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IT WOULD be overly dramatic to say that I nearly got Pauline Black killed, but things turned nasty very quickly. I’d joined The Selecter’s American tour in Texas in May 1980 and in Dallas, at my suggestion, we drove to Southfork Ranch to take some pictures. Jokes about JR and Miss Ellie dried up faster than Sue Ellen in rehab, however, when a flatback truck carrying furious locals with baseball bats pulled up.
“I think they wanted to use our heads as balls,” singer Pauline recalls. “It was scary, especially when we were having such a good time.”
Unpleasant words were spoken but mercifully, the band’s bus driver calmed things down.
Black’s only other brush with death was in Portland, Oregon. “I’d asked the hotel for a room with a water bed but didn’t know you had to plug them in,” she says. “When I woke up, I thought I had hypothermia. I was so cold, I couldn’t stop shaking. It took two hours for my teeth to stop chattering.”
She also suffered the indignity of having to go onstage after a wet T-shirt contest (again in Dallas).
The band’s first and only US tour was full of surprises. In Los Angeles, where The Selecter played a week of sold-out shows at the Whisky A Go Go, a woman came backstage looking “like a bag lady” says Pauline, 67.
It was Bette Midler in a heavy tweed coat with an old beret hat pulled down over her eyes.
By way of an introduction, the Hollywood star grabbed Pauline’s breasts and asked, “Don’t it hurt your boobies jumping around so much on stage?” “I told her, ‘Not if you’re wearing the right bra’,” Pauline says with a smile. “And then we both collapsed in fits of laughter.”
Debbie Harry was in the audience at one New York show; Mick Jagger at another.
“He came to our gig at Hurrah’s. Nobody told me! I had a headache that night and went straight back to the hotel. He was late 30s then and still bonkable.” She laughs, “He was the great could-have-been...”
The Selecter were on a roll. Arriving on the heels of the Specials and Madness, the Coventry-based band notched up three hits in four months beginning with On My Radio in October 1979.
Their debut album, Too Much Pressure (just re-released) sold more than half a million copies.
Yet just months before, Essex girl Pauline – dubbed “the Queen of 2-Tone” – had been working as a radiographer at Walsgrave Hospital, and playing folk gigs for £1 a song in the backroom of Coventry’s Old Dyer Arms.
A chance encounter with musicians who went on to be in The Selecter changed everything.
“I thought I’d be going round folk clubs doing Joan Armatrading and Joni Mitchell numbers for life,” she says. “When the band did our first gig, I actually didn’t know the sound came out of the PA…”
2-Tone’s message of racial harmony reflected how things were in the NHS. “I was a radiographer, working with people from Bangladesh and India, and black women from the Caribbean.
“It’s a great leveller. When people are dying on you every day you really don’t think about the differences, you just all pitch in.
“I’d grown up in the NHS from the age of 21,” – when she’d quit the science degree at
‘‘
I thought I’d be going round folk clubs my whole life
Lanchester Poly, now known more grandly as Coventry University.
In The Selecter, Pauline adopted an androgynous, suit and trilby look, confusing potential admirers.
When The Beat’s David Wakeling chatted her up, she reveals, “he thought I was a boy – he was a little ambiguous about his sexuality at time”.
Born Belinda Magnus in Dagenham, in 1953 to a white schoolgirl mother and a Nigerian student father, Black was adopted at 18 months by a working-class white family with four sons and raised in Romford, Essex.
Her new parents Ivy and Arthur, a mechanic who worked on articulated lorries at Ford’s, renamed her Pauline Vickers.
Years later she discovered her Jewish birth mother Eileen had been a “£10 pom” who’d emigrated to Australia in the 1960s, and her engineering student father Gordon was a Nigerian prince. Both sets of parents are now dead.
Pauline’s autobiography Black By Design rakes over the coals of her childhood.
“I was the only black kid in school,” she says. “I didn’t experience racism, just a sense of otherness. I discovered aspects of black culture by accident.”
WHEN MULTIRACIAL pop stars The Foundations played at her school dance, they took a shine to her. “I ran home,” she says. “I could’ve been a groupie.”
She moved to Coventry in 1971 and stayed there, marrying engineer husband Terry in July 1980. They’d met in 1972. “I was a child bride,” Pauline laughs. The Selecter were the brainchild of guitarist Neol Davis. Their first gig was small Worcester pub, their next was supp the Specials in Leeds with Elvis Costello i audience. “We had to learn very quickly, p on bills with Secret Affair and Hazel O’CO
The band went up like a rocket and cras almost as quickly. They split soon after th gruelling US tour, and the line-up that continued fizzled out in 1982.
Ill-fated single Celebrate The Bullet spe decline. “Ronald Reagan was shot and DJ Read refused to play it,” Pauline says. “We sending up gun culture but Radio 1 didn’t the concept of irony. It killed the single an second album.”
She acted for 10 years, famously playing Holliday on stage, presented children’s TV Hold Tight with Bob Carolgees and fronte more serious Black On Black – “We had Yellowman, Eartha Kitt, Nina Simone. I g meet all my heroes…as well as Spit the Do
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Arthur Henderson fronted a new line-up of The Selecter who’ve been playing to ever larger audiences ever since.
Highlights include: Coachella festival in 2013, “10,000 people all rammed into a huge tent”, two stonking appearances at Chicago’s Riot Fest and headlining a Colombian festival in 2017. “It was amazing. Such a great reception. Our young Mexican fans are great too. They wear their heart on their sleeves and are really down with the music.” 2-Tone inspired new waves of Ska bands including California’s The Interrupters “who really get what it was about”.
At home, gigs are no longer plagued by dodgy politics. “There was a racist element at the start,” she says. “You’d get maybe 40 or 50 people out of 2,000. I’d always try and get the rest of the audience on our side. Sometimes it shamed them into silence.”
A 2-Tone exhibition opens at Coventry’s Herbert Museum next month.
AT THE Selecter’s 1980 peak, the band were earning just £150 a week. Things are financially brighter for Pauline now, who says her only vice is clothes shopping.
“Although my husband would probably say I don’t know when to shut up,” she adds. “But I’m a very good organiser which he appreciates because it means he doesn’t have to do anything. I organise and he puts up with it.”
Now she buys her stage clothes from Prada – “a change from Oxfam shops and C&A… and I’m the Imelda Marcos of hats.”
She gets understandably annoyed by “hate and ignorance, people who’d rather believe fake news, some rubbish about the vaccine”.
The Selecter have festivals booked for later this year and a long tour with From The Jam due to start in the autumn.
Pauline has no regrets. “If I could live it all over again, I’d do exactly the same as I did,” she says, adding “I’d just make more money.”
● The Selecter’s Too Much Pressure 3 CD boxset is out now