15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story review – original rude girl is still impossibly cool
'I was never going to be a nice little white girl,' says Pauline Black, singer with the ska band the Selecter – and a woman with an amazing personal story to tell. There's her childhood growing up as an adopted mixed-race girl in a white family in 1960s Romford in east London, and her time as the impossibly cool frontwoman of the Selecter. Black is a brilliantly blunt straight-talker and very funny. Here she is joking about her open marriage in the hippy 70s: 'I did get the hump one time, when I came home, and she was using my frying pan.' (She is still happily married to her husband.)
Black was adopted as a baby and at that time in Romford racism was everywhere. 'It would come at you like a slap.' Even in her family, she remembers an uncle singing the praises of Enoch Powell. When she was 10, Black was sexually abused by a neighbour (her parents' reaction was appalling). Her childhood made her mistrustful; lonely and alienated, she spent hours practising the piano and reading. In 1979, Black was working as a radiographer in Coventry when the Selecter took off – and she changed her name from Pauline Vickers to Pauline Black. ('I don't think my family ever forgave me.')
The Selecter were not the biggest band signed to 2-Tone Records, but they were pioneering: six out of seven members were people of colour and they had a female singer. DJ Don Letts says Black was the first lady of 2 Tone and today, she is still rocking her 70s rude girl look: the sharp boy's suits and pork pie hats. After three years, she left the band, did some acting and TV presenting before the Selecter re-formed. Black co-wrote this documentary, and arguably she exercises a bit too much control; that said, given everything in her personal history, you can see why she wants to tell it her way.
Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story is on Sky Arts and Now on 16 April.
