Terry Hall has been laid to rest after he lost his cancer fight before Christmas.
The Specials frontman’s funeral was held at the Golders Green Crematorium in northwest London, with Tim Burgess from The Charlatans and Steve Cradock of Ocean Colour Scene among the famous faces who attended to say farewell to the ska pioneer.
Dad-of-three Terry, 63, died on December 18 after his pancreatic cancer spread to his liver and he stopped responding to chemotherapy.
Along with celebrity attendees, dozens more mourners arrived for his funeral on Tuesday (03.01.23) on two red double-decker London buses, and were seen clustered under umbrellas as they braved bad weather.
It was highlighted after Terry’s death his music was influenced by his nightmarish experience of being abused by a paedophile teacher as a child.
He hinted at the horror in lines from his track ‘Well Fancy That’, which referenced how the singer was abducted and taken to France and molested.
Terry sang: “On school trips to France, Well fancy that, You had a good time, Turned sex into crime.”
It wasn’t until years later Terry would tell the world what the words meant.
He first told of his abuse nightmare in a 2019 episode of Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast, telling the comedian: “I find it quite easy to forgive and forget. It’s like, you know, going back to my abduction, it’s like you can let that eat away at you but then well you know it’s paedophilia and it’s like part of life really.
“It’s unfortunate it happened to me but you can’t just let it destroy your life, it’s not good.”
Terry also told how the only way to deal with his experience was to write about it in ‘Well Fancy That’, despite finding it “very difficult”.
Terry also said in ssn 2019: “I was abducted, taken to France and sexually abused for four days.
And then punched in the face and left on the roadside.”
The experience left the ‘Ghost Town’ singer fighting depression for life, leading him to drop out of education aged 14 and develop a Valium addiction after being prescribed the tranquilizer by a doctor, before he later became an alcoholic after he started self-medicating with gin.
But in 2019 he said about getting hooked on the tablets: “I didn’t go to school, I didn’t do anything. I just sat on my bed rocking for eight months.”
Terry tried suicide in 2004 and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, before telling in 2019 how he had been prescribed medication to help him cope with his trauma and addictions.
