Black by Design

by Pauline Black

  Our manager Juliet was not present all the time. She and Rick Rogers, the Specials manager, had Trigger, their PR company, to run in London. When she did join the tour I was glad of her company. I rather enjoyed a woman being in charge of us unruly Selecter lot and she knew her onions when it came to PR. She was getting us a lot of reviews and interest, which all helped to build our profile.

  The gigs were universally packed. So much so that sweat dripped off the walls and the ceiling at many venues. One particularly avid fan leapt from a balcony during our set at the Top Rank, Cardiff gig. I assume he lived after his spectacular vault.

  My twenty-sixth birthday was celebrated at a now-defunct venue, the Plymouth Fiesta. I was lucky enough to be presented onstage with a huge birthday card signed by all three bands after the last encore. Lynval then led the whole audience in singing Happy Birthday. This was a magical, life-enhancing moment, but it just as quickly turned into the first of many nightmarish moments. Post-show, most band members were well fortified with beer and assorted drugs. Desmond, whose unpredictable behaviour was beginning to cause concern, began acting up, due to something that had been said to him by one of the bouncers. The burly security guys were eager to clear the dressing rooms as quickly as possible and close up for the night. Unfortunately they were being less than polite. Suffice to say that as we were getting changed out of our sweaty stage clothes in a less than convivial communal dressing room, Desmond suddenly shouted: ‘Bloodclaat white man.’

  Within moments I saw three bouncers and several of The Selecter holding Desmond’s struggling body almost at right angles (remember he was a big man) while he sunk his teeth into Chrissy Boy from Madness’s left cheek. His manhandlers dragged him off, leaving a scared and stunned Chrissy Boy clutching his face. Desmond was too heavy to carry for long, so his feet were re-deposited on the ground, but he hadn’t finished with his ‘Hannibal Lecter’ routine. He lunged at one of the bouncers and tried to bite him too. The bouncers then decided to go and find reinforcements. That was when things turned ugly. Somebody, maybe Frank Murray, ran into the dressing room and told us to get Desmond out of the building as quickly as possible, because the bouncers were coming for him armed with baseball bats. That’s the last I saw of Desmond that night.

  The atmosphere in the bus took on a distinct chill the following day. The Selecter began to get a reputation for being rude, argumentative and at times violent with each other. The Specials had the same problem with two of their members, namely Roddy and Jerry, who were always having differences of opinion, but they hadn’t resorted to biting each other yet! Unfortunately, we didn’t know then that Desmond was ill, let alone that soon his mind would degenerate even further until his stage persona was compromised too.

  The Specials’ Neville Staple still has my undying respect for the attitude he exuded on stage. This was a young, black British male, adored by men as well as women for his cocky, devil-may-care persona, but not afraid to subvert stereotypes. Terry Hall may have been full of the studied sarcastic stage chat, but to see Neville astride a PA stack singing ‘Monkey Man’ and gesticulating at the skinheads in a mock chimp way was to see real rebellion. That moment in the set always spoke to me, far more than seeing some sleepy-eyed boy-wonder laconically singing his lyrics as if he couldn’t really be bothered. If that’s cool, then you can keep it. Give me a man who nails his colours to the mast!

  I can’t tell you how sick I used to get of the Sieg Heiling bonehead skins. 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. At gigs I always pointedly directed the chorus of ‘They Make Me Mad’ at them.

  Madness jumped ship halfway through the tour to go to America. I think they wanted to distance themselves from the media flak that was unfairly directed at the tour. Some of the more unscrupulous newspapers erroneously dubbed the 2-Tone movement as ‘racist’, because of the violent skins who were targeting the gigs, ostensibly to make trouble. The Specials and The Selecter did our best to answer such accusations, but Madness didn’t seem to have the stomach for controversy like the rest of us. Their jaunty, boyish image was in danger of being sullied with political fall-out, so they de-camped. Cowards!

  I think they also wanted to steal a march on the Specials and get to the other side of the pond first. Ultimately, the Specials nailed America much better than Madness, the latter’s quintessential Englishness being somewhat lost on the brash American sensibility.

  Madness was replaced on the tour by Dexy’s Midnight Runners, a soul band, just a few months from breaking through with a stupendous single release, ‘Geno’. They had their own resident mad man, Kevin Rowland. I always noticed that Desmond and Kevin gave each other a wide berth whenever their paths crossed.

  Just before Madness left us, there was a night on the television when there was almost a wholesale takeover of Top of the Pops by 2-Tone records. All three bands appeared on the show. Since we were on stage first every night, TOTP used a pre-recording of ours, but the Specials and Madness were able to do a fresh recording, thus pushing their singles further up the charts. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that we would find ourselves with a hit single and be a major movement in the pop market within the space of a few short months.

  Suddenly we were catapulted into a world where people did things in order to ‘make the show go real nice!’ This could mean anything from helping you get your dry cleaning to providing you with the drug de jour. This was a whole new world and not necessarily a brave one. Weakling that I was, I soon found myself out of my depth.

  The best you can hope for as a woman designated as ‘one of the boys’ is to be tolerated. Most men are on automatic pilot when it comes to women. For them, women have a dual role. They are either shaggable or not. If the woman in question is the lead singer of a popular band, then this often renders her definitely un-shaggable. Therein lies the rub, as they say.

  For almost two months, I was doomed to watching grown men act like prepubescent schoolboys at an Ann Summers party. Therefore I spent an awful lot of time on my own while everybody else, with the noted exceptions of the monk-like Horace and the studiedly aloof Terry Hall, were pursuing the Bacchanalian triple tour delights of sex, drugs and alcohol. Don’t know when they found time to do their laundry!

  The flipside of the gold coin that I had just been tossed was loneliness – hours of it in impersonal hotel rooms up and down the country. Unfortunately loneliness can lead to poor decision-making, especially when fuelled with gratis lines of cocaine. I had never taken cocaine before. In fact, I had never given cocaine any thought at all before the 2-Tone tour. I smoked marijuana without a second thought, and had done so recreationally at weekends for years, but cocaine was out of my price range and out of my social sphere. I discovered that cocaine makes an essentially shy person rather gregarious and on some days, the life and soul of the party. Regrets? I had a few!

  The Selecter’s rollercoaster ride hurtled down the track towards Europe, taking in Holland, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Germany and Italy on the way. I had never been outside Britain until then, and I found it hard to comprehend that so many foreign fans turned up at our gigs, fully kitted out in black and white clothes, and sang along to the songs at our performances. Their English was practically non-existent, but they had memorized our songs’ words. They were tuned into that youthful musical sixth sense that can detect meaningful new sub-cultures inside their radar range. Slowly but surely we stealth-bombed Europe with the 2-Tone message. During this initial raid I also caught the eye of a Swede, Stockholm-based photographer Hatte Stiwenius.

  Life seemed to be zooming along at breakneck speed, while all sorts of career-enhancing or sometimes threatening decisions had to be made. Mike Read and John Peel commissioned us for much-coveted radio sessions.
During these lengthy Maida Vale recordings, coffee breaks were spent deciphering the impenetrable gobbledy-gook-speak of our chosen lawyer and accountant, who were negotiating with our prospective record company, Money. Record deals, just like time and tide, waited for no man or woman. Out of natural loyalty to the Specials and perhaps a misplaced sense of trust in Chrysalis, we stuck with 2-Tone. In retrospect, not the best business decision, but that’s where our hearts were at the end of 1979.

  We were a band that had been catapulted into the big time within six short months, unlike the Specials who had had two years to build up their touring chops. It is a testament to the strength of us as both musicians and people that we managed to make it in the way that we did, given the short preparation time.

  Now we faced our biggest hurdle. Who would produce our first album? The bar had already been set very high by the Specials when Elvis Costello had consented to produce them. Neol wanted Roger Lomas to carry on in the producer’s role. On the face of it this was reasonable enough. Roger had managed to produce two hits from Neol’s songs, the instrumental ‘The Selecter’ which had kicked off the whole seven-piece band idea and the quirky single ‘On My Radio’ that had established the band as more than just a faceless semi-hit wonder.

  In my opinion, we had already made one stupid mistake. Our first band single should not have been a double ‘A’ side. ‘On My Radio’ should have been the first single and its flipside ‘Too Much Pressure’ should have been the second single. But Neol and the rest of us at that time agreed that the fans came first and they should have value for money. This is true, but we had plenty of cover tracks in the live set which would have been adequate for ‘B’ sides. Also, these cover tracks would have generated much-needed royalties for the original Jamaican artists. More importantly, it would have established Gaps Hendrickson as a lead singer too.

  There was much heated discussion as to whether we should have a change of producer. Charley argued that we needed a ‘name’ producer from the Jamaican reggae world, not a homegrown, almost unknown from Coventry. Mikey Dread was suggested, and Dennis Bovell, who had not only produced ‘Silly Games’ for reggae artist Janet Kay, but also earned his punk credentials by providing the sounds for the very successful all-girl band, the Slits. Charley stood his ground. He felt unhappy that although the band was predominantly black, two white men, Neol and Roger, were calling the shots and trying to push the band further away from its roots. It was bound to happen, particularly when Roger’s catchphrase of ‘All right, boy’ resurfaced as an argument for not employing him further for the first album.

  I was stuck in the middle, that miserable ‘between a rock and a hard place’ void, where most mixed-race people find themselves from time to time. I’d always wanted to promote my black credentials, but these seemed very different from Jamaican credentials. In the same way that Roddy Radiation was in love with the illusion that was James Dean, I was in love with the illusion of Angela Davis and the Black Panthers. I was dancing to a black American aesthetic, not a Jamaican one, even if I was the lead singer of a band that did Jamaican music. I was confused. I had to make a choice and in 20/20 hindsight I made the wrong one. I should have supported Neol, but I didn’t. I supported Charley in his quest to bring in somebody who would authenticate our sound. The trouble was it didn’t need authenticating, or if it did, then we chose the wrong producer.

  For whatever reasons, the big guns Mikey Dread and Dennis Bovell did not take up the offer. A real pity, because I think they would have taken our raw material and really made something of us, not necessarily because they were Jamaican but because they were fine producers. Instead we got Errol Ross. I didn’t like him after five minutes in his company. His unctuous demeanour coupled with his hustler mentality did not impress me. He had ‘slick willy’ written all over him. Charley, who had known Errol for some years, was obviously very impressed with Errol’s business acumen. Errol loftily explained that he had a production company called Positive Productions.

  ‘Positive productions produce positive outcomes’ was his favourite mantra.

  As I recall, he immediately complained about the hotel we had been booked into in Brussels. I’m not sure what his complaint was, but the upshot of his displeasure made some members of Charley’s faction start questioning whether we were being treated as befitted our status. Fuel was added to this fire when somebody suggested that perhaps the Specials had stayed in more upmarket hotels and had bigger riders at gigs than us during their European tour. I couldn’t see anything wrong with our accommodation or our well-stocked riders. Compared with our respective homes, the hotels were downright palatial. It seemed to me that the bottom line was that The Selecter had not had the degree of chart success that the Specials currently enjoyed and therefore there were not so many ‘goodies’ available to us yet, but if we were patient and worked hard, then soon those things would materialise. At first, their querulous objections were only low rumblings, muttered in the back of the tour bus or in shared hotel rooms, but Errol amplified these whenever possible and their sound would get louder as we progressed around Europe. The split had started.

  We arrived back in London just in time for the Christmas festivities and a three-night run at the Michael Sobell centre in London supporting the wonderful Ian Dury and the Blockheads. These gigs were a fitting end to a fabulous year and were a barometer of how far we had progressed as a band. There was only one problem. We were driving each other mad.

  EIGHT

  TOO MUCH PRESSURE

  Fans and me outside Sheffield Limit Club, 1980

  The Selecter reported for recording duty on 1 January 1980. It was a new year and a new decade, anything seemed possible. We were well rested, refreshed and raring to get on with recording our first album. Three leisurely weeks stretched ahead of us to get the honed perfection of our live set down on to tape. We were secure in the knowledge that each of us was now on a regular wage of £100 per week, due to a Chrysalis advance. No more signing on or working while we were not on the road. Even the roadies were on a retainer. The Selecter was generating money. A publishing contract was still to be resolved, but that particular bugbear could wait for a while. We were a happy band again. All that remained was to deliver a killer album. We awaited the arrival of our new producer, Errol Ross.

  A first album should be the easiest to realize in the studio. The band has usually been polishing the songs for years and the constant repetition in professional surroundings tightens and finesses any wayward song structures. However, as soon as Mr Ross arrived it was as though we were all novices again. In some ways we were, but we had done radio sessions in the BBC Maida Vale studios by this time. We knew the runnings, even if we weren’t totally seasoned professionals. Most of us knew what was expected in a recording studio. A producer should put the musicians at their ease and subliminally create a working environment where they feel that they can create good music; endless hoary old lectures about how to create positive vibes are not the way to achieve such a result. Charley seemed enthralled by Errol’s smooth, silver-tongued homilies and platitudes, almost treating him like a mentor, but oblivious to his corrosive production style. Prior to his engagement, he had apparently been a mediocre bass player, who decided to retrain as a sound engineer. To my knowledge, the Selecter album was his only successful recording. Certainly in his current résumé he lists no others. In my opinion, he single-handedly ruined the sound of our first album, Too Much Pressure, although fortunately, not the songs. They were too good and couldn’t be harmed, but his production skills were minor at best and majorly ruinous at worst.

  We chose Horizon studios again, which was a big mistake. The studio engineer Kim Holmes and the tape op Moose naturally bore their allegiance to Roger Lomas. They were often less than receptive to Errol’s ‘positive productions’ lectures too. Errol made the mistake of bullshitting so much about his technical studio prowess that when he did need advice, Kim and Moose were not very helpful. It was a mess from beginning to end. It to
ok over a week to record the basic instruments. Gaps and I were expected to provide guide vocals for every song. Every session went on into the wee hours of the night, so by the end of the week our voices were very hoarse. Then Errol expected us to record our vocals with voices that were well below par. I politely asked him to do the instrumental overdubs instead while we gave our voices a few days’ rest, whereupon I received a pompous lecture about my ‘less than positive’ attitude. Needless to say, my attitude became ‘less than positive’ by the second and for anybody who has stood downwind of me when I’m raging, they will know what I mean. I think our exchange went something like this: ‘You must think positively, Pauline. What do I mean by this? Banish all negative thoughts, see only the good in every situation. Therefore instead of being negative about the vocal sound, why not think positively and ask yourself how best to use this sound to your advantage.’

  To which I positively answered: ‘How about sticking it up your arse.’ Unfortunately, probably not the most considered response, but once a rude girl, always a rude girl I guess!

  I’ve worked with many producers over the years and I think most would say that I am a very reasonable person in a studio. I’ve never had a bad session with Roger Lomas at the helm. He always likes the recorded vocals to sound as good as possible. After all, the vocals carry not only the words and message of the song, but the lyrical melody that the punter in the street likes to whistle, so why would anybody go out of their way to make them sound worse than necessary?