You’re Wondering Now What To Do

Now You Know This Is The End

It was February 1980. The Police played a show at the PNE Gardens with this new band called The Specials opening up for them. Gerry Barad recounts in Aaron Chapman’s book Live At the Commodore, “ The Specials were fantastic. They had the next night off, so we asked them if they wanted to play a Commodore show the following day. We announced the show that night from the PNE stage. It sold out the next afternoon- no posters, no nothing.”

I was there that night. It was was of “those” nights back then, when so many were just magical. Like the first Clash show in North America, or DEVO, or Pere Ubu at Robson Square.

I had no clue who the Specials were or what kind of music they played. And I had not seen the Police. No one that I knew saw the Police. But somehow we ended up at the Commodore the next night for The Specials.

Terry Hall is gone. He will never play again. Let me try to explain why he was so important. His stage manner was somewhat awkward. You felt his shyness, even while he was sweating and skanking with this quintessential ska band. And his eyes were always so sad. Even when he was young.

The Specials had great songs. A Message to Rudy, Do The Dog, Monkey Man. But for me, it was the last song of the night.

Everyone was high on this crazy new band, sweaty and and fuelled on alcohol and what have you. But when they played the last song, this audience, who loved them at first sight, sang along with the band on the song “You’re wondering now, what to do, now you know this is the end. “

The lights went on. The band had stopped but the audience kept singing. It was a new anthem. The words meaning more than what will we do now that it’s the end of the show.

We knew that drill. Go home with the one you came with. Find someone new. Go to an after hours party. We would go on until we could not go on.

But this was different. It felt more apocalyptic. This is the end.

Like when I woke from my bed in Richmond after high school, a loud boom, and I jump up and look out the window, expecting to see the mushroom cloud. It sounds overly dramatic now but that was the feeling then. The End was coming.

And now it is the end for Terry Hall. We all go sometime. Whenever the gas runs out. Some of us are lucky. We run out of gas at a gas station - to keep that metaphor going. But some of us run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, with no one else around. And the end….is really the end.

Tonight we are left singing to ourselves, “you’re wondering now, what to do now you know, this is the end.”

Terry Hall RIP.