Black By Design - Pauline Black

BLACK BY DESIGN – PAULINE BLACK

Just to show how little I know about The Selecter, I didn't even realise the name Pauline Black was a pseudonym. Pauline's real surname was Vickers and she changed it to Black initially to enable her to take time off work to play gigs without it leading to her being recognised and losing her job as a radiographer. And why 'Black' of all names? Well, as Pauline explains in her autobiography Black By Design: 'It was a statement of truth and intent all at the same time. Yes, I was black and I wanted to sing about what it meant to be black. But more than anything I wanted my family to finally say my name. Pauline Black. They could never bring themselves to say the B word. After years of being called half-caste or coloured, I could say it loud and proud. Pauline Black.'

To put this into context, when Pauline was a baby she was adopted into a white family where she had a white mother, father and brothers. Her adoptive parents held fairly traditional racist attitudes though it should be noted this was in the Fifties and early Sixties. Her adoptive parents desire for a baby girl apparently eclipsed the fact that she was black and blinded them to their own attitude to race. This was the backdrop against which Pauline grew up and it all makes for a fascinating read.

I understand how it appeals to some but usually I find reading about other people's childhoods a bit boring unless it's an unusual one. Pauline Black's was very unusual. I always presumed as well that she was from Coventry but actually she grew up in Romford, which makes it all the more strange because at that time there would have been very few people of colour there. She moved to Coventry to go to college and that's where she auditioned for lead vocalist in The Selecter, having cut her musical teeth singing Bob Dylan songs in local folk clubs. The past is indeed a foreign country.

Pauline's autobiography is a book that can be broken down into different parts. There's her childhood and early years, the Selecter years, her post-Selecter wilderness years, the genealogy years, and her Selecter epilogue years. Each part is going to be of more interest to some than others but I presume most people pick up her book due to having an interest in The Selecter and 2-Tone, and in this department Pauline certainly doesn't disappoint.

Amusingly, she's very forthright in her opinions of various people involved in 2-Tone, particularly individuals in The Specials. Out of all of them, Neville Staples comes out the best and is the one she offers up the most respect to even when telling us about the girls backstage being groomed 'for future sacrifice on the altar of Nev's cock'.

To Pauline's credit there is no love lost for the Sieg Heiling bonehead skinheads who flocked to the gigs: 'I'm sick of saying stuff in interviews about how 'lovely' it was on the 2-Tone tour. Some of these shirtless, bleached-jeaned, braces-dragging-round-their-arses bastards made it total misery. If you scratch their surface they have 'racist' written all the way down their centre like a sickly sweet stick of BNP rock'.

Of personal interest, Pauline writes about a specific gig The Selecter played in Bristol (my home town) at the Trinity Centre in September 1979. Her and dual vocalist Gaps are to be interviewed before they're due to go on stage so they traipse off with the journalist to a pub 'round the corner from the police station' opposite the venue. 'As soon as we walked in,' Pauline writes 'the landlady looked at us and pronounced audibly within the pub: “No, not in here”. A swift glance around the place showed me what she meant. No blacks in here.'

I used to live within walking distance of the Trinity Centre and I can't for the life of me figure out what pub it was that Pauline refers to. All I know is that whatever pub it was, it's certainly no longer managed by racists because if it was it would have been fire-bombed by now.

They return to the Trinity to conduct the interview there, only to have it interrupted by the promoter who begs that the band get on stage immediately so as to stop the growing tensions between the different factions in the audience. They do as they're asked but ultimately are unable to control the animosity between the Mods, the punks and the skinheads as fighting inevitably erupts 'like a forest fire finding dry tinder'. It's at this gig that Pauline realises it wasn't just about The Selecter spreading a message of 'unity' but about them being 'caught up in the maelstrom of competing teenage tribal factions'.

Cheers, Bristol. You're welcome.

Of all the 2-Tone bands, The Selecter were the most politically earnest and whilst this undoubtedly caused them problems it also made them a lot more valid than their peers. Madness and Bad Manners, for example, promoted their fun factor above anything else which led to greater success for them but also marked them as being lightweight. The Selecter had more substance. Importantly, Pauline understood their position in the scheme of things: 'We had been pushed up out of the masses, not imposed by some corporate music bigwig who wanted to have a bash at this new 'multi-ethnic' look. We were the real deal.'

Not that Pauline is without a sense of humour as revealed by a lot of the observations she makes and the anecdotes she relates, some of which it must be said being unintentionally funny. An amusing one is when she tells us about a time at the Melkweg in Amsterdam where she is given some Ecstasy. It's the one and only time she's ever taken it and ends up feeling a bit embarrassed about herself: 'Fortunately I was with a good friend who dragged me away from the young man who had become the object of my attentions. God knows what I'd been thinking. I had no intention of ever being counted among the ranks of that loony, perpetually grinning, bedroom-eyed breed again.'

You've got to laugh, really.

For all of this, however, the most affecting part of the book is when Pauline decides to search out her birth parents. It's the best part of the book, I would say. She discovers her dad is a Nigerian prince but has passed away and that her mum has emigrated to Australia. On finding her address, Pauline writes her a letter enclosed with photos and newspaper clippings from The Selecter's heyday. A week later she's wakened at 5 a.m. by a phone call:

'Blearily I groped around the bedside table for the phone. 'Hello,' I mumbled, rubbing sleep out of my eyes.

'Hello, is that you, Belinda?' (Belinda being Pauline's birth name.)

'Yes,' my soul blurted, before I could stop the word. I was suddenly super-alert.

'It's Mummy, darling.'

I couldn't help thinking that my mother sounded alarmingly like Dame Edna Everage!'

Following the whole build-up to this moment it's a curiously emotional piece of writing tinged with comedy that brings a lump to the throat and almost a tear to the eye.

Black By Design is a well-written memoir and Pauline should be really proud of it. As an insight into The Selecter and the whole 2-Tone movement it offers a unique perspective. Arguably, when it comes to the subject of 2-Tone it's better than Horace Panter's book Ska'd For Life if for no other reason than it being much more open about absolutely everything. For a start, Horace Panter never mentioned anything in his book about the altar of Neville Staples cock, that's for sure.

Far beyond such trivialities, however, as an insight into identity and the search for it, it's a fascinating read and this is actually where it's true strength and importance lies.

John Serpico