Terry Corridor, singer with ska icons The Specials, dies at 63

LONDON — Musician Terry Corridor, who helped create a number of the defining sounds of post-punk Britain as lead singer of The Specials, has died. He was 63.

The band introduced late Monday that Corridor had died after a short sickness. It referred to as him “our stunning pal, brother and one of the sensible singers, songwriters and lyricists this nation has ever produced.”

Corridor joined the band that will grow to be The Specials within the English Midlands metropolis of Coventry within the late Nineteen Seventies, a time of racial rigidity, financial gloom and concrete unrest. With its mixture of Black and white members and Jamaica-influenced fashion of sharp fits and porkpie hats, the band turned leaders of the anti-racist 2 Tone ska revival motion.

With Corridor’s deadpan vocals setting the tone, The Specials captured the uneasy temper of the occasions in songs together with “A Message to You, Rudy,” “Rat Race” and “Too A lot Too Younger.”

The band’s most iconic tune is the melancholy, menacing “Ghost City,” which topped the U.Okay. music charts in the summertime of 1981 as Britain’s cities have been erupting in riots.

The Specials had seven U.Okay. High 10 hits earlier than Corridor and fellow band members Neville Staple and Lynval Golding left in 1981 to type electropop outfit Enjoyable Boy Three. It scored hits together with “It Ain’t What You Do (It’s The Means That You Do It”) and “The Tunnel of Love.”

Corridor later shaped The Colourfield and different bands, and collaborated with artists together with The Go-Go’s – co-writing the group’s 1981 debut single, “Our Lips Are Sealed,” which was additionally recorded by Enjoyable Boy Three.

Go-Go’s guitarist Jane Wiedlin remembered Corridor as “a beautiful, delicate, proficient and distinctive individual.”

“Our extraordinarily temporary romance resulted within the tune Our Lips Are Sealed, which can ceaselessly tie us collectively in music historical past. Horrible information to listen to this,” she wrote on Twitter.

Singer-songwriter Elvis Costello additionally provided condolences, saying “Terry’s voice was the proper instrument for the true and needed songs on ‘The Specials.’ That honesty is heard in so a lot of his songs in pleasure and sorrow.”

A lot of the unique Specials reunited in 2008, staged a Thirtieth-anniversary tour in 2009 and in 2019 launched an album of latest materials, “Encore,” which turned the band’s first U.Okay. No. 1 album. A follow-up, “Protest Songs 1924-2012,” was launched in 2021.

Corridor’s bandmates mentioned he was “a beautiful husband and father and one of many kindest, funniest, and most real of souls. His music and his performances encapsulated the very essence of life… the enjoyment, the ache, the humor, the struggle for justice, however largely the love.”

“He can be deeply missed by all who knew and liked him and leaves behind the reward of his outstanding music and profound humanity. Terry typically left the stage on the finish of The Specials’ life-affirming exhibits with three phrases… ‘Love Love Love.’”