Front Row

When The Specials released their new album Encore recently, their first new music with Terry Hall since the classic Ghost Town in 1981, it went straight to Number One. Nearly four decades on from their split, the Coventry band’s lead singer Terry Hall discusses the new album and how he found himself back in the recording studio with his long-term collaborators Lynval Golding and Horace Panter after all these years.This year is the 25th anniversary of the first universal democratic elections in South Africa which resulted in Nelson Mandela becoming President of the new rainbow nation. Athol Fugard’s plays dramatise the injustices of apartheid and were part of the struggle that led to those elections. Now two of his plays are about to open in the UK, 1961’s Blood Knot, and, A Lesson, which was first performed in 1978. Directors Janet Suzman and Matthew Xia discuss the importance of Fugard and how, 25 years after the end of apartheid, his plays speak to us today. As the National Gallery's newly acquired self-