Good morning,
You join us today for an enjoyable Life & Times chinwag with ska legend Pauline Black, the singer and irrepressible frontperson of The Selecter. Next week, her band release a sprawling box set collating their BBC recordings titled At The BBC: The Complete Recordings 1979-1981. Here they are on Look! Hear! in 1980:
Pauline spoke to me, Niall, on Zoom a few weeks ago. Very funny, very affable, and very I would not like to be on the receiving end of the temper she talks about. You can dig in in just a mo. Before then, here’s a reminder that today’s edition is free. Free editions are a great vibe but great vibes alone will not keep The New Cue rolling on – that would be down to our legendary paying subscribers. It cost £5 a month to upgrade and you’ll have our undying love forever:
Enjoy the edition, see you on Friday
Ted and Niall
What was the first record you loved?
Light Flight by Pentangle. I was probably 18 and I’d just come to Lanchester Polytechnic, as it was then, in Coventry to study biochemistry. It was in Fresher’s Week and they turned up. I’d never heard of them before but I knew one track and that was Light Flight. It was the theme tune to a show on TV at that time that appealed to my generation called Take Three Girls. I was smitten after that.
And the last?
Probably Gorillaz’s The Mountain. I was on tour with them last week in Istanbul and I’d done Zagreb and Pisa and other places with them. The past month has been a bit Gorillaz-y. We had a song called Charger and Grace Jones did a version and I did a version on the Humanz album and he’s getting in people he thinks can recreate some of the songs, it’s The Mountain tour but he’s doing other stuff as well. It’s been really cool, really good. Everyone gets their five minutes in the sun. It’s quite a trip being onstage with Damon as well, because he’s really out there with his audience, anything goes. When you come onstage, you don’t know which Damon you’re going to get!
What’s your earliest memory?
Puking up all over my mother’s freshly laundered sheets when she told me I was adopted, and then she gave me a smack. You remember that!
What’s your daily domestic routine?
If I’m not gigging, it’s get up at 7.30am or something, have breakfast, walk the dog, I’ve got a basenji and he’s quite temperamental, so we both temperamentally go out about 8 in the morning for about an hour. If the muse is upon me, it’ll be songwriting for a period, then the usual domestic things that women do which is making sure there is food in the fridge and thinking about what I’m gonna cook that evening, rather than ordering in by Uber Eats when I’m not here. I read books as well. I saw this great T-shirt over the weekend that said, ‘Read books, walk the dog and fight fascists’, I’ll have a good go at that too.
How do you spark creativity?
In a number of ways. It can be quite random. It can be two or three words or a sentence someone says on TV or social media or a book you’re reading, even looking through a magazine. I’m very lyrics-orientated and where I live in Coventry, we live near a very old Victorian cemetery. That’s where I walk the dog. A lot of dead people hear all my meanderings of demo versions of tunes and ideas I have for lyrics.
What’s your worst habit?
Being blunt. If people ask me something, they’ll get a relatively blunt answer. Or what they would term blunt, I just call it not wasting time. Straight to the point!
What’s your pet peeve?
People who don’t say what they mean, hence my bluntness.
What was your first job?
The first job that I actually got money for, and that was £1 and a pound extra if I cleaned the manageress’s car, was sorting out coathangers in a ladies’ dress shop called Fifth Avenue on South Street in Romford. It was shit!
Has anyone you’ve ever met made you feel starstruck?
Mick Jagger. And it still does because I saw him a couple of months ago at the V&A summer party. I was talking to some people, who will remain nameless, and it was like an Alan Partridge moment, ‘I’m sorry, there’s someone over there I’d rather go and see…’! Which is terrible to say but there you go! Just out of the corner of my eye he hoved into view with his girlfriend, he was obviously over here to promote his new record. I had to go and say hello to him because when do you know you’re gonna get the chance again, he’s 81, I’m only nine years younger, you’re thinking, ‘How much time do we have to solidify this?!’.
He came to a gig back in the day, probably in 1980 when we were on tour in America. He was rather fascinated with the ska sound. He and one other, I don’t know who that was, I only ever had eyes for him, turned up at a gig. I didn’t know because the manager didn’t tell me and I had a headache… the whole thing could’ve been different. But I did meet Marsha Hunt, who was a bit of a main squeeze back then, so I know he has a penchant for the black ladies. Hahaha!
What was the home you grew up in like?
Semi-detached in Romford on a street called 34 Collier Row Lane. My mum and dad lived there and me and two brothers when I was young, then they went and got married and stuff like that, cos I was adopted and then there was just me rattling around there and my mum and my dad. It was alright. It’s better now, I went back when I shot a film a couple of years ago called Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story. I revisited the house and I’m pleased to say I more or less went from being the only black girl in the street and now there’s loads. Multiculturalism rules.
Who or what is the greatest influence on your work?
I mentioned her before but I’d have to say Marsha Hunt, because that’s who I wanted to be when I was 15. A lot of people probably don’t know who Marsha Hunt was but she came over to be a musical theatre production of Hair which was on the London stage, it was all a bit hippy and whatever but she was the first I ever saw with this huge afro and I just thought, ‘I want that afro’. I met her later on and became friends with her and she encouraged me to write a book. She’s been there as an influence… and also she has a baby for Mick Jagger!
What do you wish the 18-year-old you knew?
That things really don’t matter as much as what you thought, to be much more comfortable in oneself. When you’re 18, you’re establishing all of your interests, the way you’re gonna be, what you’re gonna do in life and I just wish I’d been a bit more relaxed about it. I’d decided I wanted to be a biochemist, and that’s pretty far away from it isn’t it. Why waste time?
What’s the bravest career decision you’ve ever made?
Probably to give up my job as a radiographer when you’re just about to get a promotion that you really, really wanted and join a band. I didn’t know we were gonna become what we became but it looked as though we were gonna go on tour on the 2 Tone tour and there was no way I could go on a tour with consecutive nights because we were doing weekends so you could have Monday morning off and tell them you’re ill or Friday afternoon and tell them you’re ill. But you couldn’t do that once you went on tour, so that was the bravest decision, handing in one’s notice thinking, ‘Will I have to come back to my day job?’. And I haven’t had to so I’m really happy.
What’s the secret to a happy relationship?
Respect. My husband and I have been together for 54 years this year – I was a child bride! I wasn’t a child bride, I shouldn’t say that. But that’s how long we’ve been together. We respect each other. You’ve always got to remember that the person you met was the person you liked and you shouldn’t try and change them. I think too many people get married or start living together and try and change them into something else and that’s never gonna fly, so they get divorced. We never bothered to change each other, he’s very, very reasonable, he lets me go off on tour all over the world, never batted an eyelid and he carries on doing what he does, ploughing on.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
Never live above your means. Certainly when I was younger, we were in a dodgy industry, even dodgier now because they have AI to ape whatever you do. Back then, you were as good as your last record. You were gonna go through fallow periods so if you didn’t diversify you were gonna find yourself back in your day job and I really didn’t fancy that. I never lived above my means. Also, it divorces you from the people you grew up with, the people who came and listened to you at the beginning. With The Selecter, we never really saw that huge gap between ‘Hey, I’m onstage and you’re down there’, hence all the stage invasions that used to happen in 1979 on the 2-Tone tour and generally with us, The Specials or Madness at that time.
Can you cook? If so, what’s your signature dish?
I can cook. I always cook something different for myself or for my husband, he’s more of a meat and two veg geezer. I cook a mean pan-fried salmon fillet.
What book would you recommend we read?
Beloved, by Toni Morrison. It’s a brilliant book, it’s like Sophie’s Choice for black people, not quite that but it has the same choice to be made.
Do you have a temper? How does it manifest?
I have a terrible temper. It manifests as a flash in the eyes. So I’m told, I don’t see my own eyes! Anyone will attest, if the eyes change, it means it’s coming. And it’s fierce and furious and not particularly my best trait.
Which talent do you wish you had?
I wish I could dance. I got sent to ballet dancing lessons and that didn’t go well cos I’ve got two left feet. Then I got sent to piano lessons. I always wished I was one of those little fairy girls, as I used to call them.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Still being relevant to some people in the world after 47 years of doing pretty much what I always wanted to do, which was 2 Tone.
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