Latest news with #PaulineBlack:A2-ToneStory
The Guardian
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.
Telegraph
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Selecter's Pauline Black: ‘Racists had this anger for Jamaicans, but they loved their music'
'I was never going to be a nice little white girl, and that's what my parents wanted,' says Pauline Black. There's sorrow, defiance and analytical rigour in The Selecter frontwoman's voice throughout the powerful Sky documentary Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story, as she describes the experience of her journey to 'minor pop-stardom' as a mixed-race woman in mid- to late-20th-century Britain. 'Growing up in Essex surrounded almost exclusively by white people wasn't easy,' she tells me today. 'As a little black girl, I saw them at their worst, their most racist. I don't mean that everybody I knew was a paid-up member of the National Front. It was all much more casual than that. But it was endemic. I think it's endemic in all societies, really.' Having believed 'we were on a progressive upward trajectory' through the 1980s, 1990s and early Noughties, she's bitterly disappointed to see 'the far-Right back on the rise across Europe and America. Pre-Covid, the German police told us not to bring our tour bus into Leipzig because of far-Right demonstrations. So this documentary has fallen into the world in quite a zeitgeisty way.' Sitting tidily opposite me in a chic Soho hotel, 71-year-old Black is a more collected version of the coiled spring we once watched bouncing around to the ska group's 1980 hit single On My Radio on Top of the Pops. She's also got the natty threads (pillbox hat and two-tone loafers) and the coolly appraising stare that never flinched even when skinheads were chanting 'Sieg Heil!' at the gigs. She tells me that they 'were often in a battle as a mixed-race band, celebrating our cultural differences and bringing the anger of punk together with the danceability of reggae... but we never ran away'. Born Belinda Magnus in 1953, she's the biological daughter of a Nigerian engineering student (and Yoruba prince) father and an Anglo-Jewish mother. She was adopted as a baby by Arthur and Ivy Vickers, a middle-aged white couple from Romford who already had four sons. Ivy had been advised by her doctor that a new baby would lift her spirits after her confidence had been shattered by the facial paralysis of Bell's palsy. The way Black tells it, the couple went to a 'baby supermarket', brought her home to sleep in a drawer (they didn't bother with a cot), and renamed her Pauline Vickers (Black traced her birth parents when she was 42). Ivy told her daughter that she was adopted when she turned four: 'I puked and she slapped me.' As she grew up, she heard 'skin colour discussed an awful lot... it would come at you like a smack'. Members of the extended family used racist language. Today, she takes a slow sip of water and explains: 'They felt they were 'being invaded'.' The 'colonialist' attitude also meant that white families adopted mixed-race children (they weren't allowed to adopt those with two black parents) with a sense of pious obligation. 'Those adoptions were organised by the Church,' she says, 'so they were steeped in religious values. Adoptive parents thought they were doing something good. And they were. I really don't want to sound as if I'm being terrifically ungrateful for the chances I was given, because I am not. But I'm trying to highlight the way you were seen as some 'poor thing'.' Despite feeling like 'a cuckoo in someone else's nest', Pauline was a studious child who escaped from her uncomfortable home life into literature and music – spending hours perfecting her classical repertoire on the piano. 'My parents didn't have books. The only books that came into the house were brought in by me,' she says. In the classics, she struggled to find characters who looked like her ('the black people in Huckleberry Finn had green teeth, the black woman in Jane Eyre was mad, and shut up in the attic'), but science fiction brought ideas that challenged the status quo. She credits John Wyndham's 1956 novella Consider Her Ways (in which the proto-feminist heroine becomes a biologist) with turning her on to science: 'I'd study ants under a microscope and make notes.' Later, she'd turn the same analytical eye on the post-war society around her, as unemployment and deprivation brought racial tensions bubbling to the surface. In her teens, Pauline was repeatedly, violently sexually assaulted by a man whose children she was babysitting. She told Ivy, expecting 'a hug I didn't get'. Instead, she was forced into a face-to-face meeting with her assailant, who assured her parents she was making it all up ('Well, he would, wouldn't he?'). The incidents were not discussed again and the relationship between Pauline and her adoptive parents never recovered. 'I realised, 'I don't have any allies here. I better go and find some.'' Determined to discover people who looked – and felt – like her, Pauline moved to Coventry at the age of 17, studying to become a radiographer. She felt more at ease in a cultural melting pot that included people of Irish, Pakistani and Caribbean heritage. When she began working for the NHS in the late 1970s, she continued to encounter racism, this time from patients who 'would say, 'I don't want to be touched by her!' Extraordinary, given that some of them were in agony! It was tremendously embarrassing. But the hospital corridors were filled with black faces – doctors from Africa and all around the world.' Outside work, Pauline sang and played folk guitar in the Irish pubs around Coventry, which was where her sweet but fiery voice caught the ear of Neol Davies – the chief songwriter and only white member of the seven-piece act The Selecter (formed in 1979). Needing a pseudonym to hide her identity from her employer, she chose the name 'Black' in blunt defiance of her parents, who always insisted on referring to her as 'coloured'. She was thrilled to be part of the '2-Tone' scene, mashing up musical genres from different cultures and including Madness (all white), the Beat and fellow Coventry scenesters the Specials (both of mixed heritage). As working-class bands, they all pushed back against limited opportunities and – as on The Selecter's 1980 hit Three Minute Hero – 'stupid job[s]... just another day with that endless grey drone'. Black's documentary does a great job of unpicking the complex relationships between struggling cultures of all ethnicities in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. 'I'd grown up with skinheads at school,' she tells me. 'I was actually introduced to reggae by white boys who liked Desmond Dekker, and the Pioneers.' She says they often had a confused relationship with people of Caribbean descent, 'They had this ire for Jamaicans, but they loved their music. But I've always said, there are more fascists walking around in suits and ties than skinheads on the far-Right.' As one of very few women on the scene, Black struggled with misogyny as well as racism. The documentary features witnesses who describe seeing her on the receiving end of unacceptable behaviour from her bandmates, and withdrawing socially as a result. She won't discuss that today. 'All I will say,' she frowns, 'is that the cry that everybody sends up is, 'Oh, it was different times!'' She snorts, 'It wasn't 'different times', it was just men getting away with it. And yes, of course there were always good guys out there. But they didn't outweigh the bad.' The Selecter broke up in 1981, but reformed a decade later with a new lineup featuring Davies and Black along with members of the London ska band Bad Manners. They continue to release albums, from 1998's Cruel Britannia to Human Algebra, which came out the year after Black was awarded an OBE by the King in 2022. 'Can you believe we're opening the Pyramid Stage on Sunday at Glastonbury this year?' marvels Black. As racist tension rises across the UK, fuelled by what Black describes as the 'incoming Trump-Musk effect' and the 'frightful things people say on Twitter [X]', she feels The Selecter's presence offers a powerful reminder of the joyful sound that people can make when they come together. 'I have spent nearly 50 years of my life trying to fight those views with the music that we make and the things I say on stage,' she says. In her adopted hometown of Coventry, where in March this year she was honoured with an Award of Merit, Black believes her message has been absorbed. She notes that, 'Last August [when hard-Right and anti-immigration protests and riots broke out across the UK in the wake of the Southport stabbings], Coventry had no riots.' She nods firmly. 'I take great strength from that, from living in a city known for peace and reconciliation. I don't mean to say that it is a perfect place. But if we don't have peace as a principle to live by, then where are we going?' she asks, leaning forward. 'To hell in a handcart, that's where. And we're halfway there!'
The Guardian
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pauline Black: ‘My most unappealing habit? Bluntness'
Born in Essex, Pauline Black, 71, worked as a radiographer before becoming lead singer of the Selecter in 1979. The band's hit singles include On My Radio, Three Minute Hero and Missing Words. Black was made an OBE in 2022 for services to entertainment. A documentary about her life, Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story is on Sky Arts and Now TV from 16 April, and the Selecter are due to appear at Glastonbury. She is married and lives in the West Midlands. What is your earliest memory? Puking all over my mother's freshly ironed sheets when she told me that I was adopted. She was not amused and she smacked me. I was four and a half; it was before I started going to school. I needed to be told because all my family was white. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? I'm argumentative. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Being late. What was your most embarrassing moment? It was a small gig and I was doing Three Minute Hero, which has a long, held note at the end, and I fell off the stage. Describe yourself in three words Fizzy like lemonade. What would your superpower be? Matter transfer like in Star Trek so I never had to use a tour bus again. What makes you unhappy? Fascists. Who would play you in the film of your life? Janelle Monáe. What is your most unappealing habit? Bluntness. What scares you about getting older? Not being able to perform adequately. Which book are you ashamed not to have read? Nineteen Eighty-Four. I always meant to read it before 1984, and once 1984 had passed I didn't see the point. What is the worst thing anyone's said to you? I was called the N-word in Romford, by someone stepping off a train as I was getting on. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion What is your guiltiest pleasure? Creme Eggs. What does love feel like? An umbilical cord. Which living person do you most despise, and why? Elon Musk, for being the most unimaginative rich person in the world. What is the worst job you've done? Giving barium enemas. I used to be a radiographer in Coventry. How often do you have sex? Define sex. What would you like to leave your children? I don't have children. I will leave my nieces money because girls need money of their own. Anything to make women independent. What is the closest you've come to death? I fell asleep in a room that had an oil heater and it filled with carbon monoxide and, if it hadn't been for my husband, Terry, I would have died. What keeps you awake at night? My husband snoring. Would you rather have more sex, money or fame? Money. How would you like to be remembered? For ever. Tell us a joke Me to my dog, Milo: I hear you've been attacking people on a bicycle. Milo to me: It's not me, I don't even own a bike.
