The Selecter’s Pauline Black: ‘When we get on stage, something alchemical happens’ | Ska

“I like,” says Pauline Black, “to be mistress of my own shit.” It’s an admirable approach to life; also a sensible one, when you’ve had a life as varied as Black’s. Though she’s known as the singer in the Selecter, the Coventry 2 Tone band who gave us On My Radio and Three Minute Hero, Black has actually had many working lives. A quick CV: she started off as a hospital radiographer, before quitting in 1979 when the Selecter took off. Three years later, when the band split, she became a TV presenter, moving between kids’ telly (Granada TV’s Hold Tight!) and Black on Black, Channel 4’s British black magazine show. Then: an actor, winning Time Out’s best actress in 1991 for her stage portrayal of Billie Holiday. She found acting interesting, and liked “the discipline”, but got “fed up” with the lack of control. “I spent 10 years acting. Once I went back to music, I was happy. I don’t like being directed.”

So, on and off for the past three decades, Black has been mistress of her most natural, joy-giving role: as singer, songwriter and frontperson of the Selecter. For the young’uns: the Selecter were one of the founding bands of 2 Tone, the multi-racial ska-punk-rocksteady independent record label set up by the Specials’ Jerry Dammers in the late 1970s (others included the Specials, Madness, the Beat, the Bodysnatchers). They were the blackest band on the roster, plus the only one with both a male and female frontperson, Arthur “Gaps” Hendrickson smooth skanking alongside Black’s peppy fire.

After breaking up in 1982, the Selecter reformed in the early 90s. For a while, they had a mixed, stop-start time, before, in 2011, they started bringing out new songs and upping the ante on their always excellent live gigs. Their past three albums have done well, they’re booked to support Blur at this summer’s Wembley gigs, and their tune-packed new LP, Human Algebra (out on 21 April), launched itself with a banging single of the same name. For me, their type of ska – irrepressible dance music with conscious lyrics – is music that everyone likes, but Black demurs. “The Selecter is Marmite,” she says. “You either get it or you don’t.”

We’re in a cafe after her Observer photoshoot, drinking coffee. Black looks brilliant: sharp in her hat, Prada jacket, dark Levis, DMs. The new album, she says, was started during lockdown, with Black coming up with Human Algebra’s chorus hook, “Mama’s so blue” (she sings it to me: her voice is great). She and guitarist-saxophonist-keyboardist producer Neil Pyzer, along with Hendrickson, pinged ideas among them so that when life opened up again, they already had the basis of an album, “with lyrics covering all the things I was thinking about”.

What things? The album covers knife crime, keyboard warriors, fake news, global heating, ridiculous politicians… There’s an anti-war song, written before the invasion of Ukraine, and even a track that takes in the trials of touring in Europe post-Brexit. “We’ve got 10 people out on the road every single time, and everything has just gone sky high,” she says. “Brexit made me so angry. We’ve wrecked a generation, basically. We’re not allowed freedom of movement.”

There’s also a song, Stay Rebel, that lists black people killed by police and other authorities. The band have made a similar track for the past two albums, and this time round the list includes a relative of Charley “Aitch” Bembridge, the drummer. Bembridge was part of the original lineup of the Selecter, along with Black and Hendrickson, but has only just rejoined (the last drummer left: “he got God, and also he didn’t want to be vaccinated”).

There have been a lot of different lineups to the Selecter, some including co-founder Neol Davies. Black and Hendrickson’s Selecter has been fairly settled for the past decade, but even so, she says: “I don’t live in any of my musicians’ pockets. We don’t see one another for months, sometimes. But everybody knows that when we get on stage, something alchemical happens. Perfect, for that time. And that’s what I get off on.”

Black is refreshingly blunt. Before I met her, I’d been warned by other journalists that she could be tricky – “formidable”, “not easy” – though actually she’s warm and welcoming, gives a big hug on meeting. But she is honest and dignified, anomalies in a music business that, even now, tends to dance over differences, smile with gritted teeth.

I ask how she felt about the death of the Specials’ singer, Terry Hall. She says she was far closer to Ranking Roger, from the Beat, and was very upset when he died, in 2019 (one of the songs on Human Algebra, Parade the Crown, is a tribute). About Hall, she says: “I didn’t know Terry that well. I didn’t know Terry from the 2 Tone tour, and he just wasn’t a person that… We didn’t warm to each other, but I did admire his talent. His talent was mighty.”

The 2 Tone tour that she mentions is a seminal one: the Specials, Madness and the Selecter went round the UK on a 40-date tour in 1979, bringing down the house in places such as Hatfield and Widnes. (Madness dropped out after a while and were replaced by Dexys Midnight Runners.) For fans, it was a fantastic time; for most of the bands, too. But it wasn’t quite so great for Black, as the only female performer.

“There were about 30 people on the coach,” she says, “and I always used to sit up the front of the bus. And there’s a photo of me, and I’m reading Alien. And it fits the way that I felt on that bus. People gave me a wide berth. Because I wasn’t like Pepsi and Shirlie or whatever – not marriage material. And anyway, I already had a husband [she’s been with Terry since 1973]. And I wasn’t a bloke.”

So did you enjoy the tour?

“I enjoyed the times I was on stage,” she says. “That’s it. I rarely speak to women who say that they actually enjoy touring. Particularly if they’re in a male band. Men just seem to have a better time on tour, happy getting drunk and doing the things that men do. Women never seem to be quite so… carefree.”

It was easier, she says, when the Selecter’s manager, Juliet De Vie, was there. But, really, Black didn’t fit in. When the gigs were done, the bands would get back to the hotel, she says, “and everybody would just disappear. And you’d just be sat there. They wouldn’t tell you that they were going out, or where they were going. It was all boys together. And you know that if you turn up, you’re really going to… I can walk in rooms now and the conversation stops. It’s usually about football or something.”

Plus, she says, she had to deal with young female fans invited back “for coffee” by various other band members. “You’d rescue them from corridors, and they were crying, because somebody had just kicked them out because they wouldn’t… you know.”

There was much to admire about the 2 Tone movement – the music, the anti-racist, anti-sexist stance, the unity politics – but, of course, it was much easier to be a white man within it than a black woman.

“I can’t look at the world in any other way other than refracted through the eyes of a black person,” she says.

She does think things are getting better, but even when she released her autobiography, Black By Design, in 2011, at the launch, a white woman argued with her about racism. The woman insisted that her daughter was suffering from similar discrimination at school because she had red hair. “You don’t get those conversations now,” says Black. “Back then, you were still having to explain micro-aggressions.”

How does she feel about 2 Tone’s audience, which is mostly white (“chubby white men” she says in her book)? “I’ve always found it interesting. It wasn’t like that at the beginning, not quite so much. I’ve always had this theory that black folks move on with music. They don’t want to hold on to the past, whereas white folks are always being retro. Anyway, I think that the Selecter’s audience is more evolved. The knuckle-draggers can do one.”

Black has always loved 2 Tone – the sound, the attitude. It was perfect for her, brought up black in a white world. She was born Belinda Magnus to a Nigerian father Gordon Adenle (a Yoruba prince), and a British Jewish teenager from Dagenham, Eileen Magnus, who gave her up for adoption. Black traced her birth parents when she was 42. Adenle had just died, but her mum was living in Australia, and Black had a “sweet” relationship with her for 24 years until Eileen died, during Covid. They would write each other letters once a week.

Black only found Eileen after her adoptive parents, Ivy and Arthur Vickers, were both dead – she didn’t want to upset her mum. Ivy and Arthur had adopted Black after a doctor told Ivy that she needed another baby to take her mind off her Bell’s Palsy (the 50s were mad). They already had four boys, and wanted a girl. Black’s name was changed to Pauline Vickers, and she was brought up in Romford in the 1950s and 60s. Her autobiography reveals the racism that surrounded her, casual and specific, even within her own family. She was the only black child at her school. Her hair was a constant talking point. Her local Brownie pack wouldn’t allow her to join; nor the dance class. “They didn’t want me mucking up the chorus line,” she says wryly. “I know it doesn’t seem much, but it was devastating at the time.” Her mum got her piano lessons instead.

Also, she was sexually abused, over a period of months, by an adult neighbour. Telling her parents led to an awful scene (they made her retell her story in front of the neighbour and his pregnant wife). Aged 10, she went into herself.

“What did I find there? Protection. That’s what I found, mainly. Too much is made of: ‘Oh, black people are strong.’ We’re no stronger than any other person. But I had to navigate the sexual abuse, and the humiliation of that was really quite mind-blowing. And I needed to protect myself. All I could say to myself was: ‘The only thing you can do is make yourself clever.’ I knew that if I was ever going to get out of this ditch, which was Romford, then I was going to have to do something.”

So she did, scraping together enough qualifications to get to Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry. It was here that she began to find herself, hanging out with other black people for the first time. She was already aware of civil rights (she’d written “Say It Loud I’m Black and I’m Proud” in big letters on cardboard and hung it on her bedroom wall at home, much to Ivy’s distress), but it was the Selecter that led her to change her name from Pauline Vickers to Black, to name what she was. She started dressing in a cooler, more masculine style (she wonders, now, if that was self-protection as a result of the sexual abuse). Meeting other women in music also helped: Chrissie Hynde was very kind, she says.

There’s a brilliant women-in-punk/post-punk photograph by Michael Putland that’s often passed around the internet. It’s of Debbie Harry, Viv Albertine, Siouxsie Sioux, Chrissie Hynde, Poly Styrene and Black, taken in 1980. Black remembers the session as quite an odd one. It was for New Musical News, a facsimile of the NME put together because NME writers were on strike; Kate Bush was meant to come, but didn’t; Debbie Harry was two hours late. “Chrissie was practically falling off the chair, she’d had so much red wine, regaling us with all the stories of touring in America.”

When Harry did turn up, they were all in awe.

“Well, she was 10 years older than all of us. And if Debbie Harry turns up, everybody looks like chopped liver, don’t they? I often look at the picture because I’ve got it in my toilet. We were all interested in one another, but I see the expressions on my and Poly’s faces and they’re decidedly different from the others’ expressions… We’re like: ‘What are we doing here? Where do we fit into all this?’ There were other photos taken, she says, where she and Poly weren’t included.

From that time, she’s still friends with Rhoda Dakar, from the Bodysnatchers, but her closest friends are from when she was a radiographer. “Because I’m Miss Distrustful, Mistrustful. I don’t seek out people in the business, I don’t know how to hang out at parties and that kind of stuff. I’ve always been useless at that.”

But then, Black has no need to network. Not fitting in is her life force, her drive, her independent spirit. She even got through menopause without any help, “not even black cohosh!”

“Between 50 and 58 I didn’t know where the hell I was,” she says. “You know when people say that oestrogen is a problem? It’s not a bloody problem. That’s your life fuel. I think I always produced a surfeit of oestrogen; I have a sister, who I discovered much later, and she has the same thing. In menopause, your oestrogen drops, and all that live wire-ness disappears. And when you don’t have it, then you really, really know. I couldn’t have HRT for various reasons. I thought: ‘I’m going to die here.’”

She didn’t. Instead, she went off to make music in Argentina, Brazil, Germany. “I didn’t want to be seen until I got my life force back. I thought it had gone for ever, but I just trusted that it would come back, and it did.”

Good, I say.

“Yes,” she replies. “I haven’t looked back since. I mean, come on, we could all be more successful, more rich, more whatever. All those things. And sometimes people are like: ‘You’re a bit thin-skinned, aren’t you?’ You know, ‘You’ve got a chip on your shoulder.’ I’ve got a chip on both fucking shoulders! But I’m too old now to think about that. What I try to do is search out good work. Find a way of bringing something of yourself to the world, but not submerging yourself in it.” Find a way to remain, in short, mistress of your own shit.

“I like,” says Pauline Black, “to be mistress of my own shit.” It’s an admirable approach to life; also a sensible one, when you’ve had a life as varied as Black’s. Though she’s known as the singer in the Selecter, the Coventry 2 Tone band who gave us On My Radio and Three Minute Hero, Black has actually had many working lives. A quick CV: she started off as a hospital radiographer, before quitting in 1979 when the Selecter took off. Three years later, when the band split, she became a TV presenter, moving between kids’ telly (Granada TV’s Hold Tight!) and Black on Black, Channel 4’s British black magazine show. Then: an actor, winning Time Out’s best actress in 1991 for her stage portrayal of Billie Holiday. She found acting interesting, and liked “the discipline”, but got “fed up” with the lack of control. “I spent 10 years acting. Once I went back to music, I was happy. I don’t like being directed.”

So, on and off for the past three decades, Black has been mistress of her most natural, joy-giving role: as singer, songwriter and frontperson of the Selecter. For the young’uns: the Selecter were one of the founding bands of 2 Tone, the multi-racial ska-punk-rocksteady independent record label set up by the Specials’ Jerry Dammers in the late 1970s (others included the Specials, Madness, the Beat, the Bodysnatchers). They were the blackest band on the roster, plus the only one with both a male and female frontperson, Arthur “Gaps” Hendrickson smooth skanking alongside Black’s peppy fire.

After breaking up in 1982, the Selecter reformed in the early 90s. For a while, they had a mixed, stop-start time, before, in 2011, they started bringing out new songs and upping the ante on their always excellent live gigs. Their past three albums have done well, they’re booked to support Blur at this summer’s Wembley gigs, and their tune-packed new LP, Human Algebra (out on 21 April), launched itself with a banging single of the same name. For me, their type of ska – irrepressible dance music with conscious lyrics – is music that everyone likes, but Black demurs. “The Selecter is Marmite,” she says. “You either get it or you don’t.”

We’re in a cafe after her Observer photoshoot, drinking coffee. Black looks brilliant: sharp in her hat, Prada jacket, dark Levis, DMs. The new album, she says, was started during lockdown, with Black coming up with Human Algebra’s chorus hook, “Mama’s so blue” (she sings it to me: her voice is great). She and guitarist-saxophonist-keyboardist producer Neil Pyzer, along with Hendrickson, pinged ideas among them so that when life opened up again, they already had the basis of an album, “with lyrics covering all the things I was thinking about”.

What things? The album covers knife crime, keyboard warriors, fake news, global heating, ridiculous politicians… There’s an anti-war song, written before the invasion of Ukraine, and even a track that takes in the trials of touring in Europe post-Brexit. “We’ve got 10 people out on the road every single time, and everything has just gone sky high,” she says. “Brexit made me so angry. We’ve wrecked a generation, basically. We’re not allowed freedom of movement.”

There’s also a song, Stay Rebel, that lists black people killed by police and other authorities. The band have made a similar track for the past two albums, and this time round the list includes a relative of Charley “Aitch” Bembridge, the drummer. Bembridge was part of the original lineup of the Selecter, along with Black and Hendrickson, but has only just rejoined (the last drummer left: “he got God, and also he didn’t want to be vaccinated”).

There have been a lot of different lineups to the Selecter, some including co-founder Neol Davies. Black and Hendrickson’s Selecter has been fairly settled for the past decade, but even so, she says: “I don’t live in any of my musicians’ pockets. We don’t see one another for months, sometimes. But everybody knows that when we get on stage, something alchemical happens. Perfect, for that time. And that’s what I get off on.”

Black is refreshingly blunt. Before I met her, I’d been warned by other journalists that she could be tricky – “formidable”, “not easy” – though actually she’s warm and welcoming, gives a big hug on meeting. But she is honest and dignified, anomalies in a music business that, even now, tends to dance over differences, smile with gritted teeth.

I ask how she felt about the death of the Specials’ singer, Terry Hall. She says she was far closer to Ranking Roger, from the Beat, and was very upset when he died, in 2019 (one of the songs on Human Algebra, Parade the Crown, is a tribute). About Hall, she says: “I didn’t know Terry that well. I didn’t know Terry from the 2 Tone tour, and he just wasn’t a person that… We didn’t warm to each other, but I did admire his talent. His talent was mighty.”

The 2 Tone tour that she mentions is a seminal one: the Specials, Madness and the Selecter went round the UK on a 40-date tour in 1979, bringing down the house in places such as Hatfield and Widnes. (Madness dropped out after a while and were replaced by Dexys Midnight Runners.) For fans, it was a fantastic time; for most of the bands, too. But it wasn’t quite so great for Black, as the only female performer.

“There were about 30 people on the coach,” she says, “and I always used to sit up the front of the bus. And there’s a photo of me, and I’m reading Alien. And it fits the way that I felt on that bus. People gave me a wide berth. Because I wasn’t like Pepsi and Shirlie or whatever – not marriage material. And anyway, I already had a husband [she’s been with Terry since 1973]. And I wasn’t a bloke.”

So did you enjoy the tour?

“I enjoyed the times I was on stage,” she says. “That’s it. I rarely speak to women who say that they actually enjoy touring. Particularly if they’re in a male band. Men just seem to have a better time on tour, happy getting drunk and doing the things that men do. Women never seem to be quite so… carefree.”

It was easier, she says, when the Selecter’s manager, Juliet De Vie, was there. But, really, Black didn’t fit in. When the gigs were done, the bands would get back to the hotel, she says, “and everybody would just disappear. And you’d just be sat there. They wouldn’t tell you that they were going out, or where they were going. It was all boys together. And you know that if you turn up, you’re really going to… I can walk in rooms now and the conversation stops. It’s usually about football or something.”

Plus, she says, she had to deal with young female fans invited back “for coffee” by various other band members. “You’d rescue them from corridors, and they were crying, because somebody had just kicked them out because they wouldn’t… you know.”

There was much to admire about the 2 Tone movement – the music, the anti-racist, anti-sexist stance, the unity politics – but, of course, it was much easier to be a white man within it than a black woman.

“I can’t look at the world in any other way other than refracted through the eyes of a black person,” she says.

She does think things are getting better, but even when she released her autobiography, Black By Design, in 2011, at the launch, a white woman argued with her about racism. The woman insisted that her daughter was suffering from similar discrimination at school because she had red hair. “You don’t get those conversations now,” says Black. “Back then, you were still having to explain micro-aggressions.”

How does she feel about 2 Tone’s audience, which is mostly white (“chubby white men” she says in her book)? “I’ve always found it interesting. It wasn’t like that at the beginning, not quite so much. I’ve always had this theory that black folks move on with music. They don’t want to hold on to the past, whereas white folks are always being retro. Anyway, I think that the Selecter’s audience is more evolved. The knuckle-draggers can do one.”

Black has always loved 2 Tone – the sound, the attitude. It was perfect for her, brought up black in a white world. She was born Belinda Magnus to a Nigerian father Gordon Adenle (a Yoruba prince), and a British Jewish teenager from Dagenham, Eileen Magnus, who gave her up for adoption. Black traced her birth parents when she was 42. Adenle had just died, but her mum was living in Australia, and Black had a “sweet” relationship with her for 24 years until Eileen died, during Covid. They would write each other letters once a week.

Black only found Eileen after her adoptive parents, Ivy and Arthur Vickers, were both dead – she didn’t want to upset her mum. Ivy and Arthur had adopted Black after a doctor told Ivy that she needed another baby to take her mind off her Bell’s Palsy (the 50s were mad). They already had four boys, and wanted a girl. Black’s name was changed to Pauline Vickers, and she was brought up in Romford in the 1950s and 60s. Her autobiography reveals the racism that surrounded her, casual and specific, even within her own family. She was the only black child at her school. Her hair was a constant talking point. Her local Brownie pack wouldn’t allow her to join; nor the dance class. “They didn’t want me mucking up the chorus line,” she says wryly. “I know it doesn’t seem much, but it was devastating at the time.” Her mum got her piano lessons instead.

Also, she was sexually abused, over a period of months, by an adult neighbour. Telling her parents led to an awful scene (they made her retell her story in front of the neighbour and his pregnant wife). Aged 10, she went into herself.

“What did I find there? Protection. That’s what I found, mainly. Too much is made of: ‘Oh, black people are strong.’ We’re no stronger than any other person. But I had to navigate the sexual abuse, and the humiliation of that was really quite mind-blowing. And I needed to protect myself. All I could say to myself was: ‘The only thing you can do is make yourself clever.’ I knew that if I was ever going to get out of this ditch, which was Romford, then I was going to have to do something.”

So she did, scraping together enough qualifications to get to Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry. It was here that she began to find herself, hanging out with other black people for the first time. She was already aware of civil rights (she’d written “Say It Loud I’m Black and I’m Proud” in big letters on cardboard and hung it on her bedroom wall at home, much to Ivy’s distress), but it was the Selecter that led her to change her name from Pauline Vickers to Black, to name what she was. She started dressing in a cooler, more masculine style (she wonders, now, if that was self-protection as a result of the sexual abuse). Meeting other women in music also helped: Chrissie Hynde was very kind, she says.

There’s a brilliant women-in-punk/post-punk photograph by Michael Putland that’s often passed around the internet. It’s of Debbie Harry, Viv Albertine, Siouxsie Sioux, Chrissie Hynde, Poly Styrene and Black, taken in 1980. Black remembers the session as quite an odd one. It was for New Musical News, a facsimile of the NME put together because NME writers were on strike; Kate Bush was meant to come, but didn’t; Debbie Harry was two hours late. “Chrissie was practically falling off the chair, she’d had so much red wine, regaling us with all the stories of touring in America.”

When Harry did turn up, they were all in awe.

“Well, she was 10 years older than all of us. And if Debbie Harry turns up, everybody looks like chopped liver, don’t they? I often look at the picture because I’ve got it in my toilet. We were all interested in one another, but I see the expressions on my and Poly’s faces and they’re decidedly different from the others’ expressions… We’re like: ‘What are we doing here? Where do we fit into all this?’ There were other photos taken, she says, where she and Poly weren’t included.

From that time, she’s still friends with Rhoda Dakar, from the Bodysnatchers, but her closest friends are from when she was a radiographer. “Because I’m Miss Distrustful, Mistrustful. I don’t seek out people in the business, I don’t know how to hang out at parties and that kind of stuff. I’ve always been useless at that.”

But then, Black has no need to network. Not fitting in is her life force, her drive, her independent spirit. She even got through menopause without any help, “not even black cohosh!”

“Between 50 and 58 I didn’t know where the hell I was,” she says. “You know when people say that oestrogen is a problem? It’s not a bloody problem. That’s your life fuel. I think I always produced a surfeit of oestrogen; I have a sister, who I discovered much later, and she has the same thing. In menopause, your oestrogen drops, and all that live wire-ness disappears. And when you don’t have it, then you really, really know. I couldn’t have HRT for various reasons. I thought: ‘I’m going to die here.’”

She didn’t. Instead, she went off to make music in Argentina, Brazil, Germany. “I didn’t want to be seen until I got my life force back. I thought it had gone for ever, but I just trusted that it would come back, and it did.”

Good, I say.

“Yes,” she replies. “I haven’t looked back since. I mean, come on, we could all be more successful, more rich, more whatever. All those things. And sometimes people are like: ‘You’re a bit thin-skinned, aren’t you?’ You know, ‘You’ve got a chip on your shoulder.’ I’ve got a chip on both fucking shoulders! But I’m too old now to think about that. What I try to do is search out good work. Find a way of bringing something of yourself to the world, but not submerging yourself in it.” Find a way to remain, in short, mistress of your own shit.