Tag Archives: Terry Hall

Song of the Day: TERRY HALL & MUSHTAQ – A Tale of Woe

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The Hour of Two Lights is easily my most prized purchase so far this year. The album itself was released in 2003 (unbeknownst to me at the time) via Damon Albarn’s Honest Jon’s record label and features Albarn (“Ten Eleven”) and a host of other guest musicians on this brilliant collaborative album from Terry Hall (The Specials/Fun Boy Three et al) and Iranian producer and drummer Mushtaq (Fun-da-Mental). This is one of my favorite tracks from their self-described album of “contemporary nomad music.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T80UWvBfsaI

Song of the Day: TEN ELEVEN – Terry Hall and Mushtaq

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMwRKmkZ8oM

…with an additional certain familiar voice and lovely smattering of melodica…from the album The Hour of  Two Lights (follow the link for clips from other tracks off the record).

Excerpt from the record label (Honest Jon’s” Records) website:

Nominally this is a collaboration between Terry Hall and Mushtaq, once of British-Asian pioneers Fun-Da-Mental — but ‘everybody we worked with had a story to tell,’ recalls Terry Hall, ‘and their stories became part of the record. We were blessed with the range of people we found.’ A Tunisian singer, a Syrian flautist, an Egyptian who had settled in Iraq, a twelve-year old Lebanese girl, a blind Algerian rapper from Paris, a choir of Polish gypsy refugees brought in from a social club in Leytonstone, the clarinetist who recorded the original Pink Panther theme; singers in Hebrew, English, Arabic, Romany. ‘Everybody had a sense of something in common in their minority and oppression and struggle. In the end, it felt more like we were editing a film than making a record.’