating depression that didn’t involve loading me up with valium, like they did the first time around.” The same doctor urged him to take up art therapy, something he still does to this day. “It takes me back to when I used to build walls as a kid. Simple pleasures.”

Help couldn’t have come at a better time. Hall’s mother was struggling to deal with her own worsening mental state. Having laid his own demons to rest, he was finally able to help look after her. “The last five years of her life, she didn’t leave a room. She’d become completely paranoid. She called me to tell me that someone had decorated the front of the house and that he’d painted all the windows white: ‘You’ve got to come, you’ve got to come’. So I drove up, I think I was in London, and I got there, and there was like a tiny little dribble of white paint on the window. But it’s what it did to her. So I scraped the paint off and she was alright.”

THE IRONY OF HALL’S post-Specials quest to create happiness in the words and chords of a pop song is a rather sweet one. When he finally gave up trying, he found it in real life. In the wake of his mother’s death, he met his current wife (he’d rather not name her) and found himself dealing with an emotion that had been unfamiliar to him for the longest time. He was in love and about to become a father for the third time. What was different this time? Hall breaks off the corner of his lemon sponge and holds it up to his direct line of sight. “It’s a good question,” he says. “Part of it was that I didn’t know if I was ever going to make another record. And that was fine. I mean, I’d set out to do what I had to do. This time I could just be a dad and try and do the best job I could without having to deal with a divorce as the same time.”

If Hall had yet to work that out when he got the call from Daltrey about reuniting The Specials, it hit him like a thunderbolt the moment he walked into that nondescript Holiday Inn conference suite. “I was the last person to arrive, and when I walked in they all looked up and I was like, ‘Fucking hell, I love you all, like deeply love all of you.’ None of the old arguments mattered to me. I didn’t care who was cross with who.”

While Dammers wanted to reinvent old Specials songs in surprising new ways, Hall felt it was no longer appropriate to be proprietorial about music long since soaked into the collective consciousness. It’s a hunch that was borne out dramatically on the day that Encore was released, twelve years later. Launching the album with a show at The 100 Club, Do Nothing and Gangsters oscillated with an urgency that belied the passing of time. A soaring, celebratory version of The Equals’ Black-Skinned Blue Eyed Boys felt like the right song at the right time. And even if Dammers couldn’t set aside his misgivings and participate in this incarnation of The Specials, a febrile rocksteady repudiation of the modern political reptile Vote For Me was true to the sonic blueprint that he had helped to establish 40 years previously. Among the fans present was a weighty quotient of excitable millennials and teachers from the Islington primary school that Hall’s nine year-old son attends. As children, they bought the records and stuck the posters on their bedroom walls, but on stage Hall will later fret about the weirdness of singing swear words in front of them. He still doesn’t smile on stage, but when Saffiyah Khan — the unwitting catalyst of The Specials’ resurgence steps forward to deliver her vocal on a new song 10 Commandments — Hall gazes on at her in what looks like a paternal reverie. It’s oddly, indescribably moving.

“It was moving,” he confirms afterwards. “Hugely so. One thing that you take with you if you follow a team like Manchester United is this idea of continuity. One manager goes; another one arrives. Y’know, there are certain values that you hope will stay intact. Whatever you want to call it, there’s an essence to the thing. You can choose to be part of it or you can opt out. And that’s fine. But it’s there. It’s bigger than you.” Terry Hall, a man who knows a thing or two about turbulence, sips the froth from his coffee and gently places the cup back onto its saucer. “I’m not sure that I even really understood that ten years ago. But I understand it now.”

This feature was originally published in Issue #29 of Fantastic Man.