Black by Design

by Pauline Black

  The gig is still vivid in my mind. We began playing to quite a few seemingly disinterested folk propping up the bar or sitting at the tables and chairs at the edge of the dance floor. Despite the money that had been exchanged with the sound and lighting crews, the sound mix, the onstage foldback and the constant, single state red stage lighting were woefully inadequate. But we must have been making the right kind of noise, because after the first song the people at the bar suddenly came down the front clutching their pints, followed by others who had been waiting in the stairwell or round the sides of the room for the main act. Soon they tried dancing, but suddenly realised that it was impossible while holding a pint of beer. So they downed tools and started skanking. Not a bad result to be better than a pint of beer at your first proper gig.

  Gaps and I stole looks at each other as we skanked up and down the front of the stage, our vocals fearlessly intertwining over the urgency of the Selecter music, until a look passed between us during a song in the middle of the set that telegraphed the message: ‘Hang on in there. We are doing all right, just keep it up to the end.’

  I loved it when Gaps danced. He really was the most elegant dancer out of the whole 2-Tone assortment of wannabe Fred Astaires. He seemed to come into his element when he moved his legs and body, flailing his arms or holding them in stylish positions to the beat of the music. He made the instrumental ‘James Bond’ come alive with his toasting, a technique of chatting on the microphone, and he looked exceptionally menacing even though, as I said before, he was a shy, quietly spoken man in everyday life.

  Gaps Hendrickson and me leading from the front

  In Leeds everything came together, the harmonies, the Selecter sound, the songs, Gaps’s dance routines, my stage persona and cockney patter. The crowd was baying for more by the end of the show, but there wasn’t time for an encore. The band was told in no-nonsense terms that we had to have all our gear off the stage in ten minutes, because the stage had to be properly set for the headline act, the Specials. As the rest of the band stripped the stage down and packed it away in our van, I went back to the empty dressing room, sporting a grin as wide as that of the Cheshire Cat. Taking the opportunity to remove my sweaty clothes while there was still some privacy, I was less than pleased when Trevor reappeared demanding his hat back. I reluctantly returned it, while trying to cover what little dignity is left to a woman who has been caught wearing not much more than her bra and knickers. He stared at me for a few moments with a renewed respect, before remarking: ‘You looked good onstage, sis.’

  To demonstrate this newfound respect, he promptly dropped his drawers as he exited, up-ended his backside, reached back with his hands and spread the under-side of his testicles. I was later informed that I had been ‘turkey necked’. I realised that I was now officially ‘one of the boys’!

  We were all elated after the gig. Something was happening in the world of music and we had somehow thrust our fingers into the life-giving force of the Zeitgeist. The resultant shock of the new was ‘le ska’!

  The very next day I went into town to a men’s outfitters, Dunn & Company, which had a double-fronted store opposite Sainsbury’s on Trinity Street. There was a strange hush in the shop, probably more due to the fact that there was a soft carpet underfoot than a rogue woman standing in their midst. The shop was run along the lines of the comedy sitcom Are You being Served? As soon as I stepped into the shop, a man approached me with a tape measure around his neck.

  ‘Can I help you?’ He choked back the ‘sir’ part of his standard, reflex-action patter and stood staring at me, as if he had just noticed a slug on the floor.

  I explained why I was there in my best patrician tones and after a barely imperceptible rise of his left eyebrow, he asked my hat size, which completely stumped me. It hadn’t occurred to me that hats had sizes. Helpfully, he went to the back of the shop and reappeared with a selection of dove-grey hats.

  I loved their hats. They were beautifully made, with just the right proportions and lined with white silk stamped in the middle of the crown with the ‘Dunn & Co’ logo in curlicue script. I tried on a couple rather self-consciously until I found one that fitted. I now had my own hat and always shopped there whenever I needed a replacement, which fortunately was not too often.

  Eleven days later, on 21 July 1979, we supported Madness and the Specials at the Electric Ballroom in London. How many bands can say that they played a prestige London show within seven weeks of getting together? Not many, but we did. We were on a steep learning curve. Not only that, we also garnered our first review from Sounds journo Giovanni Dadomo, who begins his article being totally surprised that the venue is rammed at only 8.30 p.m. and asks the reader to forgive his vagueness because ‘it is hard to be a saint in a sauna’. He freely admits that he has no idea whether the band on view is related to the ‘B’ side of the Specials’ ‘Gangsters’ single or not, but he seems impressed by the ‘two all-action vocalists’. Unfortunately I find it hard to forgive him for saying that I introduced the songs in ‘a squeaky oop north accent somewhat reminiscent of the late “Clitheroe Kid”’, only to realize on closer scrutiny that ‘the squeaker is quite definitely a girl’. Fortunately he later mitigates this unflattering portrayal by saying ‘a much better singer than talker’. More importantly though, he loves the band, likening us to the Specials, and signs the article off with ‘[The Selecter] conspire to make dancing the only way to walk.’

  He was not wrong when he described the venue as a sauna. Water dripped from every inch of space on the auditorium’s walls. When I first read the review, I hated him for likening me to Jimmy Clitheroe. A chubby, middle-aged pipsqueak in a schoolboy outfit was not the ‘image’ I was going for! But the rest of it – whoah! What a review for only your fifth gig ever!

  Fortunately no more reviewers ever alluded to the ‘Clitheroe Kid’ again. And it will be Giovanni Dadomo who will be talking in a squeaky voice if I ever meet him in the future!

  The review now posed a huge problem. I was still working, albeit sporadically – lately I had been phoning in sick on rather too many occasions. I often joked with Philip, my fellow radiographer, that I had had a heavy night after a gig and I wasn’t in a fit state to work the following day. Thankfully and to his credit, he didn’t say anything to anybody, but he was beginning to wonder what kinds of venues my new band was playing in. To make matters worse, he read all the music papers hoping that one day his sorry-arse band, Silmarillion, would be reviewed. I had told him the name of my band, but I’m not sure that it registered with him. He never referred to us by name, just ‘your band’. I hoped he had forgotten it. Otherwise if he read the gig reviews in the papers he would begin to put two and two together. Fortunately, the reviewer had not named any of us individually, because in those early days, we had no PR company giving out press releases to would-be reviewers.

  I expressed my worries to Charley one day while listening to some records round at his house. Apparently Neol had told him that Paul Rambali, an NME journo, wanted to do the first in-depth interview with the now rapidly emerging Selecter. Our names would appear in public once the article was printed. Suddenly I was scared. Everything was moving so fast. What was I going to do about my job? After all, I was up for promotion soon to senior radiographer. Was I prepared to destroy my career and throw away three years of hard training just to follow what could possibly turn out to be a damp squib? There were hardly any guarantees in life, but none in the music business. All these questions messed with my head, until Charley said: ‘Why not change your name, P?’ (He always called me ‘P’.)

  The simplest ideas are always the hardest to think through, but a name change cut to the chase immediately. But to what?

  By this time, Gaps, Desmond and Rob had arrived. They busied themselves rolling large spliffs, while listening to Charley’s old bluebeat record collection. People love a game when they are stoned. Inhibitions roll away and people blurt out the first thought that comes into their head. Everybody sta
rted pitching in ideas about a name change. Most of the ideas were unworkable, particularly when Desmond, while eyeing me lasciviously, shouted out: ‘Pauline Pum-pum’. For those readers not acquainted with Jamaican patois, pum-pum is a woman’s vagina!

  The wonderful thing about ‘free-forming’ with words is that happy accidents occur. So when Charley lay on his back puffing out smoke rings after pulling on a large chillum, and said: ‘What have we got…Pauline…she’s black…Pauline’s black…black Pauline…’

  ‘That’s it,’ I shouted excitedly, ‘Pauline Black.’

  As soon as I said it, the name felt right. It fitted me like a glove. 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.

  At that moment I felt as good as Muhammad Ali probably did when he kept taunting his opponent Ernie Terrell in 1967 with the words: ‘What’s my name, fool? Say my name?’ Ali said it in retaliation against Ernie Terrell, who had insisted on calling Ali by his former name, Cassius Clay, which Ali considered his ‘slave name’. I wanted to assert my new identity, fashioned in my own image, not somebody else’s idea of who I should be. As far as I was concerned back then, my adopted name was as good as a ‘slave name’. My rebirth was complete. The ‘rude girl’ I had invented had a new name, Pauline Black. Black by design!

  I used the name in public for the first time in Rambali’s article, ingeniously titled ‘They Still Bear the Skas’.

  This staved off the danger of being found out at work, but only for a short while. We were getting more and more gigs further afield and requests for interviews, so it was only a matter of time before my secret life was discovered. In an attempt to stave off the inevitable, I went to my doctor with a cock-and-bull story about a bad knee and very obligingly he signed me off for six weeks.

  During July and August, The Selecter travelled up and down the English motorways, gigging and building a reputation on the circuit. On 11 August 1979, our trusty Bedford van broke down just a few hundred yards from the gig in Middlesbrough at the notorious Rock Garden. We had been warned in advance that you entered here at your peril, particularly if you were a predominantly black band. The local skinheads were tough and heavy and as someone usefully described it: ‘It was a cross between a Viking pillage and a far-right rally.’

  The venue occupied a corner plot and we could see in the distance a small crowd of skinhead fans waiting for us. Rob and Grant, our trusted roadies, advanced towards the venue on foot with a degree of trepidation, but as soon as the reception committee heard that it was The Selecter in the van, they ran pell-mell towards us. This was a most unnerving sight when you were actually in the van and had no idea of the conversation that had just taken place between them and the road crew. Neol and Charley got out of the van trying to look mean and moody, because they were both over six foot, but it was completely unnecessary; the advancing horde were clutching bits of paper or torn-off wall posters advertising the gig and all they wanted was to have them signed and talk to us, which everybody dutifully did. They then pushed our van to the venue, where they helped our roadies unload the gear. That was it, this band of tearaways were now our ‘official’ protection for the day and chaperoned us to the local pub and chippy, where nobody bothered us at all. The gig was rammed. These kids understood what we were trying to say. The moral of the tale is, take people as you find them. It was us who had preconceptions that day and it taught us a lesson.

  After this, we got ourselves a manager. Her name was Juliet De Vie and she was twenty-one years old, a bottle-blonde puppy of a girl, but beneath the puff-candy exterior lurked a will of iron and a mind like the Enigma machine at Bletchley Park. When we first engaged her, she was working at Trigger, a PR company that by then had become the 2-Tone HQ, in Camden, adjacent to the tube station.

  Rick Rogers, the Specials manager, owned Trigger’s cluttered, makeshift office. It was up some rickety stairs at the back of a tiny arcade, which also conveniently contained a loafer and Dr Marten’s shoe shop on the ground floor. Meetings normally took place in a greasy spoon café around the corner. It was all marvellously informal in the early days and, come to think of it, in the latter days too.

  Our choice of manager was largely down to Neol Davies, who has always been an incurable flirt, and was smitten by the physical charms of Ms De Vie on sight. Besides it was a good idea to have another woman on board, not that anybody had sought my opinion before engaging her, but her managerial presence chimed with the anti-sexist ethos of the 2-Tone label.

  As soon as we had management, our ad hoc schedule became structured, thanks to Juliet. No longer were we running hither and thither like headless chickens looking for a gig.

  Suddenly we were added to the bill of a benefit concert in aid of One Parent Families in London on 21 August. It was headlined by the Specials. Initially John Cooper Clarke was on the bill above us and we were bottom, just behind Linton Kwesi Johnson, but at the last moment JCC went to the States and we and LKJ were bumped up the bill, while all-girl band the Modettes were brought in to take up the slack.

  I loved Hammersmith Palais, the famous venue immortalised in song by punk band The Clash, whose taped records were now on permanent rotation in the bus thanks to Rob the roadie. It was an old-school dance hall, smaller than the nearby premier venue, Hammersmith Odeon, but it was big on history. The building dated back to the 1920s. It was a place where the ‘unwashed’ masses congregated to hear music, from jazz, big bands and tea dances to the currently in-vogue punk and reggae.

  The stage was at such a height and width that the rapport with the audience was perfect. The auditorium was wider than it was long. There is nothing better than seeing a wide stretch of upturned faces all pointed at the stage and smiling and enjoying the music. Somehow the alchemy that happened between audience and performers at the Palais made you enjoy the music whether you wanted to or not.

  However, on this particular night the stage was a small round bandstand, not able to support the burgeoning needs of two seven-piece bands who bounded around the stage as if their very lives depended on it. Therefore a lorry was hurriedly dispatched to get a new one and a motley load of bits of staging and risers arrived that had to be quickly assembled before the doors opened. Everybody pitched in amid much grumbling from the bands and tears from the lady promoter who didn’t realise that a large venue like the Palais required a powerful PA rig and a proper stage. Nonetheless, a good night was had in the end. As they say, all’s well that ends well.

  We came to realize that ‘benefit’ gigs were often badly organised and benefited nobody much after all the ‘expenses’ were taken into account. Indeed, I often wonder who is the real beneficiary? In my experience it is usually the egos of the many flaky do-gooders that attach themselves to these charity gigs like ticks to a mangy dog.

  Word went round backstage that John Lydon was in the audience. Him I had to see. I rushed out front with Gaps for company and as we pushed our way through the scrum at the bar we saw a huge crowd jostling for a better look at a pimply, skinny white boy, who was doing his best to ignore them. Oh, the price of fame!

  Other luminaries present and correct on that particular evening were a brace of Pretenders, Elvis Costello and an exuberant Iggy Pop, who may or may not have been in the company of Mr Rotten. My eyes were popping out of my head as I clutched my pint of bitter shandy and shuffled in and out of the assembled mob.

  The Modettes came on to the stage amid a bit of heckling from some of the more uncouth sexist elements in the audience. This was my first live experience of an all-girl band, who competently played their instruments and wrote their own material. Vocalist Ramona fronted the band. She looked just like Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 movie A Bout de Souffle. She sang in Engli
sh, but with a heavy French accent, mangling the words of the song, but nonetheless possessing that je ne sais quoi that many French girls use to maximum effect. I’d been told that their guitarist Kate Korris had formerly been a member of the Slits, an all-girl band that I admired, but the revelation for me on that night was the powerful drummer, June Miles-Kingston, who sat gorgeously stony-faced behind her equipment, holding the whole, wobbly, jelly-like sound together. They won the audience over by the end of the set. After all, London was their stomping ground and this was a London audience, notoriously fickle and expectant. What could The Selecter offer?

  Respected NME music journo Charles Shaar Murray reviewed the gig eleven days later, on 1 September 1979. He provides a vivid, if somewhat fanciful, rundown of Selecter personnel. Neol Davies is described as ‘fearsomely be-shaded and looking like he’s never dropped any pills’ and again, I am initially mistaken for a boy, ‘a ska-oriented Michael Jackson’, until on closer inspection he refers to me as ‘a real live Rude Girl’. Impressed with our ‘tightly constructed Proper Songs’, he suggests that we may give ‘the Specials a taste of serious competition in time to come’.

  Peter Coyne of Record Mirror saw the gig in much the same way: ‘they play harder than the Specials and their demonic, danceable sound is pleasurably akin to being whip-cracked across the skull with white-hot barbed wire’.

  Praise indeed! But the man of the evening as far as The Selecter was concerned was LKJ. His albums Dread, Beat & Blood and Forces of Victory were also on heavy rotation in the van. He eloquently articulated the very things that we felt so strongly about. Single-handedly he had invented a new lexicon to describe the often violent events in Britain that impacted on its black Caribbean citizens. When he strode to the microphone that night his mighty presence just ate up the stage. Unfortunately, his backing tapes had gone missing in transit, so it was a very short set. The highlight was a version of ‘Sonny’s Lettah’ declaimed in his usual incendiary verse to a spontaneous rhythm supplied by massed handclaps and a smattering of drums provided by June, the Modettes’ drummer. Definitely a night to remember.