Old Misery- Guts Is Back” announced Smash Hits’ Valentine’s Day 1985 edition, welcoming Terry Hall’s latest venture, The Colourfield, in typically irreverent fashion. Perhaps the pop bible thought the Coventry-born singer had cause to be low: a year earlier, following two UK Top 5 albums with The Specials and two Top 20 albums with Fun Boy Three, his new trio’s eponymous debut single had fallen short of the Top 40, with follow-up Take faring worse still. Even when the deceptively charming Thinking Of You returned him to Top Of The Pops, Hall looked impatient to leave, grudgingly immobile in an unpretentious Next For Men outfit, sweater tossed casually around his shoulders.
Terry, however, cared little for commercial success. “I honestly don’t think about it anymore,” he told Music Box TV. “I did with Fun Boy Three because I was trying to keep people in wages and stuff. But the people I work with now... they don’t expect anything. Neither do I.” Anyway, he acknowledged, it was easy to mistake his demeanour. That Easter, on Manchester’s Piccadilly Radio, he introduced himself as ‘Mr. Misery’, a nickname he’d reiterate a fortnight later on Yours Sincerely when their first album, Virgins And Philistines, reached record stores.
Despite being manic depressive (if, at that point, undiagnosed), Hall wasn’t as dour as his hangdog appearance suggested.