One so often hears about famous people who are horrible when they think no one important is looking – barking at assistants, or snapping at waiters – that it’s heartening to learn of the opposite: kindness in circumstances that promise little obvious reward. The author and filmmaker Jon Ronson had just such a story last week about his pick for Radio 4’s Great Lives series: the late Terry Hall, lead singer of the Specials and Fun Boy Three, and an attractively morose and compelling presence on the 1970s and ’80s music scene.
The 12-year-old Ronson was at the front of an ‘excitingly feral’ Specials gig in Cardiff when he conceived ‘on a whim’ of the daring plan of pretending to faint, so that bouncers would lift him to watch the show from the side of the stage. They did exactly that, and then things got even better: before the music began, Hall – ‘the coolest man in the world’ – walked over and asked Ronson if he was okay.
One wonders if a pop star such as Terry Hall – modest, droll, ambivalent about fame – could exist today
The vignette shines a telling light on both involved: Hall, who even in the thick of pop stardom was keeping one eye out for those in trouble, and the pre-teen Ronson, already displaying guile camouflaged by vulnerability, a combination that would later serve him well on the human safari of his journalism, stalking unpredictable characters such as Omar Bakri Muhammad and the Reverend Ian Paisley.
In retrospect, however, Ronson thinks there might be a haunting reason why Hall had a protective attitude to ‘wayward children’.
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