Black by Design

by Pauline Black

  We hit the road again in our comfy, well-equipped tour bus, driven by our bona fide redneck driver Romain, whose constant refrain was that he usually only drove for Dolly Parton. Quite what he had done to deserve us remained a mystery, but we seemed to get on okay as we chatted our way through the deserts and wastelands on the interminable night drives in America. Anybody would have thought that aeroplanes hadn’t been invented. We reached El Paso after driving almost 800 miles across the Arizona desert from Los Angeles. En route, I saw a staggeringly beautiful sunrise in the desert at 4.30 a.m. It was one of those moments when I just felt blessed to be alive and doing something I loved. It made me think about how far we had come in the space of less than a year. Everybody else was asleep. It was bliss not to talk. I felt more alone when everybody else was awake.

  I was eager to cross the border into Mexico from El Paso. It was similar to the nondescript border that Orson Welles filmed in one of his movies. The hills surrounding the city were flame-red and shimmering in the heat. Once in Ciudad Juarez on the Mexican side, I was surprised to find its dusty streets awash with beggars, mostly blind or deformed women and children. I vividly recall being passed by a young boy whose severely twisted body only allowed him to walk on all fours like a dog. He had a rope tied around his neck which an older woman, presumably his mother, used to lead him along the streets. She intermittently tugged at it to make sure he kept up with her. The poverty and cruelty on display were mind-boggling, and made all the more shocking as 1980s El Paso was known as the blue jeans capital of the world, producing over two million pairs every week. Yet a few hundred yards across the border people lived literally like dogs. The Americas were proving full of contradiction. Overwhelmed by the abject squalor and deprivation, I shamefully put some dollars in a few begging bowls and fled back across the border to the comfort of my air-conditioned hotel. Dog-boy haunted my dreams for weeks afterwards.

  Despite such acute reality checks, the excitement of conquering a new territory for 2-Tone hadn’t jaded The Selecter yet. We knew that on the whole Americans didn’t ‘get us’, but for us it was a challenge rather than a demoralizing experience. Americans have a surprising lack of what British people pride themselves on – irony. Without it, American audiences rarely understood what the hell we were on about. There was a lot of irony in songs like ‘On My Radio’ and ‘Three Minute Hero’, but I think most of it went over the heads of the average American audience. Plus there was the problem that if you are mixing up black and white people in the band, well, that is okay, but stick to rock music or reggae music, don’t try and fuse the two. That way lies serious confusion! American audiences are not big on hybrids, unless they tend to be of the ‘mule’ variety! Beyond the major cities, our anger-fuelled music was stubbornly misunderstood. Perhaps we were asking too much from our audiences to immediately embrace an anti-racist stance. After all, it had only been twelve years since Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been mercilessly gunned down. Wounds like that took a long time to heal.

  The chief problem was that radio stations in 1980 were still segregated. As far as American radio was concerned, there was black music and there was white music and although crossover hits regularly happened, these categories still prevailed. 2-Tone music didn’t lend itself to either side of this accepted racial barrier, being essentially black in origin but, apart from The Selecter, white in personnel and sensibility. It owed too much to punk music for mainstream tastes, but was not similar enough to the great reggae entrepreneurs like Bob Marley for it to be embraced by important black stations.

  Faced with such a dilemma, the main radio stations on either side of the ethnic divide chose not to play it. This rendered us dependent on college radio stations and thus a primarily white audience. There were exceptions to this rule, such as maverick radio DJs like Rodney Bingenheimer, who played his own eclectic mix of new releases on KROQ, a rock station in Los Angeles that championed the 2-Tone music and style in much the same way that John Peel had furthered its appeal in Britain. But unfortunately there weren’t enough of these defenders of the faith countrywide and the music fell into the yawning crack between black and white America, then largely disappeared once the bands returned home. Some bands overcame this musical apartheid but ours was not one of them.

  As we journeyed through Texas, it became apparent that non-musical racism was alive and well too, despite all the civil rights victories. I lost count of the times that I went into shops and was treated like dog dirt until they heard my accent and discovered that I was British and then everything changed and it was ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘hope you have a good day, y’all’. That was how it was in the cities, but it was just plain hostile if you strayed off the interstate roads.

  I remember a truck stop somewhere in the ‘Deep South’. The restaurant was full of noisy lunchtime diners, all of them white. The sight of six black people and three white people laughing, joking and chatting with each other as they stood in line waiting to be seated rendered the entire place dumb. Eventually we were seated. We were then ignored for fifteen minutes by the two waitresses on duty. America is a place that normally prides itself on its service industries. Nowhere up north had we encountered such blatant unwelcoming behaviour. The tension in the air was palpable. Hungry as we were, we just got up and left. Just before the door shut behind us, the loud hubbub of conversation immediately started again, as though the past fifteen minutes had been a figment of their collective imaginations and, at last, they had woken up from their joint nightmare.

  The worst racist incident we encountered was when music journalist Garry Bushell and a photographer were sent to the states to do an interview with us for Sounds. Music journos would move heaven and earth for an American assignment. These junkets made up for the hard slog of reviewing crap bands in crap venues in the back of beyond in Britain.

  Garry’s idea was to spend a few days with us on the tour bus while we trucked through the Texas leg of the tour. He came up with the bright idea of photographing us down by Southfork Ranch, where the popular, glossy soap Dallas was filmed. Dallas was huge in Britain at the time. The British TV audience had taken the main character, the scheming, but charming JR, to its collective heart. We thought it would be fun to do the photoshoot in such gloriously ironic surroundings.

  Romain was not too happy when he heard about our plan, but he was in no position to disagree with it. He dutifully drove us out to the ranch and parked on the side of the country road. A white picket fence surrounded acres of land belonging to the imposing house that was just visible in the distance. A huge sign displaying the name ‘Southfork Ranch’ hung above the gated entrance. The band piled out of the bus and began to pose for photos in the entrance. Apart from the sound of our general excitement, it seemed as silent as the grave.

  Ten minutes later, as we were sitting on the picket fence, smiling and mugging for the camera, a flat-bed truck turned up with several burly men on the back all ominously sporting baseball bats. It pulled over to the side of the road behind the tour bus. Immediately Romain approached them and I can only assume that he explained who we were and what we were trying to do. The ensuing conversation with the strangers became heated. It was at that point that I noticed that we began to group along racial lines. All us black folk knew instinctively that the problem was us. The white members of our party were free to come and go between us and enter into conversation, but the six of us became dumb, which I hasten to add was not our usual modus operandi. It was scary. Suffice to say that we were hustled back on to the bus and Romain told us all to shut up if we wanted to get out of there safely. I was later told that the menacing strangers had said to Romain that ‘If those niggers don’t get off that fence and back on that bus right away, then there is gonna be trouble.’

  The Selecter on a dirt road outside Dallas, 1980

  Well you can’t say fairer than that, can you?

  I’m not sure that the American tour ever recovered from that piece of ‘good ole boy’ ad
vice. But it did make us all feel like counter-insurgents in their big old country. We were pleased to get back to civilisation as Austin beckoned. The city that spawned Janis Joplin welcomed us with open arms and made up for such appalling treatment.

  Garry Bushell still relates the Southfork diplomatic incident, except he has embellished it over the years. No, Garry, nobody actually shot at us. Believe me, I would have remembered that!

  The Selecter travelled a zigzag path across the States and Canada until we reached New York on 20 May. Our music garnered a lot of good reviews and love along the way. People began to sit up and take notice of us: one member of rock royalty in particular, Mick Jagger, who attended our New York City gig at Hurrahs.

  Record Mirror journalist Mike Nicholls describes the place as ‘a swanky, uptown club full of failed fashion plates’ in an article about us, entitled ‘How The West Was Won’ from 14 June 1980. While trying to get a bird’s eye view of the stage from the raised DJ podium, he was surprised to find himself in the company of Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall. He notes that ‘not only was he [Mick Jagger] there, he was actually dancing and to all intents and purposes enjoying himself!’

  The wear and tear of the tour is highlighted in the same interview with Mike Nicholls. At a Greenwich Village instore album signing in New York, this is what Neol had to say about whether he liked America and its people: ‘They’re just a bunch of idiots. Posers. They’re not interested in our music, they just think they ought to be here.’

  Mike Nicholls answers: ‘That’s how the scene operates here,’ and suggests that we ‘should make the best of it’, particularly while we ‘keep selling tickets and albums’. He tells Neol that we ‘might as well accept it’.

  ‘We don’t have to accept anything,’ Neol retorts.

  Nicholls muses that for someone in a band whose self-avowed purpose is to get people dancing, perhaps Neol is taking everything, including himself, too seriously. Bored with Neol, he tests out Desmond, who eagerly tells him about his visit to a local hospital’s ER department that morning with a rash on his arm where he was made to wait in line for ages while white patients were seen ahead of him. Nicholls marvels at Desmond’s – presumably unexpected – Midlands accent. He continues: ‘Pausing only to raise his [Desmond’s] spirits with a few shots of duty free, we went for a stroll around the East Village. Desmond related a typically daft anecdote. “I tell you, when we got into town I asked this guy where there was a park to go and walk around. So he directed me to a car park, the foolish bastard.”’

  It had been a long, hard slog to the East Coast, but on arrival our management reported that the notoriously hip club, ‘Whiskey A Go Go’ in Los Angeles, had invited us back for a further week of sold-out shows. What that meant was four nights with two shows a night. We were already exhausted, but what band in their right minds would turn down such an offer? We valiantly tried to invigorate our jaded spirits for the big push back across the continent. My voice had at last improved and the band’s spirits were lifted with the clement weather, constant attention and laidback atmosphere of the West Coast. My main memory from one of those shows is when Hollywood star Bette Midler came backstage for a meet-and-greet session after one of our shows. At first I didn’t recognise her, because until then I had only seen her elaborately dressed for her stage shows. The woman who presented herself in front of me that night was dressed like a bag lady: heavy tweed coat, hat pulled down over her eyes. It was only when I peered closer and saw her face that I realized who she was. She clutched her prodigious boobs with both hands and said in a broad ‘Nu Yoick’ accent: ‘Don’t it hurt your boobies jumping around so much on stage?’

  We both collapsed on each other in fits of laughter. It takes a well-endowed girl to know the concerns of another! The divine Ms M was indeed divine as we discussed the relative merits of Playtex bras.

  Band interview in Horizon studios, 1980 – tough decisions ahead

  The Selecter returned from America a leaner, harder band and went straight into Horizon studios to record our next single, ‘The Whisper/Train To Skaville’, but we were now so lean and hard that it would take only the slightest knock to fragment us completely.

  TEN

  SELLING OUT YOUR FUTURE

  We left America on 1 June 1980. As soon as I arrived back in Coventry, I experienced an acute dose of culture shock. For the previous week we had been enjoying the largesse that Los Angeles nightlife had to offer. We had been driving up and down the Sunset Strip in an assortment of hired Thunderbird or Cadillac cars. Now I was journeying into Coventry city centre on the number 31 bus – what a leveller! I still lived in a two-up, two-down terraced house in Earlsdon and the car was a beat-up, old, blue Vauxhall Viva.

  It was as if nothing had changed, but everything had. I needed some stability in my increasingly fluid life. It was not just the band that was in danger of fragmention, I was too. Not only that, but my relationship with my partner Terry suddenly felt very distant. It’s difficult to be in a relationship where one of the partners is perceived to be living it up in far-flung corners of the world while the other stays at home and goes to work every day. These were not the days of mobile phones and e-mails; communication was sporadic when in a foreign country. The cost of international phone calls was prohibitive on a wage of £100 per week.

  To make matters worse, every time I arrived back home I was full of what had happened on tour, without recognising that Terry had been on his own for weeks and probably didn’t want to listen to my litany of band intrigues. Somehow, I knew that we had to strengthen our commitment towards each other or run the danger of splitting up, which would have been such a waste after eight years. So I discussed with Terry the possibility of us getting married. I wanted to make us a permanent item. Fortunately he felt the same way.

  My favourite magazine cover, 1980

  Terry booked the wedding in Coventry registry office for 8 July 1980. He picked a time to coincide with his lunch hour. That morning he left for work at 8 a.m. dressed in his usual casual manner, blue Levis, shirt, jacket, coat and umbrella, just in case it rained. I think he wore a tie that day as a grudging nod towards the solemnity of the occasion.

  I left for Horizon studios at 10.00 a.m. The Selecter were embroiled in recording a selection of tracks for our fourth single. We had chosen ‘The Whisper’, ‘Cool Blue Lady’, ‘Rock and Rockers’ and ‘Train To Skaville’ as likely candidates. This was our second day in the studio. I had dressed in my usual rude girl boyish manner, because a photographer wanted to do some informal shots of the band hard at work in the recording studio that morning.

  Terry had been told that we would need two witnesses at the wedding. Since we had invited no relatives to celebrate our union, we decided to ask the bands’ two roadies to attend. Rob Forrest, having been with the band from the beginning, was our trusted compatriot in our musical adventures. He had recently been joined by Hartford, a strong, mean-looking, personable young black guy, who hailed from Gloucester and spoke with a broad countrified accent. Hartford didn’t look for trouble, but it unerringly found him. They were the perfect pair, one white, one black; one crazy, the other sometimes even crazier! But both supremely loyal to the band. I’d sworn them both to secrecy about my impending nuptials. Terry and I wanted a no-fuss, no-frills wedding. It would have complicated our lives far too much to have had it any other way. So at 11.50 precisely, I donned my trusty trilby and all three of us sneaked out of the studio and walked the short distance to the registry office.

  My future husband was there already, pacing up and down outside the medieval building housing Coventry Registry Office. We nervously smiled at each other in acknowledgement of the incongruity of the situation. We could not have looked less like a bride and bridegroom if we’d tried.

  The four of us climbed the winding wooden staircase to the reception desk. We were ushered into an impressive oak-beamed room with a splendid vaulted ceiling, ‘the Black Prince Room’. The four of us looked rather woebegone in this
large room which probably accommodated 50 guests when full. After a short while two elderly, conservatively dressed ladies entered. One of them introduced herself as the person who would conduct the ceremony.

  ‘Are you still waiting for guests to arrive?’ she enquired.

  She directed her question at Terry, whom she had deemed as the most sensible-looking of our quartet.

  ‘No, this is it,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ was her only reply. She bustled over to her friend and after a brief, whispered exchange between them, asked us if we had brought along a tape recording of some music for the ceremony.

  ‘No,’ said Terry. ‘Perhaps we should get on with it, because I’m due back at work soon.’

  The two ladies looked most concerned at this turn of events. Then I piped up: ‘I don’t want to say the “obey” part of my marriage vows either. I don’t mind saying, “to love and honour”, but not the “obey” part.’

  I had read somewhere, probably in Cosmopolitan, that it was only women who had to say this, it was not part of men’s vows. The magazine article had said that the word ‘obey’ was optional. That was good enough for me.

  The officiating lady peered over her reading glasses, gave me a withering look, but grudgingly agreed to remove the offending word. Rob and Hartford did their best to stifle their giggles. I pointedly stared at them and they shut up. She then asked the sixty-four thousand dollar question: ‘You do realise that marriage is a very serious matter?’

  The phrase hung in the air as heavy as mercury. I knew that if I looked at Terry and he looked at me, then we would probably both burst into laughter. For years we had said that we would never get married, seemingly content just to live together, but here we were doing exactly the opposite. How did that happen?