It's difficult buying presents for Tim (and, evidently, vice-versa). I sort of know his tastes, but they're unpredictable. And it's not like he hides it if he doesn't like what you've given him. So I knew I was taking a chance when, in 2003, I bought him this album, for all sorts of reasons.
I heard, ten or so years ago, that Terry Hall still worried that Tim might bear some grudge for Terry taking his place in what became The Specials, and wanted it to be known that when Jerry Dammers invited him to join he wasn't aware that would require Tim being asked to leave. Tim always says he feels no resentment (to either of them), can't really believe that he once sang to audiences of two or three hundred, and would never have been the success that Terry turned out to be.
But Tim didn't like this CD of Terry's. We put it on round at his (Tim's) house, and I don't know what that instrument is at the start of the first track, but I could tell straight away that it wasn't going to go down well. I urged forbearance, but that only earned another few minutes listening before the CD was ejected and handed back to me. Lest I make out that Tim was being an ungrateful sod, I did offer it on the basis of "If you don't like it, I'll keep it myself" — and that's how I came to keep it.
But back to Tim and The Specials for a moment. I've just found this reference to Tim, describing his as, "A kind of Lou Reed chap; he didn't really sing, he sort of glowered and spat". Ho, ho, fucking ho. My favourite quote is from a story Kevin Bacon told in The Rutland one evening about a TV interview he'd seen with Terry Hall:
Interviewer: Terry, as singer in The Specials, you always projected an image of being pretty miserable.
TH: You should have seen the bloke they had before me.
The reason I bought the album in the first place was that Charlie Gillett was raving about it on his BBC London show. So much so that he said he'd been prompted to go back to Terry Hall's other work, and had fallen in love with much of that as well (Our Lips Are Sealed, great song!). And I think Gillett is a great DJ, one of my Top 5 ever, maybe Top 3.
It took a while — this CD travelled round Andalusia with Lucy and me in 2004, along with David Thomas and Lucy's Pixies CD among others — but I came to like this album a lot.
It shouldn't be an afterthought, though it's turned into one here thanks to my personal anecdotes, but clearly this isn't just a Terry Hall album, as the billing makes clear. It's not like Paul Simon, or even David Byrne, incorporating tropes from other cultures into their songwriting. It's half-English/half-Arabic, with even the lyric booklet being printed partly in Arabic. Apart from the songs being excellent in their own right, there are some fantastically rich noises on the album — my favourite, on the title track, being a little bit of repeated percussion that sounds like a car's starter motor.
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