A punk rock bassist from Uxbridge has told of her grief at the death of legendary singer Terry Hall - saying The Specials frontman changed her life forever after inviting her band to tour with him.
Mr Hall, famous for hits such as Ghost Town, died aged 63 in December from pancreatic cancer, leaving fans all over the world in shock.
Harriet Doveton, a 33-year-old bassist from the punk band called The Tuts from Uxbridge says she was heartbroken by the loss.
She said: "I’m in a girl band called The Tuts in the Hillingdon Borough. We are a completely DIY band, so we are completely self-managed and everything. In 2018 we got a message on Instagram from someone called Terry Hall. We actually thought it was a fake message like this is someone pretending to be Terry Hall, there is no way it's him. We said send us an email, assuming it was fake because people impersonate people like that.
“He emailed us and was like ‘I really like you and everything you are doing. I want you to go on tour with us.’ He got in touch a bit more over time, but we never got the tour confirmed. One morning we were doing a photoshoot in London, and I had some weird feeling that Terry was going to call that day. We were driving home from the photoshoot, and he called us in the car and it really was him. He said, ‘Do you want to tour with us next year?’ and we were just screaming in the car and probably deafening him.”
This opportunity changed The Tuts’ lives forever and it was all thanks to Terry Hall, said Harriet, who is employed by Brunel University as a support worker.
She said: “He invited us to do a month on tour with him and The Specials in Spring 2019 and it was the biggest tour we had ever done. We’d played in Glastonbury Festival before, but this was the biggest of venues we had ever played and also it was like an invitation into this important subculture of 2 tone that started before we were born.
Something they really liked about us is that they are from the 2-tone movement band. Our band always called ourselves 3 tone because we had 3 females from different racial backgrounds bringing it together. They just really appreciated the newer generation bouncing off of the two tone and making it even more intersectional in terms of the fact that we were women, and we were all from different backgrounds.”
The band added new meaning to the two-tone movement and modernized it which is something that Hall recognised and respected.
“The thing I really appreciated about Terry was that he counteracted all the gatekeepers of the music industry. The gatekeepers of the music industry are all these white men called Dave. They decide everything like who tours with who, who is going to be covered where, who gets to be signed. When you’re a DIY band like us, against all odds as well as women, you’re always having to navigate and beg from people called Dave but then people like Terry come along and he just cut through the noise. He didn’t care about booking agents and managers. He would go straight to the source. He would ring the band and be like ‘do you want to tour with us?’ and that’s something that needs to happen more in music. Musicians with power taking control of a situation and saying, ‘I want to give an opportunity to this young band’.
“I read a tweet recently from Bananarama and they tweeted after Terry died that it was a phone call that changed their lives, and it was a phone call that changed our lives which I think is very beautiful.”
She added: “It was really shocking to read about his death, I mean The Specials were working on a new album and his death really came out of the blue. You can say that about anyone but he's younger than my parents and I always just thought he’d be around. He always wanted to collaborate with people which is really wonderful. When I found out he died, I was in bed and reading because I was trying to have a break from my phone. Then I just got a text from the lead singer in my band in all caps saying, ‘TERRY HALL HAS DIED’.
“You know when you feel like the walls are shrinking in on you? I suddenly felt panic, and I was thinking this could not be true. I just couldn’t accept it. Then I went on my phone and saw all the posts everywhere. I couldn’t sleep that night because it made me feel really panicky for some reason. Then I just listened to a load of their music and watched all their old videos of us being on tour with them and it was very sad.”
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