Dear Terry,

It starts with my sister Pam persuading me to buy her the cassette of More Specials for Christmas 1981. She played it once then forgot about it, but I didn’t. I hadn’t heard anything like it before. ‘Pearl’s Café’ was the stand-out: a tale of jaded promiscuity which was the musical equivalent of a Play for Today, sprinkled with mordant Coventry wit. And the wordplay – “She kept her looks / But lost her mind”. Sad. Clever. Spot on.

The Specials were over too soon but you didn’t hang about. With Lynval and Neville, you formed the Fun Boy Three and still played ‘Gangsters’ live. The songs got better and better: the inspiring ‘Our Lips Are Sealed’ soundtracked the courtship of my wife to be, while ‘The Tunnel of Love’ was one of your bleakest and best. The line from ‘Farmyard Connection,’ “Hey diddle diddle / Policeman on the fiddle”, still makes me laugh out loud. One TV performance the FB3 did was enough to justify their whole short but significant career: a cover version of The Doors’ ‘The End’ (popularised in the anti-war movie Apocalypse Now, 1979) which peaked with Neville setting fire to an American flag. “Does anybody know any jokes?” you asked the audience before leaving the stage. Right on the money as always.

You went solo but The Specials weren’t forgotten. In 1988 The Pogues – The Specials’ spiritual heirs – were being supported by Lynval’s band After Tonite, and at the end of the St. Patrick’s Night show at Brixton Academy The Pogues got Lynval, Joe Strummer and Kirsty MacColl on stage to sing ‘A Message to You Rudy’. The crowd went bananas. A wry NME journo said it was like “gate crashing 1979’s biggest party.” He wasn't wrong. I danced and nearly cried.

2009 and it happened. The Specials reformed (minus Jerry, sadly). The shows were just as electrifying and celebratory as they must have been in the band’s heyday. It was a bit sad because the songs were, if anything, even more relevant to our battered realm, but that’s why you had to get the band back together.

Amy Winehouse loved you and The Specials too. She looked as if she was at her happiest performing ‘… Rudy’ on stage.

And then, forty years on, the third LP – Encore (as sardonic as ever, eh?). The band even made it on to the bloody One Show. Prime time TV, just like Top of the Pops in the old days. And in lockdown you gave us Protest Songs 1924-2012 to keep us going.

You’ve left us now. But no-one’s really gone as long as they’re remembered with love and affection, and we’re all better people for having you in our lives.

Just look what the Ska website Do the Dog had to say:

"The music, the look, the anger, the energy, the art, the words, the unity, the confrontation, the swagger, the clarity, the coolness, the danger, the confusion, the excitement, the message, the hope, the desperation, the catchiness, the movement. The Specials. The greatest. No other band has reflected the state of a nation or shaped a generation so profoundly."

You can’t argue with that, Terry.

Thanks for everything. x