Black by Design

by Pauline Black

  She repeated the words.

  ‘Yes,’ we both said, somewhat irritatedly.

  Seemingly satisfied, if not convinced, she opened her book and began to read from the marriage service. Terry and I dutifully turned into parrots. There was only one more hiccup.

  ‘Do you have the ring?’

  ‘No,’ Terry answered.

  ‘We don’t need one,’ I offered by way of explanation.

  I noticed that her partner pursed her lips and looked very worried by this turn of events. A wedding without a ring, whatever next? The lady reading the service was now completely flustered. Yet more lines had to be cut from the service. In an effort to get us out of there as quickly as possible, she took a deep, steadying breath and cut to the chase. Before we knew it we were pronounced husband and wife, documents were signed, Terry was on his way back to work and I was on my way back to the studio to record the vocal on ‘The Whisper’. Job done. We are still married. No photos exist of our nuptials.

  As Terry and I drew together, the members of The Selecter moved further apart. This period in the studio should have been a joyful and creative time. Nobody had to do anything other than write songs and perfect their musical chops, but unfortunately the bickering between us never ceased.

  In the wider musical world, the level of intolerable tension at ska gigs was reaching boiling point too. Far-right groups, National Front and British Movement members and sympathisers, made it their business to target 2-Tone bands. This gig review of Desmond Dekker and Madness at the Lewisham Odeon in Record Mirror’s 14 June 1980 edition by Mike Nicholls, a respected music journo, painted a worrying trend: ‘The lemming-like pseudo-skanking was bad enough but the constant “Sieg Heil!” was pathetic.’ He notes the confusion of this section of the audience, who were ‘(correctly) applauding Desmond Dekker while he was singing the immaculate “Israelites”, hardly a race the BM/NF (does it really matter?) are known to have endeared themselves to.’ He later observes that ‘Madness did little to discourage the chanting.’

  This review marks the beginning of a distinct sea-change in the accepted thinking of the music press about all things 2-Tone. The 2-Tone movement was no longer the next big thing; indeed, would soon be last year’s old thing. The media was becoming disenchanted with us. Perhaps we were not the promised antidote to the fascist thugs after all? We may not have been the remedy to society’s racist ills, but collectively we did much to hold a mirror up to society and show the racism at its very heart.

  I think the 2-Tone movement positively changed many young people’s views about discrimination and social politics, unlike the new Turks who were now snapping at our heels intent on embracing more Thatcherite ideals. Margaret’s jackboot was readying itself to give left-wingers a bloody good kicking. The era of style over substance was knocking at the back doors of record companies. We had been in America for only six weeks, but that was long enough for a new movement to gain a foothold on the entertainment ladder. Synthesizers that offered a large, colourful array of sounds were the new playthings of young, upcoming musicians.

  This new musical generation was growing tired of the monochrome palette of 2-Tone. Their flamboyant, multi-coloured clothing began to make us strictly black-and-white adherents look drab. The peacocks stalked the clubs while us magpies chattered among ourselves, seemingly oblivious to the fact that a new era had dawned on the musical horizon.

  Then it happened. The band fell apart. On Thursday 21 August 1980 Desmond left. Just like that. Why? I don’t really know. There was never much explanation. It happened on our first day back in Horizon studios after a fun weekend at an outdoor festival in Helsinki, Finland, where we played on the same bill as the Jam and the Tourists. There must have been something in the Finnish water, because the Tourists split up soon after that gig and the Jam split up not long after The Selecter.

  Hartford and Rob had just spent the morning getting Desmond’s Hammond organ and Leslie amplifier up the Alpine slope staircase at Horizon and setting it up along with the rest of the band’s equipment in the main studio. We were engaged in the tricky business of laying down possible new tracks for the second album, guaranteed to bring on a fresh bout of arguments. It didn’t take long before a big row erupted about something very trivial. By that time, so much disagreement was going on behind closed doors that for a lot of the time I was left out of the loop. I think the main protagonists were Charley and Desmond. The upshot was that Desmond stormed out of the building, shouting that he was ‘done with the band’, and he never returned.

  Special envoys like Lynval Golding were sent to his house to have behind-the-scene discussions with him, but he could not be persuaded back into the fold. Desmond was having none of it; when he ‘left the building’ he had done so permanently.

  At which point, Charley flexed his muscles. Within a day and a half, the band’s ongoing debate was resolved. This polarisation of attitudes had been consolidated in America. The tour bus had been split into two living areas, the kitchen/dining area at the front of the bus and the secluded lounge with two long couches and a big central table at the back of the bus. The bunk-bed area in the middle kept the two sides apart. Charley, Aitch, Gaps, Desmond and, most of the time, Commie occupied the back. Here they listened to reggae music and smoked copious quantities of weed – so much that when you opened the door it was impossible to see the occupants through the foggy clouds of ganja smoke. Neol and Jane, Malcolm and Juliet, the two loving couples on tour, occupied the front half of the bus, mostly listening to Talking Heads, Roxy Music, Dire Straits, the Motels and our tour manager’s pet love, Meatloaf! Commie and I straddled the two areas and listened to the Clash’s new album London’s Calling and probably too much Gary Numan. I rarely ventured into the back, mainly because the smoke was bad for my inflamed throat and as a woman you can only listen to ‘Pussy Price A Gone Up’ so many times in raucously laughing male company before you begin to wonder what the fucking joke is!

  These divisions between us had been brought back to Coventry. The band was unable to go forward until they were resolved. We were not the only ones experiencing this kind of hostile separation into opposing camps. The Specials were embroiled in their own band disaster too, brought on by the rigours of their American tour. Our problems were brought about by musical differences, exacerbated by the racial and cultural divisions that had brought us together in the first place.

  Charley wanted to push the band into deeper reggae territory. Neol wanted to push the band into a more experimental rock territory. The hybrid of these two musical forms that was the key to our success was in danger of extinction. It was the same insoluble problem we had experienced back in February while recording the Too Much Pressure album. Something had to give. Meetings were called. Factions formed. Our management grouped behind Neol. Gradually Charley painted himself into a corner, whereupon the pack hounded him and his ideas. But none of them could bring themselves to actually ‘sack’ him. That job fell to me by default. It was a hard thing to do, but if we were to proceed to the next level as an established band, then the source of the division had to be excised. If those around you are too cowardly to do it, then somebody has to step up to the plate. I was happy to do so on Saturday 23 August 1980, a scant forty-eight hours after Desmond disappeared over the horizon (no pun intended!). And everybody else was happy to let me. I should have given each of them a white feather!

  Now we were five. Three days later we had to record our appearance on TOTP with our new hit single, ‘The Whisper’, which had managed to garner enough Radio 1 airplay to scrape into the Top 30. Gaps and Commie took up the slack on bass and keyboards. I threw out my hat and donned a red jacket. Big mistake. I looked like a Butlin’s redcoat. However, it was not all doom and gloom, we were a unit again. The bickering and back-biting ceased, enabling us to explore new material. We rediscovered what it was to be an original creative band. But, best of all, we discovered an unlikely saviour in the guise of the late and sadly lamented Ian Dury of the Block
heads fame. Fortuitously, he performed on TOTP the same day as us. They were promoting their latest hit, ‘I Wanna Be Straight’. Ian perceptively noticed we were short of personnel. While both bands shared an elevator back up to our respective dressing rooms after the recording session, Ian said: ‘’Ere, do you wanna borrow Norman to play bass on a couple of tracks until you lot sort yourself some new guys?’

  An NME interview with Charley Anderson after the split. By this time he and Desmond had formed the short-lived reggae band, The People

  ‘You bet!’

  It’s well known that Ian had his own personnel problems within the Blockheads around that time. His arch-nemesis was Chas Janckel. Perhaps he recognised a similar situation with us and felt impelled to sort out our problems, even if he couldn’t sort out his own. Who knows? But we were eternally grateful for his interest, and even more for his solution to the problem. Norman Watt Roy was the quintessential New Wave bassist.

  Ian was as good as his word and within a few weeks of our initial meeting he arrived in Coventry with Norman in tow. The two of them ensconced themselves in a seedy hotel on the Leamington Road for the weekend. Neol had written two songs, the haunting ‘Celebrate the Bullet’ and the melancholic ‘Washed Up and Left for Dead’ that laid the blueprint for the second album. They both needed a definitive bass line, the kind of melodic line that was a ‘hook’ in itself. Immediately Norman started playing on the two tracks, it was obvious that he understood the sparing subtlety required to match the evocative vocal lines and poignant guitar melodies. The precision of his playing, tinged with an indefinable melancholy, remains unsurpassed and makes both of these tracks classics of that Selecter period. The band was moving on, stylistically and musically.

  Commie wrote ‘Selling Out Your Future’ for the album, a sad, lilting, reggae paean to recessionary Britain, pre-dating ‘Ghost Town’ by many months. A creative wellspring was suddenly at full flood. Carried along on the tide, I wrote ‘Deepwater’, ‘Red Reflections’ and ‘Bristol and Miami’ for the album.

  ‘Deepwater’ originated when I noticed a sign for the town on the freeway in Missouri. Population 400. Small-town America. It reminded me of the ‘small town’ thinking in the band. ‘Red Reflections’ was about my relationship with Terry and the upheavals that had been caused by my new career. My home life was still a hotbed of discontent, much like the internal strife within the band. Sometimes there seemed no escape from arguments. The only place I found a semblance of peace was writing new songs in the studio.

  The next song I wrote, ‘Bristol and Miami’, was probably my proudest moment in songwriting. As much as I was concerned about the recession and the creeping fascism in Britain, I also thought that what was happening was part of a global phenomenon. The riot in Bristol in April 1980, triggered by a police raid on the Black & White Café in the St Paul’s area, was black people’s answer to the same kind of racial injustice felt by the black people of Miami who rioted one month later, after a black Marine Corp veteran was viciously beaten to death by the police. Both riots had been triggered by seemingly random events, but in essence were about black people’s continued lack of empowerment in society. It had taken an American tour to make me see that these seemingly unconnected events were part of the ongoing black struggle. At that time it was easier to write about the struggles of black people in the world than it was to write about my own within the band.

  ‘Celebrate the Bullet’ is still my favourite Selecter song from the album of the same name. It showed that Neol’s songwriting abilities had matured, now that a direction had been set for the band. Finally The Selecter floated in calmer waters after the battering that it had taken in its former stormier creation. In my opinion, Neol was way ahead of Jerry Dammers’s abilities at that time, because the Specials were still plagiarising old ska songs and serving them up as originals. It would be another year before their demise and before the prophetic ‘Ghost Town’ would appear on the scene, but we would be gone by then and ‘Celebrate the Bullet’ would be forgotten.

  Curiously Charley and Desmond formed a short-lived band called ‘The People’, which was rich considering that one of the reasons that Desmond had cited for leaving the band was because he ‘couldn’t stand Charley’s bass playing’! I think that Charley was intent on showing us all how it should be done, but it didn’t work out as well as he hoped. After one single release, ‘Musical Man’ backed with ‘Sons & Daughters’ on Race Records, they were gone. Some while later I discovered that Desmond had become ill with schizophrenia and his Hammond genius was lost to the world for ever. I sincerely believe that if Desmond hadn’t succumbed to mental illness he would have been one of the truly remembered greats of the keyboard fraternity.

  As we rehearsed the new material, it became apparent that we would soon have to look for a new bass player and keyboard player. An advert was placed in the music journals. Several hopefuls applied and an audition day was set. Unfortunately I had to go to London on that day for a BBC Radio 1 Roundtable show appearance. This show pitted the week’s new releases against each other, overseen by a judging panel, which on this occasion was made up of myself, Jake Burns (Stiff Little Fingers) and Pete Townshend (The Who).

  Meanwhile, back at camp, the band auditioned a bass player, Adam Williams, and a keyboard player, James Mackie from Lancaster.

  When I got back it was a fait accompli, they were both in the band and booked into a hotel near where Neol and Jane lived. I was somewhat hurt that I hadn’t been included in the decision-making process. After I was introduced to them and heard them play, I instinctively knew that they were not right for us. They were good players, but stylistically and musically at odds with our chosen aesthetic. I consoled myself with the fact that hopefully I would be proved wrong.

  In the absence of Charley to hold back his worst excesses, Neol was now free to indulge his many musical influences, which were growing by the day and included Bryan Ferry, Roxy Music, Talking Heads circa their Once in a Lifetime album, as well as the more flamboyant Funkadelic, Parliament, Chic and Brian Eno. He even suggested that we get Brian Eno to produce the album. Needless to say, that did not go down well at the record company’s A&R. Instead we got Roger Lomas, who ironically went on to have a string of successes with Bad Manners after he finished our album.

  The Selecter ship became increasingly rudderless. Nobody knew what they wanted or who they were. Though the songs were good, the music had no coherency from track to track. Band members smoked enough marijuana on a daily basis to remain absurdly paranoid about each other, as well as other bands on the label and gig audiences. These were hard transitionary times in the music business and none of us was strong enough to identify what was required to get us through these choppy waters. This was when our choice of manager began to appear naive, if not downright detrimental. Poor Juliet stood no chance of dealing with us in our present extremism. Things began to deteriorate badly between us, as a band, and her and Malcolm, our tour manager and now her permanent partner. This ended when they were sacked and the band decided we would manage ourselves. Big mistake. Needless to say, we were not very good at it.

  The Selecter mark II – the styling for this photo is wrong on many levels. Photograph by Gered Mankowitz © Bowstir Ltd. 2011/Mankowitz.com

  I remember a meeting with Chrysalis Records around this time, when the triumvirate of myself, Neol and Commie tried to conduct a discussion with the MD and Head of A&R about future advances for us. It was obvious quite early on in the proceedings that these advances were not going to be forthcoming until we had a hit. When this had been established, the A&R guy got up and put on a record, pompously announcing to nobody in particular, but meaning it for us: ‘This is the future of pop music.’

  The record was the future single of arch-New Romantics, Spandau Ballet, ‘(Work Till You’re) Musclebound’.

  The three of us looked at each other nonplussed. As soon as the record ended, the meeting was over and The Selecter knew that the party would soon be
over. To make matters worse, as we were as usual raiding the Chrysalis press office for freebie new releases we noticed that all the young staff were sporting scarves around their necks and tartan trousers or kilts. The last time we had been there everybody had been wearing black-and-white checked clothes. How times had changed.

  Even worse than this, a movie, Dance Craze, directed by Joe Massot, had its premiere at the Dominion Theatre that evening. The film had been shot in 1980, and comprised performance footage of The Selecter alongside Madness, the Specials, the Bodysnatchers, the Beat and Bad Manners while on tour throughout the United Kingdom. A soundtrack album of the same name had been released the day before, featuring fifteen of the songs that were played in the film. We had been invited to attend. The timing couldn’t have been worse. There in all its glory was the original band banging out the songs with vibrancy and panache, even if some of the members had overdubbed their parts in the studio in post-production. The present band seemed a pale imitation, literally and performance-wise, of that on screen, despite what we ultimately managed to achieve in the studio.

  The single ‘Celebrate the Bullet’ had been released on 6 February 1981. It was unfortunate timing. Just two months before, on 8 December, John Lennon had been shot. Radio 1 DJ Mike Read thought that we were trying to say something clever about this event, which of course couldn’t have been further from the truth. The song has a staunch anti-violence, anti-war theme, but irony was never big at BBC Radio. The lily-livered Smashie & Nicey fools at Radio 1 took the song title literally and, as ever, underestimated the intelligence of their audience, while overestimating their own. It was instantly banned.