Terry Hall was the self-assured eye of the Specials storm

As the credits roll on Dance Craze, the impossibly exciting 1981 concert film shot at the height of the 2 Tone movement, the Specials perform Nite Klub. It’s a noticeably different version of the song to the one that appears on their eponymous 1979 debut album. The intro is long and slow, reflecting songwriter Jerry Dammers’ increasing interest in jazz and easy listening, which would controversially infect the Specials’ second album More Specials. Then the song erupts into frantic ska and the band’s members suddenly spring into life, leaping up and down, rushing backwards and forwards across the stage. Except for Terry Hall, who continues to stand more or less stock still, his face impassive, an occasional nod his solitary concession to what’s happening around him. As the song progresses, audience members start to climb on stage and dance, swamping the band. Dammers gleefully dives into their midst, but Hall has retreated to the rear of the stage, by the drums. He keeps singing about the awfulness of provincial nightlife – “Is this the place to be? What am I doing here?” – while staring balefully at the mayhem before him. The song ends and the screen goes black as Hall emits a mirthless laugh.

Related: The Specials’ Terry Hall – a life in pictures

It was a very Terry Hall moment. Everyone remembers the Specials in their prime as a thrilling mass of cartoonish kinetic energy – when the comedy show Not the Nine O’Clock News hamfistedly attempted to parody them, it was with a song called I Like Bouncing – but Hall was invariably the eye of the storm: he might occasionally move in time to the music (and at one point in Dance Craze he climbs down from the stage and sings directly into the rowdy front row) but in comparison with his bandmates, he was a statue, fixing the crowd or the viewer at home with an unblinking, mournful stare.

There was something unblinking and mournful about his voice, too. Hall never tried to imitate the old Jamaican ska vocalists, even when he was essaying their material. Instead, he sang in a cheerless, unaffected British voice – you could occasionally catch a hint of the Midlands about his vowels – that could rise to a wail if needed. It was perfect for the Specials’ lyrics, which conjured up a spectacularly grim vision of late 70s Britain on their debut album – violence lurks around every corner, different youth cults battle it out and the National Front is on the march – and grew bleaker still on More Specials, where air crashes, ageing, drink-driving and nuclear paranoia (on the Hall co-written Man at C&A) found their way into the mix. More than the speed and ferocity with which the Specials played, more than Roddy Radiation’s stinging rock’n’roll-influenced guitar style, it was Hall who linked them to punk, or at least to Johnny Rotten. “It was just the way he stood on stage and gazed for half an hour … His stance was like an expression of standing still,” Hall enthused of the Sex Pistols’ frontman. The anguished, undulating cry he unleashes in lieu of a chorus on the 1981 single Ghost Town, meanwhile, wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Public Image Ltd’s contemporaneous album The Flowers of Romance.

Hall’s mordant public image proved so pervasive that a wild rumour circulated playgrounds in the early 80s: he suffered from a medical condition affecting the muscles in his face that left him physically unable to smile. Occasionally, you got the feeling he rather enjoyed playing up to it: he fell to his knees like an overwrought crooner while singing Do Nothing on Top of the Pops, but did so while wearing an expression of utter boredom; “Hello, hi, I’m Terry and I’m going to enjoy myself first,” he deadpanned on More Specials’ cover of Enjoy Yourself, a jaunty song that dated back to 1949.

Equally, one of the few things the band’s seven members agreed on in retrospect was that there frequently wasn’t much to smile about in the Specials. The sheer intensity of their success – within months of the release of their debut single Gangsters, they had spawned both their own genre and an entire youth movement – and a crippling workload didn’t do much to help relations within the band. Their live shows had a tendency to attract trouble. Their anti-racist stance made both their shows and the band themselves a target for National Front thugs – guitarist Lynval Golding was seriously injured in a racist attack in south London – but audiences could get out of control without far-right interference. On their 1980 tour, audience violence marred gigs in Newcastle, Leeds and Cambridge. At the latter show, Hall and Dammers intervened in an attempt to stop the crowd fighting with bouncers: both were arrested, charged with incitement to riot and fined £400. None of the band’s members seemed to have emerged untraumatised from the experience of their 18 months of fame, but the pressure took a particular toll on Hall, who struggled with his mental health (he was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder after a suicide attempt in 2004). “Everything was a drama,” he told the Guardian in 2009. “You couldn’t get any space, not even for an hour or two, because wherever you went there were these lads who’d travelled 9,000 miles to see you live and didn’t have anywhere to stay, so you had to put them up in your room and then you had to sit up all night with them, talking about the fucking Specials.”

He announced his departure from the band backstage at Top of the Pops, where they were due to perform Ghost Town, an eerie and eerily prescient depiction of urban decay that reached No 1 the day after cities across Britain erupted in rioting. He formed Fun Boy Three with fellow ex-Specials Golding and Neville Staple: their debut single, The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum made the Top 20, which told you more about the residual level of affection for the Specials than it did about the song’s commerciality: bleak in a way that made Ghost Town sound positively upbeat, it set the tone for their eponymous debut album, a dense, claustrophobic, impressively experimental mass of African-inspired percussion and ominous vocals that powered into the Top 10 on the back of an atypically upbeat cover of the 30s jazz standard It Ain’t What You Do It’s the Way That You Do It recorded with Bananarama. On one level, 1983’s Waiting was lighter than their debut – produced by Talking Heads’ David Byrne, it featured the fantastic, poppy hit single Our Lips Are Sealed (on the US version), which Hall had written with Jane Wiedlin of the Go Gos about their clandestine relationship – but it also contained Well Fancy That!, a disturbing account of the abuse Hall had suffered as a child, after being abducted by a paedophile ring during a school trip to France. If you wanted evidence of Hall’s catholic music taste – not always apparent in the Specials – Waiting opened with a jaunty cover of the theme music from the 1960s film adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple mysteries.

Said catholicism became more apparent still after Fun Boy Three broke up, not long after Waiting’s release. Hall later said that he spent the remainder of the 80s “distancing myself from [the Specials] as much as I could”, and there was certainly a sense of repudiating his past about the next band he formed, the Colourfield, whose debut album Virgins and Philistines dealt almost exclusively in music that would have been verboten under punk and post-punk’s scorched-earth rules, such as gentle acoustic folk-rock and Latin-infused easy listening. They performed their hit single Thinking of You on BBC1’s cosy daytime chat show Pebble Mill at One, an unthinkable environment for the Specials to have appeared in. Its glossier follow-up, Deception, featured covers of both the Monkees’ She and Sly and the Family Stone’s Running Away as well as a selection of originals that illustrated Hall’s blossoming power as a songwriter, not least the beautiful Miss Texas 1967. Next, he formed the trio Terry, Blair & Anouchka, who delved even deeper into 60s and 70s-inspired pop on their solitary album Ultra Modern Nursery Rhymes, a genuine lost classic. Improbable as it seemed, Hall had a genuine facility for sunshine pop; as if to underline where they were coming from, it concluded with a cover of Captain & Tennille’s corny-but-fantastic 1975 hit Love Will Keep Us Together. Just as the global influence of the Specials became readily apparent, thanks to a wave of American ska-punk bands, Hall had never seemed further from the music they were inspired by.

But Ultra Modern Nursery Rhymes failed to make the charts. Similarly, there were few takers for Vegas, the electronic duo he formed with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, or indeed for Hall’s 90s solo albums Home and Laugh, despite the strength of their songs – listen to Hall’s version of the Lightning Seeds’ Sense, which he co-wrote with Ian Broudie, or the glorious chiming guitars of Sonny and His Sister. Better still was 2003’s The Hour of Two Lights, which found Hall collaborating with Mushtaq Uddin of Fun-Da-Mental: a remarkably ambitious album of musical fusions that involved Algerian rappers, Polish Gypsy band Romany Rad, a 12-year-old Lebanese vocalist and jazz pianist Zoe Rahman. It could have been a worthy mess, but instead it worked, conjuring up a sense of global menace. If anyone conversant with the Specials’ oeuvre could spot Hall’s vocals a mile off, it was still like nothing else he’d released, testament to his musical restlessness.

Eventually, though, he bowed to the inevitable: inspired by seeing the reformed Pixies live, he agreed to a Specials reunion. From the start, it was dogged by the same fractiousness that plagued their initial incarnation – depending on which version of events you believe, Jerry Dammers was either fired or left after a couple of rehearsals – but it was a huge commercial success: the first set of gigs sold 45,000 tickets in an hour. The gigs were triumphant and celebratory, although relations in the band continued to prove combustible. Roddy Radiation left, so did Neville Staple: coupled with the 2015 death of drummer John Bradbury, it reduced the band to a core of Hall, Golding and bass player Horace Panter. And yet the three of them kept going, eventually releasing two new albums. If no one was going to rank 2019’s Encore or 2021’s Protest Songs over Specials and More Specials, they were far better than a naysayer might have suggested a Specials album would be without the input of Dammers, who after all had been the band’s architect, chief songwriter and de facto leader in their heyday. Both albums were admirably uninterested in simply warming over the old Specials sound: you got the feeling that the same restless spirit that had powered Hall’s solo career was behind their diversions into everything from funk to Frank Zappa covers.

Perhaps they kept going in order to prove that, contrary to popular wisdom, the Specials had been more than a one-man show, or to underline that the Specials’ left-wing, anti-racist message was as relevant in the 21st century as it had been in the late 70s and early 80s: Encore featured both a song called BLM and an appearance by Saffiyah Khan, a young woman who’d been photographed facing down EDL protestors while wearing a Specials T-shirt. Or perhaps they were simply enjoying themselves in a way that they seldom had in the band’s original incarnation. Certainly Hall cut an unexpectedly sunny figure in interviews, delighted by everything from an increase in the number of women turning up to their gigs to qualifying for an over-60s bus pass. “I bloody love being 60,” he told one interviewer. “I’ve always thought I’d make my best music between the years 60 and 70.”

It wasn’t to be, but Terry Hall’s career is hardly one of unfulfilled potential. He was a defining member of one of the most beloved and influential bands of their era, but moreover, he declined to be hemmed in by their vast legacy: as you might have guessed from the figure captured at the end of Dance Craze, standing still while bedlam erupts around him, Terry Hall was very much his own man.