BACK TO BLACK: PAULINE BLACK SPEAKS
AN OVERVIEW & INTERVIEW WITH THE 2-TONE ICON
Look sharp: The Selecter in 1979 with Pauline Black third from right. Photo c/o Doc N Roll Film Festival
Hello everyone! Yes, I’m back in London and Saturday was one of those spring days that make everything feel bright and renewed - crisp sunshine, blue sky, a temperature around 8 . . . fresh? Fresh!
Which is a relief after Hong Kong’s humidity and the seemingly endless Kiwi summer. As I’m still jet-lagged, and doubt you want to know what I watched on my flight, I’m dedicating this weekend’s Yak to the force of nature that is Pauline Black.
I’ve been meaning to post on Pauline Black ever since catching the bio-doc Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story at Doc N Roll Film Festival 2024. Now it turns out the good people at DNR are screening the film on March 18 at 60 Odeon UK cinemas at 19.50 - which means that, unless you live in John A Groats or Lands End, you should be able to find a cinema to see it in. The screening is followed by a pre-recorded discussion on the film with Pauline and director Jane Mingay. DNR host another screening at Bradford’s National Science & Media Museum on March 27th. Then there’s an Amsterdam screening on April 10.
After that? Streaming, I guess, but I’ve no idea when or where. And as I still believe that we should go to the cinema to experience films - and A 2-Tone Story is beautifully shot - I’d suggest if you are at all interested in Black’s story/women in British popular music/growing up mixed race/adopted children and their search for their birth parents, then you should head along. It’s a music doc but not simply about being a famous singer, no, its more focused on a life lived as a quest of sorts by a woman determined to make sense of who she is.
“I think you grow your own identity over time” is the first thing Pauline Black says in the feature length documentary about her – Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story. Its a statement she comes to embody across the 92 minute visual biography, documenting as it does how a mixed race child is adopted from an orphanage and raised in Romford, Essex, by an older white working class couple who already had four sons.
They didn’t adopt Pauline due to any belief in the melting pot, instead they desperately wanted a daughter and she was the only girl child available. The Romford couple’s beliefs - often reactionary, sometimes racist - ensured an uncomfortable childhood for young Pauline as she struggled to define herself, being the only Black child both in the family and in the working class, predominantly white neighbourhood she grew up in.
Through music Black developed a strong identity that she’d previously never imagined – not only changing her surname from Vickers (that of her adoptive parents) but transforming herself both into a style icon and a pioneering female singer, androgynous and intense while still being feminine and beautiful. Indeed, Pauline’s fine features and fierce self possession ensured she was extremely photogenic.
Black’s rise to fame was ridiculously fast – the first 45 issued on 2-Tone Records in 1979 featured The Specials’ Gangsters on the A-side and The Selecter, a dubby instrumental by Coventry guitarist Neol Davies on the B-side. Gangsters was an instant smash, taking the previously unknown Specials into the UK Top 10 that summer, while ensuring Davies formed a band called The Selecter.
Davies gathered a half dozen Coventry reggae musicians, but he still needed a singer. Vickers, who until then had only sung folk rock favourites by the likes of Donovan and Dylan in local pubs (while working as a radiographer for the NHS), was introduced by Lynval Golding (of The Specials) and aced the audition.
Even though she was mixed race, Pauline had never before engaged with the Caribbean community or paid much attention to Black music – fortuitously, she proved a quick learner and a very effective front woman for the band of blokes: alert to the 2-Tone outfit of black suit, white shirt, pork pie hat, she styled herself in a way that instantly made her a style icon.
For the first time in her life, Pauline was regularly engaging with Black people and music, thus her choice of Black as her new surname. By October 79 The Selecter had toured the UK with The Specials, featured prominently in the UK music press and scored a Top 10 hit of their own with Three Minute Hero.
Here are The Selecter singing their biggest hit in 1980. What potential they displayed! And what a performer Pauline was! And still is (I should add).
In many ways, that initial rush from obscurity to fame captured The Selecter at their best – fresh, dynamic, the Blackest band in 2-Tone - but by entering the spotlight so quickly The Selecter had little time to bond as a band. Inevitably, cracks started showing and a poorly produced debut album alongside inter-band tensions (which saw two members booted out before the second album was recorded), along with subsequent singles each placing lower in the charts, inevitably spelt defeat: a band that came together in a rush would rapidly fall apart, existing for barely three years. Black went on to attempt a solo career (unsuccessful) then became an actor (talented but in the 80s few roles were available for Black women in UK TV/film/ theatre).
Inevitably, the popularity she and 2-Tone together achieved in 1979-80 meant promoters were offering gigs, so Black began reforming versions of The Selecter in 1994. Since then interest in all things 2-Tone has slowly developed beyond the oldies circuit, growing strongly over the past decade – where Madness always commanded huge audiences, and the reformed Specials could fill 5000 seat theatres, The Selecter were minor players, often having to tour as support to a version of The Beat. Today Madness are largely on hiatus while The Beat and Specials have lost their leaders to cancer, so leaving The Selecter as the sole active survivors of 2-Tone’s golden heyday - they now play two-to-three thousand seat venues. And Pauline, still looking sharp at 71 (always turned out in her 2-Tone outfit) continues to speak of fighting the power.
Thus Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story, a 92-minute documentary where Black tells of her journey from orphan through adopted infant to pop icon to veteran performer, visiting locations where she once lived, discussing her adoptive family and engaging with her birth mother once they met many years later. Pauline is an eloquent, articulate individual and she shares the film’s script credit with director Jane Mingay – Black has struggled across her life to ensure she is in control, so I imagine sharing the script must have been hard for her.