Fun Boy Three

The Specials stood among Britain’s most popular and influential groups, notching seven consecutive Top Ten hits that reached their zenith with the prophetic “Ghost Town,” which held the number-one spot for three weeks during the summer of 1981. That release marked the final appearance of Terry Hall alongside the band’s original members; immediately afterward he departed with fellow vocalists Lynval Golding and Neville Staples to launch the Fun Boy Three. While the Specials had embodied a ska-revival sound, the new trio pursued a distinctly new-wave pop direction marked by odd, skeletal, and experimental textures.

Shortly after leaving the Specials, the group issued its debut single, “The Lunatics (Have Taken Over the Asylum),” which climbed to number 20 late in 1981. Early the following year they returned to the charts with “It Ain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It),” a duet with Bananarama that reworked an older Jimmie Lunceford number. Their self-titled first album finally appeared in the spring of 1982, and by that summer the band scored another success with a cover of George Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Late in 1982 the trio recorded a second album alongside Talking Heads frontman David Byrne; the resulting LP, Waiting, surfaced in spring 1983 at the same time as the Top Ten singles “The Tunnel of Love” and “Our Lips Are Sealed.” Hall had co-written the latter track with Jane Wiedlin, who had already turned it into a hit the previous year with her band the Go-Go’s. At the height of their popularity in the summer of 1983, Hall dissolved the Fun Boy Three and moved on to form the Colour Field. Terry Hall died on December 18, 2022, from pancreatic cancer at the age of 63.