DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL!
T’S A COLD SATURDAY NIGHT IN APRIL. However, in west London’s sold-out Shepherd’s Bush empire, it’s unbelievably hot. As The Beat, fronted by irrepressible toaster Ranking Roger, charge through Tears Of A Clown, the song which launched their career on the 2 Tone label in 1979, a crew-cutted crowd surfer dressed in monkey boots and fred Perry, and precariously held aloft by the crowd beneath him, pours a full bottle of water over his head, before disappearing back into the skanking throng.
Backstage, in the dressing room, another party is going on. Pauline Black, lead singer with The Selecter, The Beat’s former labelmates and tonight’s headlining band, greets MOJO with a wide smile. Thirty years since she and her six comrades first gelled amid clouds of ganja smoke in a Coventry front room, she’s still a striking presence, immaculate in rude boy check shirt, black jacket, grey fedora, and firm of handshake. “Do you want some of Gaps’ birthday cake?” she asks, eyes twinkling. “It’s a bit creamy though,” she adds, rushing off to find paper plates and forks. Arthur ‘Gaps’ Hendrickson, the group’s covocalist, stylish in three-button brown tonic suit and black leather kufi hat, is celebrating with a supersized Victoria sponge. With Black, he provided the group’s frontline during The Selecter’s 1979-80 run of classic singles – On My Radio, Three Minute Hero and Missing Words – and the pair have headed a reconfigured line-up since 2010. Recently, demand for the band has surged, as 2 Tone’s moment resonates in the present political climate (Black is a vocal supporter of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn). As a result, their ‘spring tour’ has been extended to the autumn, set to end with a show at north London’s Roundhouse. “It’s taken us all a bit by surprise,” says Black, “but this isn’t just about nostalgia. The time is right. The messages
of anti-establishment, equality and racial harmony we are putting across chime with what’s going on now. It’s an important time in our history. If you don’t want the Tories or UKIP, or bedroom tax, you’ve got to do the right thing.” The cake’s gone – it really was creamy – and the right thing for now is for the band to take the stage. After a sip of water and a quick glance in the mirror, she strides out. “Let’s all have some fun,” she shouts, sprinting full-pelt across the stage while the musicians strike up a ska version of the James Bond theme.
THERE WAS LITTLE FUN TO BE HAD FOR Pauline Black, formerly Vickers, a black girl growing up in white, working-class Romford. She remembers The Supremes on Ready Steady Go!’s Motown special in 1965, hearing Aretha franklin singing Respect on Radio Caroline in ’67, and seeing Marsha Hunt in the musical Hair in ’68. All were pointers in her search for identity, but it was iconic US activist Angela Davis who most captivated her. “The TV was full of images of black people being hosed down against a wall, or being refused a seat at the lunch counter,” she remembers. “Then you had the national front selling their material openly in Romford precinct. I started going to the library, reading as much as I could find on Angela Davis, black power, aligning myself.” In 1971, aged 18, Black, with a Davis-styled afro, left Romford for Coventry to study Combined Science at Lanchester Polytechnic, and on graduation became a radiographer at what was then Walsgrave Hospital. At the same time, she became a figure on the local folk scene. “By accident, the main club was run out of the back of the pub we drank in,” she says. “I thought, I can do that, so I went home, practised the guitar for a week and did a Dylan song there. I got invited to support Bert Jansch, 10 songs for 10 quid. It was a good training ground.” In the audience that night was Lawton Brown, a Jamaican politics student. He approached Black to start writing songs with him. “This was 1977, and he was my conduit into Coventry’s black community,” she says. “He looked like Malcolm X and took it upon himself to musically educate me. He played me Third World’s 96º In The Shade, Bunny Wailer’s Blackheart Man, Culture’s Two Sevens Clash, The Last Poets’ Wake Up, niggers, which blew my mind. He took me to see Hardtop 22 led by Charley Anderson, this tall, slim
Rasta modelled on Bob Marley. Charley was a local hero. Gaps was in the band too.” Gaps remembers Black from this time: “This gorgeous black woman singing folk songs with her guitar. I thought she was incredibly brave.” As Black took her first steps towards putting a band together, Coventry-born guitarist neol Davies was trying to build one of his own.
DAVIES WAS JUST 10 WHEN HIS MOTHER DIED. The following year he picked up the guitar and put his feelings into music. Peter Green, B.B. King, freddie King, then Jimi Hendrix fed into his playing. Growing up on the same street in Coventry as Silverton Hutchinson, later to be The Specials’ first drummer, the pair hung out as kids. In 1973, Hutchinson invited the 21-year-old Davies to jam with him and his pals at Holyhead Youth Club. “I walked in,” remembers neol Davies today. “I was the only white guy there and it was like that moment in westerns when everyone stops. But once I started playing blues lines over their reggae jams, everyone started smiling.” That collection of musicians would eventually form the basis of The Selecter, but not before the intervention of The Specials’ Jerry Dammers. Davies and Dammers had struck up a friendship while playing in Coventry soul band nite Train, so when Dammers needed a last-minute flip for The Specials’ 1979 debut-single Gangsters, he asked Davies if he had a tune. The guitarist had an instrumental called The Kingston Affair, a mournful reggae tune recorded with Specials drummer John Bradbury in local producer Roger Lomas’s 4-track garden shed studio. With trombone added by Bradbury’s brother-in-law Barry Jones, the song, renamed The
Selecter, became the B-side and fitted so well that DJ John Peel assumed it was also by Dammers. With the ska revival breaking, Dammers urged Davies to get a band together to capitalise on it. With Bradbury in The Specials and Jones running a newsagent, he had to start again. “It was Lynval Golding [The Specials’ guitarist] who pulled it all together,” Davies says. “He told me to check out this female singer he’d seen with an amazing voice.” The singer was Black. “I was playing with keyboardist Desmond Brown. We were rehearsing one evening in The Wheatsheaf on Foleshill Road in Coventry and Lynval turned up. He was dressed well, in a smart suit and pork pie hat, he was full of stories and liked my singing, and I was invited to meet Neol the next day at Charley Anderson’s house on Adderley Street, Hillfields. We were all smoking, Desmond, Gaps, Aitch [Charles Bembridge], Commie [Compton Amanor]. Neol put on The Selecter, it sounded good, and he said, ‘I need a band,’ and started singing, ‘Do you wanna be in my gang?’ [the chorus of Gary Glitter’s 1973 hit I’m The Leader Of The Gang (I Am)], and we all went, ‘Yes.’” “The template I had in my mind was Elvis Costello And The Attractions’ Watching The Detectives,” says Davies, “but as soon as Pauline took the mike at our first rehearsal, I knew we had something unique. Her voice was so loud and powerful. And Desmond was phenomenal. He was singlehandedly responsible for our authenticity, a master of reggae Hammond playing.”
AFTER A FIRST GIG IN WORCESTER, THEIR SECOND saw them supporting The Specials at The F Club in Leeds on July 10, 1979. With no soundcheck, after the headliners overran, and Elvis Costello conspicuous at the front of the crowd, they never stopped moving for their allotted half hour, Black and Gaps skanking from one side of the stage to the other then running on the spot, while delivering their hard-hitting ska. That night a deal with 2 Tone was struck. After another whirl-
wind set supporting Madness and The Specials at the Electric Ballroom in London 11 days later, and with an advance of £1,000, they headed to Coventry’s Horizon Studios to record debut single On My Radio, its flip Too Much Pressure and a third track, Street Feeling, all produced by Roger Lomas. “I was nervous, excited,” recalls Black. “Roger suggested I sing the high part on On My Radio. When it was reviewed on Radio 1’s Roundtable by Kate Bush she said it reminded her of Wuthering Heights.” Released in October 1979, it peaked at Number 8, buoyed in part by the group’s inclusion on the 40-date 2 Tone tour with The Specials and Madness (the latter replaced on nine dates by Dexys Midnight Runners). The Beat’s ‘Ranking’ Roger Charlery saw them on that tour: they were “a real eye-opener. While The Specials sounded like punky ska, The Selecter were rugged round the edges. They didn’t sound commercial. They were underground ska.” But they were also a chart act. “The Selecter took off so quickly,” says Black. “We were on Top Of The Pops with The Nolans and Buggles, rubbing shoulders with people you’d only seen on TV before. Rather than going to our head, it brought out our insecurities.” Tensions that existed before the band’s breakthrough were intensifying. “Six months before the band was launched, Charley [Anderson] and Desmond had a roots reggae image,” says Davies. “They had longer hair, flares, beards, a ‘back to Africa’ flavour. They were unsure about changing the way they looked; there was disquiet and doubt about it. They saw the music that 2 Tone celebrated as their parents’ music.” Anderson wanted the band to play hard reggae; Davies favoured an experimental rock edge. “It was difficult because when we started Charley and I were a tight unit,” says Davies. “We organised our gigs together, collected the money together, went to booking agents, talked to promoters together… That worked really well, but then the creative clash turned into a personal one and people started regressing into the playground.” Black recalls Anderson playing Bob Marley on the tour bus and Davies putting on Bryan Ferry and David Bowie. “Neol and Charley were both leading the band,” says Black. “The tension between the two musics provided our interesting hybrid. I was excited by that; we were making something new. But two bulls can’t rule in one pen, it had to spill over.” The Specials’ shows saw nightly stage invasions, breaking the barrier between group and fans; The Selecter’s set was punctuated by a staged fight amongst the band to defuse internal tension. “It would become a freemale-fronted, for-all,” says Black. “It was our way of dealing with trouble in the band and trouble in the crowd. The audience would stop fighting and see how dumb it looked on stage with everyone fighting.” But at Hammersmith Palais and Hatfield Polytechnic, genuine violence flared up and the group had to be smuggled out for their own safety. “We were a fepredominately black band and confrontational,” says Black. “We were encountering people who came to listen to the music but were racist and would stand Sieg Heiling at the stage. We didn’t see any point in preaching to the converted, we fight fire with fire. We felt we were challenging people who needed their minds changing.” At Plymouth Fiesta, on Black’s 26th birthday, it was the band’s turn to cause trouble, Desmond Brown attacking a security guard then biting the cheek of Madness’s Chris Foreman, drawing blood. Outside the mêlée, Black felt isolated. “I thought we were joined in the fight against sexism and racism, but after a while I realised that the principles adhered to in songs were not actually how guys on the road lived their lives.” At hotels where the band stayed, Black would call cabs for teary girls or provide them with a bed in her room after “the offer of coffee after a show had turned out to mean something very different.”
FOR ALL THE MAYHEM, THE TOUR WAS A HUGE success, and the singles chart reflected 2 Tone’s moment. One week in November 1979, The Specials, Madness and The Selecter were all booked to play the same Top Of The Pops, and a delay recording the show saw Madness flying by helicopter to the
venue they were playing that night. Meanwhile, The Selecter became co-directors of The Specials’ 2 Tone label, for whom they would record one album, Too Much Pressure, and two further singles. “We respected the ethos, but the recording of that album was the beginning of the end,” says Black. Arguments began with who would produce. Mikey Dread, Dennis Bovell and Roger Lomas were mooted. Eventually bass player Errol Ross, Anderson’s choice, was appointed. Black was immediately labelled difficult for having ideas about how her vocals and the music should sound. “Errol had aspirations to be a producer but he didn’t know what he was doing,” says Davies. “Playbacks were so loud we saw the Horizon Studios engineer go green, lose consciousness and slide down his chair. We had to take him out and get him some fresh air. Errol just sat there going, ‘It sounds good.’” Released February 1980, Too Much Pressure made the Top 5 as the group were already imploding. On their 30-date headlining tour that same month they argued with fans who heckled support band Holly And The Italians. Even their relationship with 2 Tone soured. “The Specials were always on tour,” says Black. “They never had time to discuss our plans so we thought it would be better if we signed directly to Chrysalis.” When their first single for the parent label, The Whisper, only reached Number 36, Desmond Brown and Charley Anderson left to form reggae band The People: “We couldn’t reconcile the musical differences, exacerbated by the racial and cultural divisions,” says Black. The remaining members went straight in to record second LP Celebrate The Bullet. Input from Ian Dury, whom they’d met at Top Of The Pops, and Blockheads bassist Norman Watt-Roy added a different flavour, but in February 1981, Celebrate… failed to make the Top 40, while its title track, when issued as a 45, was banned by Radio 1, shying from violent themes after the March 30 shooting of US president Ronald Reagan and the killing of John Lennon the previous December. “It was a case of good record released at the wrong time,” says Black, “but it was clear our days were numbered when we walked into Chrysalis and everyone was wearing kilts and saying they were New Romantics.” Davies remembers it differently. “We were struggling but there was no talk of us splitting,” he says. “Then one day we were in the General Wolfe rehearsal rooms in Coventry and Pauline announced to the band that she was going to leave. Unbeknown to us she’d negotiated a solo deal with Chrysalis. The record company dropped the rest of the band straight away.” Despite a smattering of singles in the early ’80s, including one with Lynval Golding and Neville Staple’s Sunday Best, Black’s solo recording career never took off. And it transpired that she and Davies were not quite through. In 1990, they played a handful of duo shows covering blues and songs associated with Billie Holiday (a year later, Black would win a Time Out Best Actress award for a one-woman stage show about the jazz singer) and the two revived The Selecter name on a tour with Buster’s Allstars, a vehicle for Bad Manners’ singer Buster Bloodvessel. Their rapprochement ended in 1993 when Davies caught chicken pox. “I was very, very ill and there was a proposed European tour, and there was no way I could do it,” says the guitarist. “I mistakenly thought the tour would be cancelled. However, Pauline came to my house and said, ‘We’re going without you.’” On the group’s return, Davies claims Pauline visited again. “She said, ‘We are going to carry on without you. You’re not in the band.’ That was it, I was out of the band which I’d formed and wrote most of the songs for.” Wounded, Davies sought sanctuary in the blues, recording Box Of Blues and Future Swamp, which featured Ronnie Wood on slide. “That kind of made up for any hurt,” he says. “I had a Rolling Stone on my album.” But in 2010 he would revive the Selecter name himself after Black, he insists, told him she was surrendering it. So it was a shock to Davies when a rival Selecter suddenly appeared on the circuit, featuring Gaps Hendrickson, and Pauline Black.
“As soon as she started selling tickets on the back of her and Gaps, the two singers reuniting, I couldn’t compete,” says Davies. “We had sold out our bookings but everything came to a grinding halt again. The last gig we did was at 2011’s Bestival. We were playing one stage, Public Enemy another, Brian Wilson another.” The pair haven’t spoken since. “We invited him to join our lineup,” shrugs Black. “He chose not to.” “If she did invite me, it was a hollow offer,” counters Davies. “It didn’t mean anything. How could it after what had happened?”
OR HER PART, BLACK INSISTS THAT HER SELECTER, even without its original songwriter, is a reanimation of the group’s founding values. “We weren’t satisfied with doing the usual reunion show,” Black says. “2 Tone was in danger of just being seen as good music to dance to. The message was getting lost. No one was talking about multiculturalism any more, about the rise of [far-right agitators] the English Defence League. It’s an ongoing thing, not just something that happened back then. As an artist you have a duty to reflect the time in which you live.” A new Selecter album, Human Too, is due out in October. Black feels strongly that the time is right. “There’s a sense that something is happening again in music,” says Black, “not just with us, but with the younger generation. Grime is truly exciting and has taken up the baton from punk and 2 Tone. It is talking about humanity, kindness and understanding.” Maybe some of those qualities could yet be brought to bear on the rift between Davies and Black. They’re agreed on something, at least: the value of The Selecter’s legacy. “I’m immensely proud of what we achieved together,” says Davies, currently producing reggae singer Ossie Holt, John Holt’s brother. “A predominately black band, fronted by a black female, soundtracking the Black British experience. We broke down so many barriers.”
The Selecter’s new album, Human Too, is out on October 6.