Original subtitles

Right, hello, everybody!

# Out on the streets again

# Lookin' for somethin'

I think you grow your identity over time.

# I don't wanna care!

# I wanna have some fun

When I look back over my life,

it feels full of scenes and stories all knit together.

# I feel like a roller-coaster!

This is how I used to feel in 1979, Black and Blue!

(EXPLOSION)

# Let's go somewhere...

No one notices a little Black girl

sat in a room full of white older people!

# Somewhere exciting!

I was NEVER going to be a nice little white girl!

That is all good!

And that's really what my family wanted.

# I don't wanna go...

My adoptive parents would just kind of breed the Black out of you, basically.

# Out on the streets again #

The whiter you were, then the more you were accepted.

I had to get out of my family to be heard.

# THE SELECTER: On My Radio

# I bought my baby a red radio

Growing up in Essex wasn't easy.

Some members of my family supported the National Front!

EVERYWHERE was a racist environment!

# But he loved the beat!

In fact,

the '70s was complicated for a Black woman in general.

So, I had to find a new family...

# It's just the same old show on my radio #

Luckily,

it was at a time when the UK was revolutionising youth culture.

When I moved to Coventry in my twenties,

I decided to join a ska band,

fusing together popular genres of punk and reggae at the time

and it changed my life forever!

# THE SELECTER: Too Much Pressure

# Too much pressure!

The Selecter became one of the biggest acts of the explosive two-tone movement!

# Too much pressure!

We're a dance band. We like people to move.

We like people to get involved. We have things to say as well.

# Too much pressure!

We became the opposition soundtrack to Thatcher's policies,

which had given rise to the social and economic problems in the country.

# Too much pressure!

There was a fundamentally important move towards diversity

and pop culture in the UK.

(BEAT CONTINUES)

We brought Black and white bands together forever.

# Too much pressure! #

All the guys from the scene have given us their version of events.

As a Black woman, it was always hard to be heard.

Still is.

So now, I want to tell my side of the story

from MY perspective!

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE) Thank you!

(FADES)

(GENTLE JAZZ)

Once you become 'othered' then you're on the outside.

You're looking in.

And for some, that has a privilege of its own

because you can see what the society you're in is about.

(GRITTY BEAT)

My story began with Arthur and Ivy Vickers,

a mechanic and housewife from Romford in Essex.

They had four sons.

Ivy Vickers got Bell's palsy.

Half of her face slightly dropped.

She didn't want to go out 'cause people would stare

and she was told by the doctor that what you need is a baby!

She couldn't produce one herself because she'd had a hysterectomy.

So, the only place that you were going to get a baby

was an orphanage.

She drove with her family to a mother and baby home

in Coggeshall, near Braintree.

That's where my...

My birth mother had given birth to me.

And they turned up

and it was just really like a baby supermarket!

Fortunately, they wanted a girl

but there were no white girls available

so they took me!

They were allowed to take me home.

Uh, I slept in a drawer 'cause there was no crib.

There was no...

There had been no preparation, as such.

I fetched up in an Essex white working class home

and I was the only brown girl there.

(BEAT CONTINUES)

I was just there, bundling around

and as far as I can tell I was a reasonably happy little girl.

It's very good when you're young,

'cause you're just a cute little Black kid,

you've got bows in your hair and all this kind of thing and people pat you on the head.

I was four-and-a-half, I think.

My adoptive parents had to tell me I was adopted

because I was a different colour to all the other kids that they had!

And it was obviously going to be an issue

by the time I got to school.

My adoptive mother, she just kind of blurted it out.

"We're not your real mum and dad.

There is somebody else that was your mum.

She was very young and she wasn't married.

We don't know anything about your dad

but this is the reason why you look different

from everybody else in the family."

And it was a little bit like being slapped

and I managed to puke all over my mum's sheets

so she smacked me!

I ran upstairs,

I just looked at myself for a very long time

and began thinking,

"Well, what I had known to be true suddenly wasn't true."

And I didn't really know how to deal with that at that particular point in time.

When my mother told me that I was adopted,

the way she said it told me intrinsically that being Black was bad,

that these people had come here,

impregnated my mother, who was a white woman,

and therefore all Black men were to be avoided!

(INDISTINCT CHATTER AND LAUGHTER)

I think as a child I just withdrew into myself

and had an interior life

that the people around me didn't really know that I had.

Because I wasn't part of them anymore,

or didn't FEEL part of them,

then I felt that I was in observer mode.

(GENTLE MUSIC)

That's me at school.

(LAUGHS)

Oh, that was very typically me!

In our Morris Minor!

I was suspicious of anybody, even in those days!

I always remember my mother being very specific that I had been chosen,

that, uh, I should be grateful in some way.

As far as she was concerned,

I had been saved

and I was supposed to be like them...

I didn't really FEEL that way, though.

I very much felt that I'd been placed in rather a difficult position.

My mother,

she'd always turn round to people and she'd say,

"She's adopted, you know?"

Because if I'd been her natural child,

she would have been looked at in a completely different way at that time.

So, that was her way of explaining to anybody who was interested

that she was doing her bit for the colonies

and yes, she's adopted!

My mum and my dad, they were always rowing.

My dad worked 12-hour days and was often out of the house.

I mean, in retrospect, I think he suffered from depression

and probably quite badly.

This is a sleepy old backwater of a place, isn't it?

And my parents were bombed out

and they didn't have anywhere to...

To live.

And so, they moved in there.

When I was there, there were three brothers.

Two brothers shared one room and I had the little box room.

By the time I was 12, I was the only one living at home.

The rest had all gone.

So, I was rattling around in there with my mum.

Yeah...

Most of the Black people that you would see on the telly

were either slaves or servants.

Showbiz was the Billy Cotton Band Show,

which was REALLY horrendous,

and regularly had on guests like The Black and White Minstrels.

# On a wonderful day like today

# I defy any cloud to appear in the sky #

Or poor old Winifred Atwell,

this large, smiling, Black lady who's playing pub piano.

Oh, I spent most of my time in my own world when I lived here.

I just used to read books and I lived in the world of books,

taking on whatever particular character I thought fitted me that week,

depending on what I was reading.

I mean, I could always see that there was another world out there.

Um, the only problem was I wasn't in it!

(ROCK MUSIC)

Essex was homogeneically white.

We can't go into the locals anymore, they're full up with noisy foreigners

and we don't like it!

All they'd known is colonialism.

Two world wars had been fought.

They'd lost people in them.

(ROCK CONTINUES)

They had pretty entrenched ideas

about how white Britishness had dealt with these things.

They thought they were better than others

and therefore when people started coming here

from the Caribbean or from Africa or wherever

they felt that they were invaded.

Skin colour was discussed an awful lot

by EVERYBODY who came through the house.

Somebody would just start talking in a racist way

about something they'd either observed,

was in the newspaper,

and it was just come at you like a smack!

I'm among this society of white folks,

this family...

Uh, they don't like Black people.

Yeah, my Uncle Will, yeah...

He would just openly sort of say

that he thought that Enoch Powell had the right idea.

(SOFT ROCK CONTINUES)

The National Front...

I just knew that it was wrong

and they didn't like people who looked like me.

(SOMBRE MUSIC)

When I was about eight or nine,

I was snooping through the chest of drawers of my mum as all kids do

and I found these papers that had my name, Belinda,

and this woman, Eileen Magnus.

That was my mum!

Once I'd found the adoption papers and I had my mother's name,

I had all the information I needed to go looking,

really...

And I didn't.

Um, out of deference to my adoptive mother.

Because she always used to be telling me,

"It would upset me so much if you did that!"

My real mother lived six miles away from here in Dagenham.

But after you were adopted in those days,

you couldn't have anything to do with your child.

She used to come and stand on the corner here

and watch me either coming out of school or going to school,

which I found quite heartbreaking, really.

(TRAFFIC PASSES)

And it was just tremendously hurtful.

That was my mum!

And you could have some imagining of what she had felt...

This is Rosedale Road, I used to walk up this road

to, uh...

Go on Sunday afternoons

to visit the person who I call The Troll.

He was a family friend

and I was sent there to help babysit.

Whilst his wife was downstairs making sandwiches for tea,

this man would think nothing of having his hands down my pants

standing next to his newborn child

up in a room...

And the pretext was, to get me up there,

was that the baby was crying and we were going to console it.

You were too scared to tell your parents.

But one day, his wife, she was out,

she came back unexpectedly,

she didn't have a key, she had to knock on the door.

By that time,

I was lying on the floor and he was straddling me

and when he got up I saw his penis.

I thought this has to stop, this can't go on any longer!

This cannot go on any longer!

I'm sorry...

(INHALES)

But anyway...

I feigned illness because I knew that that was wrong

and I had to tell my parents,

so they came and got me,

I went home, I was very distraught and my mother came in

and...

And I just blurted out to her

and I said, "Look, this has been going on for two years!

This has to stop! I can't bear this any more!"

I expected her to give me a hug, then,

I really did...

I just expected her to give me a hug

and she didn't give me a hug,

she just went in to my father, who was in another bedroom,

and...

And told him what I'd told her

and the next thing, they were both in there

and they were staring down at me as though I had done something terribly wrong!

My dad wanted to do down there immediately

and back this guy came with his wife

and I was made to stand there and tell them what had happened!

Nothing ever seemed hard after that.

The perpetrator said I was making it all up.

Pretty much said that, you know,

adopted children, well, you know...

Bad blood and all this kind of thing.

The wife agreed with him and it was never spoken about again.

(SOMBRE MUSIC)

The relationship that I had with my mother from that time onwards

became quite frosty.

I always felt like there was something between her and myself

that had never, ever been resolved.

# CHOPIN'S MINUTE WALTZ, D-FLAT MINOR #

I was just dead moody most of the time

because I wasn't really allowed out.

If I went to somebody else's house, it was all very closely supervised

and...

I was very lonely, it was stifling.

# BEETHOVEN'S MOONLIGHT SONATA: ADAGIO #

I used to practise the piano for hours.

Mozart, Beethoven...

I'd just lose myself.

I think she would have liked it if I had become a nurse.

She wanted a companion. She was older.

She saw herself wobbling off into her dotage,

you know, being 70 years old,

and I would still be there, looking after her.

(URBAN BEAT)

Growing up in that way,

in a white family in Romford,

it made me mistrustful of people.

A walk down the street wasn't just a walk down the street.

You'd get stared at a lot. Microaggressions.

Someone wants to touch your hair.

Why...?

It's all these little things

but they add up to something big

and that is you don't belong!

The National Front used to sell their newspaper openly

in Romford Market.

I used to glare at them. They used to glare at me.

The only person who's ever used the N word at me happened to be in Romford.

You had to build a bit of armour around you somehow.

# THE PIONEERS: Long Shot Kick De Bucket

I was about 15

and we had a fifth form common room at school

and we were allowed to play whatever music we were particularly into.

There'd be would-be hippies,

they'd play their stuff,

but we also had a skinhead contingent from Dagenham

and they would be dancing to Millie Small.

Millie Small had My Boy Lollipop out at the top of the charts.

Israelites by Desmond Dekker was a favourite...

But I think my favourite was The Pioneers,

Long Shot Kick De Bucket.

# Long shot kick de bucket! #

I liked what I heard.

I really thought, "This is different!"

My identity had been shaped by my mother

and her opinions, her views...

But there was only one person who could unpick all that

and that was me.

Being Black and growing up in Romford,

I was always in a minority of one.

I didn't have any Black people in my life.

(SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC)

So, I had to find some...

So, first of all,

they were the people that I found either in newspapers or on the TV.

I was seeing a whole other side of life.

CHANTING: We are the people!

Civil rights turned up.

People like Martin Luther King

and you know, then Malcolm X came along.

When you take 20 million Black people

and make them fight all your wars and pick all your cotton

and work all your jobs

and still you NEVER give them any real, honest recompense

sooner or later their allegiance towards you is going to wear thin!

Huge demonstrations happening,

like Selma, the bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.

Black people were being considered as second-class citizens.

The world out there just seemed unjust

if you didn't look like my parents and my brothers.

# DEE EDWARDS: Why Can't There Be Love

I was 15. 1968 was everything.

The time seemed full of possibility.

# I wanna be thrilled by your caress beneath the pale moonlight #

The music was wonderful!

You turned on the television, you saw Ready Steady Go!

You saw Aretha Franklin,

soul, Tamla...

They were appearing on Top of the Pops.

Funk music was around...

You know, like Sammy Davis Jr

or Muhammad Ali would surface!

(FLASHING)

Suddenly, there were REAL Black people

being artistic and being interviewed!

Poetry, freedom fighters movements, Black Power or whatever!

I mean, it was feminism as well.

You could get the pill!

But it was all happening

and that was what was glorious about it!

It was just exciting!

# MARTHA AND THE VANDELLAS: Nowhere To Run #

So, I thought,

"I've gotta get a handle on this,

otherwise who the hell am I?!"

(INAUDIBLE)

I can't be a little white girl for these people

because I patently am not!

So, I was finding an identity!

There were women who were turning up with these huge afros,

like Angela Davis and like Marsha Hunt.

And...

And I was mesmerised by this and thought,

"I could actually look like them!"

You gave yourself an afro, which I did,

and it freaked my mother out completely,

who turned around and said that I looked like a golliwog.

(SINISTER MUSIC)

But when I went to school there were no Black kids in school

to sort of share that information with.

The people I happened to be associated with,

they were looking at Black people and they weren't liking what they were seeing.

A lot of those families would just kind of, you know,

breed the Black out of you, basically,

and I was trying to breed it back in!

(LAUGHS)

In MY head,

all I wanted to do was live my life like Marsha Hunt in Hair

and find out what marijuana was about.

I just thought to myself, "Well, I can't stand this...

It's just over-stifling.

They don't seem to like any of the things that I like."

Even at that age, I thought, "I've gotta get out of here!"

(REGGAE MUSIC DRIFTING)

Coventry was my destination.

I enrolled at Lanchester Polytechnic to do a combined science degree

and went on to study radiography.

I was still 17, I was nearly 18.

Coventry was a hundred miles away from Romford.

You know, my mother couldn't conveniently get there

but when I got off the train in Coventry

the people around me just didn't seem to be really bothered!

They weren't staring,

weren't doing any of the things they did in Romford!

I felt more comfortable!

There had been quite heavy immigration into this area at that time.

The car industry here,

it was a little bit like Detroit, almost.

And so, it attracted people,

both Irish, Indian, Pakistani,

from, uh, the Caribbean...

People came here because the work was the magnet.

The making of the cars was the magnet for everything.

I could feel the difference. It was almost palpable.

This wasn't like Essex

and I thought, "I will like it here!"

This was the first place that I lived in

and I lived here with, uh, two girls

and it backed on to the local abattoir.

Look at it! Look at the space of it!

I mean, you couldn't swing a cat round in there!

Yeah, this house was my first taste of freedom ever!

I was just so desperate to be away from my parents!

I was just so desperate to be having a life!

(PSYCHEDELIC BEAT)

I just became a hippie, really,

just sort of wandering around in a caftan,

playing a Jew's harp in an old moth-eaten fur coat,

listening to things like Pink Floyd, The Nice

and everybody took mushrooms...

I just fell in with a load of sort of druggie sorts.

(LAUGHING) And... And had some fun for once!

A lot of them tended to be the more middle class students

but they didn't seem to mind me hanging around.

I found a place where you could be cool

being the only Black girl in town!

(EASTERN MUSIC)

And it was hippie days

and everyone was doing Gestalt therapy.

It was a very useful way of getting people to open up

if trauma had happened in their life.

It gave me a space,

a space where I felt safe to talk about things.

Terry was there at the time, my husband.

He'd kind of had a troubled childhood as well.

Boy soldier at 15,

became a political animal of left-wing politics.

He had been made redundant from Rolls-Royce in Derby

and then he got a job in Coventry.

So, he was just really casting around for people as well.

Yeah, we just found each other in that way.

But eventually, Terry and I just kind of outgrew the meetings

and decided that we would just get together ourselves.

# THE SELECTER: Selling Out Your Future

Yeah, we had all sorts of, um, hippie ideas

about formality and things like that.

I've always hated formality of any kind, you know?

Well, I think we always had a very open relationship at the time. Yeah, yeah.

I slept with other people. Terry slept with other people.

Didn't have too much of a problem about any of that.

I got the hump one time when, uh... Yeah.

Well... I came home and she was using my frying pan!

Yeah, yeah...

(BOTH LAUGHING)

I mean, I knew what values were.

I knew what my family's values were.

I suppose we were both looking for a DIFFERENT set of values!

# Selling out your future #

Meeting Terry, it started making me think politically.

Working with a left-wing party,

selling newspapers outside factories...

The unemployment was rife.

The motor industry in the Midlands was being decimated

and breaking down all over the place.

We'd had the three-day week.

(ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC)

I want to speak to you about the grave emergency now facing our country.

Jobs will be in danger and take-home pay will be less.

The one thing that I wanted to be kept getting denied

all the way along!

As I walked down the road,

other people saw a Black person

and I didn't know any Black people and I really felt that I ought!

(TENDER MUSIC)

My dad, he died in '76, I think.

He was the one in the family who was mostly into music.

He seemed to like female singers!

So, yeah, I just started making music

just for processing that,

because I did miss him.

I missed him a great deal.

I actually started learning the guitar.

I found the Leonard Cohen songbook

and I just started strumming away

and eventually taught myself to play

and used to spend hours in the kitchen there

kind of, uh, singing and stuff like that.

(INDISTINCT JAMMING)

# You're on the wrong side of town #

Joan Armatrading, she was around at that time

and I loved what she did.

You know, I loved Joni Mitchell equally as well.

The politics I think that I had at the time

tended to move me towards something that was...

Well, certainly wasn't love songs!

It was something that was more socially and politically aware!

I'd started going to a pub, playing some songs there

and eventually somebody wanted to give me some money for it!

Why he happened to be there in a folk club

I have absolutely no idea

but I met, uh, somebody called Lawton Brown.

He was from Jamaica, yeah, he was a Black student

and he said,

"Oh, you should come and write some songs with me!" Which is what I did!

# THE SELECTER: War War War #

Lawton lived in a house with a guy from the Ivory Coast called Hubert

and Charley 'Aitch' Bembridge

and we used to sit around in Lawton's front room

and I was just introduced to Black music

that I DIDN'T know about!

The Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron,

blues artists,

people like Lightnin' Hopkins.

I hadn't really met anybody before who knew his way around reggae music.

(REGGAE BEAT)

And I and Lawton tried to start a reggae band.

Punk had started in the early '70s

as an antidote to the Pink Floyds

and that whole kind of prog rock era.

(UPBEAT ROCK)

Kids who were into punk were also into reggae

because somebody called Bob Marley was making the most amazing reggae music!

(REGGAE JAM)

Society was changing in schools, in youth clubs...

Black and white were already finding a mixed place to be.

Pauline Black was finding that.

The white kids were playing old Trojan Records.

Here was the first time, in the history of British music,

an opportunity to blend the cultures of different styles,

of the Caribbean Island style with the white punk style.

# This is reggae music! #

The people that were here,

the parents of these children had come here with their ska records,

all the blue beat and all the rock steady and stuff

and when punk came along

it could kind of pivot and do anything it wanted!

# THE CLASH: Police and Thieves

Bands like The Clash, they could have a punk ethos

but nonetheless they could take quite a lot of reggae

and amalgamate it into their own music!

# Police, police, police and thieves! #

Then you had Steel Pulse in Birmingham,

not so far away.

# STEEL PULSE: Uncle George #

You'd got The Beat, you'd got UB40.

Steel Locks...

But they were reggae bands.

They were playing around all the pubs and stuff like that.

It was a transition to embrace multiculturalism

and through that make something which is new!

'76, '77...

I'd met a few people from Coventry.

We had a band called Hard Top 22 and it was reggae music...

And at the time,

The Specials were called Coventry Automatics!

And we used to have a residential play

at this club called Mr George's

and we used to play there every Monday night.

(INDISTINCT JAM)

Hard Top 22, they were all my friends.

And I think Pauline was with this other guy,

they were doing sort of folk stuff, you know?

Hard Top 22 loomed large in a young girl's life in Coventry

because, you know, you'd got Charley,

who looked like Bob Marley!

Uh, you know, there was you in all your finery!

I wanted to know about reggae!

(SLOW REGGAE)

The first time I saw Pauline was at a place called The Queen's Pub.

She was playing a guitar and sitting on a stool,

and I thought, "Oh, she's nice!"

They definitely fancied Pauline! Yeah, they did!

(LAUGHS)

There was a queue!

(BOTH LAUGHING)

# White riot, I wanna riot!

# White riot!

# White riot, I wanna riot!

# White riot!

In 1976,

during a gig at the Birmingham Odeon,

Eric Clapton said during a drunken rant,

"Stop Britain from becoming a Black colony!

Get the foreigners out!

Get the wogs out! Get the coons out!

Keep Britain white!"

# White riot! #

Rock Against Racism is triggered by the Eric Clapton statement in Birmingham.

It triggered this coming together of Black and white bands

in the name of kick racism out of music.

A seminal moment in British popular music history.

At Victoria Park,

we had nearly 100,000 young people turn up.

Up until Rock Against Racism,

you had Black musical events, you had white events

but you didn't promote Black and white bands on the same bill!

We were working with punk bands.

The music on one hand is reggae

and then there's this AGGRESSIVE noise

and we're on the same bill

and we had the same audience, is the point!

Rock Against Racism and all that, right,

make England a better country, unite people.

The punk scene, a lot of people saw anarchy, right?

But out of that come unity!

(SLOW REGGAE)

Jerry Dammers, he has been influenced by Rock Against Racism.

So, Jerry consciously looks amongst the musicians in Coventry

to find Black people and to find white people

to bring them together into a band that will become The Specials.

He also grows the idea of his own label

and a home for other musicians

and he'll bring that sense of the cooperative into two-tone.

# THE SPECIALS: Gangsters #

Yeah, the birth of two-tone is Gangsters in the spring of 1979.

We recorded, um, Gangsters.

We had £500 to make the record

and we, you know...

We just ran out of funds!

A nice piece of mohair!

(LAUGHTER)

It was only by luck that The Specials...

They ran out of money when they were making Gangsters

and didn't have enough money for the B-side

so rang up Neol Davies and said,

"Haven't you got a track that's sitting around on somebody's shelf at the moment

that you recorded two years ago called Kingston Affair?

Do you fancy putting it on the other side?

Let's rename it The Selecter!"

So, Jerry asked Neol to put a ska beat on that track

and that's basically what happened!

(SKA BEAT)

The first single, The Selecter versus The Specials.

Unique record, two bands on one record.

Out it went, started climbing the charts...

And of course that then made Neol Davies think,

"Well, I should get a band together

because maybe we can do something here!"

(REGGAE BEAT)

I remember that we had a meeting at Charley's house.

Yeah, Jerry Dammers with Lynval Golding says,

"You have to change your name from Hard Top 22 to The Selecter."

They told us they'd like Pauline to join

and also Neol Davies.

Neol, apart from being an excellent songwriter,

his guitar had a unique sound.

We thought, "Great!

We can have, like, reggae-based music

with a rock guitar going over it!"

And we became The Selecter!

# THE SELECTER: Three-Minute Hero

In 1979, The Selecter officially formed.

I had no idea at the time

that two-tone would change EVERYTHING for me!

# Three-minute hero, I wanna be!

# Three-minute hero, I gotta be! #

I came into this from a...

I suppose, a folk, bluesy sort of background,

what I was doing,

and, um, the others came in from sort of a reggae background.

We have, um, the old ska rhythm and we have reggae.

We have blues and there's a bit of funk

and of course we have ja Neol playin' his rock!

Pow!

(LAUGHTER)

The Selecter is made up of seven members.

Six are Black, one guy is white

and the lead singer is, uh, of mixed heritage.

When we're onstage,

all we put out, really, is sort of our music

and the basic feelings behind it

and we can't play unless we move at the same time.

I just remember thinking,

"Well, half of me is Black,

half of me is white...

This is a perfect fit for me!

I feel as though I can go into this and it will have some substance!"

Jerry had the vision to get it together

and some sort of business acumen.

We knew this was a chance!

I mean, yeah, we were Black people, for goodness' sake! Yeah!

This wasn't gonna come knocking again without Jerry Dammers

and toeing that whole line.

We knew that unless you've got somebody white who's handling the business

then you'd hardly get anywhere as Black...

A Black unit.

So, we were, um, more than happy to take that route.

My identity at that time was a woman

who worked in the National Health Service.

I mean, that's what I did.

I was still trying to hold down a job

with the possibility of promotion as well to senior radiographer,

knowing that actually I wanted to do something else!

I'd played in front of people, 50 at most.

I didn't have any confidence.

We just had to learn very, very quickly

and we had to write from day one.

We started supporting The Specials

and then we went out and did little dates of our own.

Then we got about £1,000 from Jerry Dammers

to go and record three songs.

That's right, yeah.

# Murder!

# Oh, murder!

# I said murder...

# Oh, murder!

When I went in the studio, I'd never been in a studio before!

# That's what we want you to do! #

Pauline would write a song and she would go,

"That's your part

and you've got to find the lyrics for that!"

The first time I did it,

Pauline was quite pleased about it

and so was I!

So, that was very encouraging.

Pauline, she would question things that she's not comfortable about in my lyrics

and then she would suggest...

It just got easier and easier.

# Too much pressure!

# Too much pressure!

# Too much pressure! #

And then the record companies were kind of after us, weren't they?

Yeah.

This is Pioneer House.

This is where I used to live.

It was very hard to get work.

You know, there would be jobs there

and there would be all kind of excuses

why they wouldn't give you the job.

And you know that there was only one reason

but there's nothing you can do about it!

It started out as a hobby, really.

Charley and other members of Hard Top 22,

we all used to congregate in my flat and listen to different music, you know?

And then you guys would hang out here a bit

and do stuff as well for Selecter?

Yeah... I mean, in the early days of The Selecter, yeah.

And just down there, we used to have, like, a green...

We used to call it The Green.

That's where we used to have sound systems

and everybody on a hot summer's day...

Everybody used to congregate down there and have a good time.

And just down there is when... It's the first time I met Pauline.

The rest of it is history!

Still pretty much the same! Yeah!

It's still pretty much the same as I remember!

And as you can see, it's very, very busy, isn't it? Yeah.

And very multicultural, the way that it always used to be.

I mean, this used to be THE place if you wanted to meet people from other places!

Well, yeah... It's all good!

# The radio on...

At first, it was On My Radio,

which was written by Neol Davies.

# I bought my baby a red radio

# He played it all day

All musicians want to be famous!

Basically, you just wanna be on Top of the Pops in those days? Yeah!

# He said he loved me but he loved the beat

If you got on Top of the Pops, that meant you had made it! Yeah, that's it!

And within about a month of that, we were on Top of the Pops!

# I bought my baby a red radio

# He played it all day a-go-go, a-go-go

# He liked to dance to it down in the streets

I was always conscious of the fact that I was Black

and that I was a woman

and that...

You HAD to be conscious of it!

We were playing to white people, in the main! Mmm, yeah!

# On my radio!

# It's just the same old show on my radio! #

Black and white musicians playing together...

It wasn't like we were the first lot who did that

but somehow we did it,

putting the social aspect of it

and the political aspect of it, um, to the forefront.

# Too much pressure!

# Too much pressure! #

I suppose, because of the way that we performed onstage,

people thought we were just perennially angry!

Um, and there was a lot to be angry about!

# THE SELECTER: Sing On

# Sing on... #

Britain in the '70s was a social battleground,

endless marches,

an increasingly popular National Front

meeting in opposition the Anti-Nazi League

and a generation who wanted to stand against a right-wing organisation

and Margaret Thatcher spoke of the fear of being swamped of people from another culture

to bring National Front support to the Conservative Party.

Skinheads go around here now fighting the rude boys.

They didn't have to fight unless there was something to fight about.

Coventry was an industrial city with all the factories,

everything there,

but it also was a very, very violent city as well.

You go into town and, man, somebody...

You've gotta fight your way through. It was really horrible.

I mean, I got chased at night and I got beaten up in Foleshill.

I got stabbed. That was a racist attack.

Saturday night was a battlefield.

It was not only a battlefield in terms of coming from the station

to get to someone's home or to get to a gig

but sometimes it was a battlefield in the gig itself!

(REGGAE BEAT OVER COMMOTION)

Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.

Where there is error, may we bring truth.

Where there is doubt, may we bring faith.

What did we get in 1979?

A Conservative government with a brief

which was basically to bust up the trade unions.

It started with the miners first and all of those things that unravelled.

We were at the start of that.

There were still sus laws on the street,

so you could be picked up if you were Black, um,

and hustled off down the cop shop.

And when you get stopped by the cops EVERY single week,

which used to happen under this sus law,

you know...

It made me kind of militant and political

and I was forced to get proactive

but it was because of the way I was treated

and I couldn't switch off and then, you know, become something else.

I was ALWAYS Black!

For Caribbeans, Thatcher was the enemy.

She was creating policies that broke up families.

It was the miners' strikes, it was all kinds of strikes.

People were being fired at the time.

If you fell into the Black community,

you were the first to lose your job.

So, people were losing their houses.

This finds its way into your music.

# Things are getting worse every day

# Things are getting worse! #

You know, there is unemployment,

so we do a song which is every day things are getting worse,

you know, dog and all a look work,

you know, which is sort of a Jamaican expression for...

You know, there's just no damn work at all.

So, everyone's just gotta go out, you know?

And, um, we've got another one, Danger,

which I suppose sort of applies to the sus laws

and things like that, you know?

# Oh, danger when the red light's shining bright

# Oh, danger, danger

# There's gonna be a terrible fight! #

The people who come to see us are not so far removed from what our beginnings were

sort of, you know, six months ago.

All we're doing is just sort of placing their life in some kind of perspective,

you know, just sort of setting it to music, if you like,

in sort of the songs we have, like Street Feeling or Danger,

and things like that, you know?

And so they can directly relate to the music you're playing.

# Out on the streets again

# Lookin' for somethin'

# It just don't matter now, I don't wanna care!

Our music isn't for sort of banging your head against a wall, you know?

It's for actually THINKING about what's going on around you

and hopefully doing something about it.

# I don't wanna stop! #

It's all musical reportage.

It's all social commentary.

# THE SELECTER: They Make Me Mad

# Things, they have changed

I was a bit of a force of nature when I was younger

and it was like no one was really going to challenge me

and nobody ever did!

# They make me mad!

# They make me mad! #

When she walks into the room, you know it's Pauline.

She stood out because she was strong,

very bright, very intelligent

and dealing with a bunch of guys, you know!

She was just perfect for that role!

Any other girls, they wouldn't have been able to cope with it!

# Three-minute hero, I wanna be!

# Three-minute hero, I wanna be!

I can certainly remember the first time I saw her.

It was probably on the telly

and I was knocked out 'cause she had this kind of androgynous,

rude boy-girl thing going on!

She rocked a fedora like no one else

and the lyrical content of what she was saying...

# A three-minute hero!

Spoke to me in volumes!

# It's too early in the morning!

# Stupid job!

Pauline is the first rude girl.

# Don't wanna eat, can't think straight

# Same as yesterday! #

Pauline Black onstage is nothing short of magnificent.

A front person taking on six male behind her

and taking it to the audience with an incredibly powerful vocal

that she takes up in registers at different points, you know...

Countering what Gaps is saying.

# If I had a pair of wings I would fly away

She has a unique and a brilliant, magical voice.

You recognise it's her straight away.

And also, it's her singing out of here,

not just here, it's coming out of here.

# Oh, murder... #

Her upbringing and her heritage

has been a very important part of forming what she's all about

and that's why her voice, it has this strength in it.

I won't use the word anger, but power.

An artist responding to their situation.

# I've paid the price, I'm not a fool

# I don't live inside your rules!

You can't keep your eyes off her because she's from left to right

to left to right,

dancing, always smiling!

She EXUDES confidence and warmness,

you want to be part of her gang!

# When they come and take me away... #

The music we listened to and the clothes we wore

were the only means of empowerment,

having any kind of, um, identity and finding your tribe.

So, they became crucial to our lives.

And again, you know, we turned that shit into an art form

and two-tone is a prime example of that stuff working in harmony.

You can't underestimate that combination,

style and music,

for the working class!

It's all we got!

# Missing words, missing words

The influence of clothing on two-tone

was a direct result of people coming from the Caribbean Islands.

# Missing words, missing words

The whole Walt Jabsco look definitely came from Jerry.

What he was referencing was, you know,

the early blue beat rude boy look from Jamaica.

It is all about being sharp!

# You might have thought that I was dumb

But they could go down to Far Gosford Street in the centre of Coventry

and find suits that would make you look brilliant

and then raised trousers so you could see the sock line.

# I wonder if you... #

Pauline took that and thought,

"Well, if it's good enough for the guys

then I am going to own that too

and in many ways do it better!"

(ATMOSPHERIC BEAT)

Dressing in a suit brought with it a certain power.

Putting on a hat added to that power

but it also created questions around sexuality.

Pauline takes her identity with her clothing

to project a certain androgynous portrayal.

You've got the jacket. You've got the trousers.

People see that and they see it as a very male silhouette

and I think it has an automatic authority about it.

Look like a man,

stand like a man, own your space like a man!

Pauline used society's own visuals back at them

so that she would then be heard and not be dismissed.

# THE SELECTER: Danger

I don't really think about gender.

I don't really think of myself as male or female or anything.

I never really have done.

In my head, I'm just me.

# I was only having some fun #

Always have a pair of loafers!

Always have a pair of brown Doc Martens!

This is a hat which has seen great service!

I bought this in Argentina!

If you need zhoosh then I tend to go for that...

That I do like!

Black suit jacket...

I like hidden buttons, a hanky in the pocket.

This, it's still probably my favourite blouse!

I bought that to go on the first American tour we did.

That was bought in C&A!

(LAUGHS)

(BEAT CONTINUES AND FADES)

Pauline came across like the first lady of two-tone!

She was fearless and had to be,

'cause back in those days they got a very mixed reception from a lot of her audiences

but she stood firm and I think that's got a lot to do with her upbringing.

Pauline was the only darky in the village in Romford.

She was forced to be strong.

Because of the struggles she went through,

that couldn't help but inform the person she became.

Because there's a big gap between Belinda Magnus becoming Pauline Black

via Pauline Vickers.

As a confident, powerful front person

leading this band with hit singles,

I discover that she's somebody that doesn't know who she is.

(SEARCHING BEAT)

She hasn't got an identity that has been given to her

by a family that makes sense to her.

She's the wrong colour in the wrong place

and things don't fit.

All these combinations that would have felt internally unsettling

to that incredible moment when she's in the room with Charley Anderson

and they're saying, "What shall we call you?

What are you?

Pauline... Pauline, you're Black.

Black... Black!"

And Pauline literally shrieks, "Black! That's what I am!"

I was always told, "You're not Black!

You're coloured!"

So, the very first opportunity I had to rename myself,

you know, it was almost like getting rid of a slave name,

a real kind of rite of passage!

Using the word Black as your surname,

I mean, that was just like dropping a bomb into my family and I've never really been forgiven.

Right, who here gets up at 7:00 in the morning?

All: Yeah!

Do you work in factories?

Now she has an identity

and there's a strength

and I think a lot of that strength is coming out of the fact

that she's saying down the barrel of the lens,

"I am Black and I am Pauline Black!

Now, get a load of this!"

# It's 11:00pm and you're on your way home

# Just another night with that endless grey drone

# Three-minute hero, I wanna be!

# A three-minute hero, I wanna be! #

The marriage of style and music,

it was that that helped push two-tone across the line

because all of a sudden a lot of working class kids...

"Yeah, we can relate to that!"

You know, the punk thing, Mohawk, safety pins and that, nah, nah, nah!

# La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la!

You had the energy of punk...

The danceability of reggae.

# La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la! #

It was music for your mind and your feet, man!

And it was ABSOLUTELY huge!

I don't think people realise how big a movement two-tone was!

This is a two-tone takeover tonight!

If you've got any colour television sets, get rid of them!

Pure black and white! I'm Pauline!

And I'm James! I mean, Gaps!

(LAUGHTER) This is the rest of The Selecter!

(ATMOSPHERIC BEAT)

What's really incredible about two-tone,

by the summer of 1980,

two-tone has proved that it is more commercially successful than punk.

It has number one records.

It's selling singles in the quarter a million,

half a million.

These are ENORMOUS sales.

They're on Top of the Pops. They're in the top ten.

These are things you couldn't say about The Clash, for example,

or maybe even The Pistols.

# I can't dress just the way I want

# I'm being chased by the National Front

# Concrete jungle

# The animals are after me! #

I was just the right age when it all kind of started to happen for two-tone bands.

They were the best bands on the Top of the Pops.

I absolutely loved 'em.

The shoes, the shirts, the haircuts,

the music, the imagery...

I had endless kind of sort of copies of their logos and stuff

on my schoolbooks!

These bands were incredibly important to me.

That was... Yeah, that was the future.

# Last night when I told you all that stuff

# About the way things are... #

Two-tone was a thing, it was a movement.

Suddenly, it was like we just came along from absolutely nowhere,

seemingly to them,

and we were just there, invading Top of the Pops!

And it was a progressive movement!

We made people talk about racism,

we made people...

Well, I made people talk about sexism

or how Black women fitted into...

Into society.

# It's all over now

# You thought you had it made

Two-tone was very important to me

because I was raised in a reggae household,

so, ska, that was the music of my childhood.

# Missing words, missing words

# Just missing words, missing words

And then here comes this music that's very, very familiar

but there's this angsty kind of punky attitude to it

and I was very attracted to the energy.

# It just don't make sense the way you did #

Then comes Pauline Black along with, like, a trilby and a suit

and it blew my mind because she was Black!

And I hadn't...

I hadn't seen a Black woman dress like that, attitude like that

or be like that.

You know, I wanted to be Pauline Black!

(ATMOSPHERIC BEAT)

At the height of my Selecter success,

NME invited me to a photoshoot

celebrating women in punk and new wave

featuring Debbie Harry from Blondie,

Poly Styrene from X-Ray Spex,

Chrissie Hynde from The Pretenders,

Viv Albertine from The Slits

and Siouxsie Sioux.

The infamous tea party photo!

Or The Rock Goddesses,

as it was called at the time for the NME!

You've got these kind of glamorous white kind of rock chicks,

Chrissie and Debbie,

who absolutely owned it

and were very confident in their role in that.

And if you look at the photo,

you've got Pauline and Poly Styrene,

both of them looking a bit uncomfortable.

(EMOTIONAL MUSIC)

When you're two Black women and certainly mixed race women

in a room with a whole load of other white ladies

and one of them happens to be Debbie Harry

it's intimidating for anybody!

Chrissie Hynde absolutely dominated the conversation!

I can't speak for Poly,

but I can see from the expression on her face we knew what was going down!

I just felt that life was so much easier for them.

Somehow, they were MUCH more open,

MUCH more talkative between each other.

You're looking at people who, on occasions,

you'll feel had an easier life.

No matter how difficult it is in the music industry,

they had opportunities I didn't.

I'm not equal... Why?

And will this ever change?

I wanna be here but I'm uncomfortable.

I don't wanna leave but I need to be here.

It's... It's a paradox.

Pauline, you can tell just wasn't sure about being part of it

and she did not understand or recognise her own power

and her own importance and her own place in that pantheon.

The insecurity was there

and I don't think she ever understood how incredibly attractive she was!

You have a vague imposter syndrome thing going on.

Should I really be here?

Because these are people I've seen on TV

and stuff like that.

And that's always how it felt when I was growing up...

Like, should I be here? I don't know!

(SEARCHING MUSIC)

and I didn't know

that she used to keep it until after she died.

I think she was quite proud of what I'd done

because she put it all in Sainsbury's carrier bags

and if she went to a wedding or a funeral or anything like that

she'd carry them with her and take them out

and show people and say, "This is my daughter!"

If anything, that showed how much things had moved on,

that my mother could now actually embrace something like that.

(REGGAE BEAT)

Hello!

(LAUGHTER)

How the devil are you, madam? All right!

I was just passing! I bet you were!

You're always just passing in the obscure hotel corridors!

(LAUGHING)

So, when did we first meet?

It was The Bodysnatchers' second ever gig. Right.

At the Windsor Castle up Harrow Road.

You came with Juliet and Jerry

and we were looking for a band to come on tour with us.

But my main overriding kind of recollection...

Because I was the female in the band,

I never had a dressing room.

I remember scurrying in the toilet one time

and I was in there getting changed

and all of The Bodysnatchers came in

and started stripping off in there!

I'm in a locked cubicle! (BOTH LAUGHING)

Trying to change! Like this!

And I came out

and I remember the first thing I saw were your rosy-tipped breasts!

Oh! I know!

I have no memory of that!

And I remember thinking, "Whoa, never seen that before!"

(ORGAN MUSIC)

Certainly, things were different after punk,

because punk was very matriarchal, I think.

And so, after that,

there were lots of strong women around

who said what they thought.

And then it came to two-tone

and it was kind of me and you.

# THE BODYSNATCHERS: Let's Do Rocksteady

Both of us fronted bands as, you know, Black females.

No one really wanted to hear that story, particularly,

then.

# Oh, oh... #

You know, who else was there?

Well, I mean, there was Poly Styrene, wasn't there?

(CONTINUES)

I think that possibly we both feel slightly ambivalent about what went before

in respect of the fact that here we are,

still kind of doing the kind of music that we did

at first in...

Yeah, but it wasn't the music. In a different guise.

It wasn't the music. It was the personnel. Yeah, it was the people.

It wasn't the music at all. The music was fine. Was always fine. Mmm.

# THE BODYSNATCHERS: Easy Life #

It was just being in bands with people

who you didn't really get on with!

We're both women.

Being in something which is largely, I suppose, a male...

Sausage fest!

I wouldn't go as far as a sausage fest! I would! (LAUGHS)

Maybe you know more about the sausages than I do!

But it's... (LAUGHING) No!

Music business, yeah. It's a lot of things.

I mean, it's not just a sausage fest... No.

There's a whole class aspect to it as well.

And as two Black women, I think that, uh...

(LAUGHTER)

We are, we're two Black women!

Yeah, as two Black women,

I think that we found ourselves kind of on the...

Back of the bus! Yeah, the back of the bus!

# THE SELECTER: Black and Blue

This is how I used to feel in 1979, Black and Blue!

# She never really had the chances

# That some of the kids she saw showed her

# She was rarely asked to dances

# Or just afternoon at the pictures in the back row

# She thought she had all the answers

# Decided to go her own way

# Alone in her room on a Friday night

# Saw her face in a broken mirror

# So black and blue, life knocks you about

# So black and blue!

# So black and blue, life knocks you about

# So black and blue!

# Hey!

I always went out onstage ready for a fight with ANYBODY!

I mean, we were playing mainly to white folks

but they were all tribally different.

There were punks, there were rude boys,

there were plain old hippies sometimes.

# So black and blue!

Skinheads used to come along and some of them were NF

and they were just troublemakers,

not like what I would like to call sort of the real skinheads,

white working class youth who were working on the docks in the East End

who admired rude boys,

people from the Caribbean,

the whole way they dressed and all this new music.

# So black and blue! #

When skinheads started,

it was a mashup of white mod culture

with Jamaican rude boy culture.

And for a short while, it was a beautiful thing!

People forget that

'cause it was hijacked by the racists,

the National Front in the '70s.

There's always an element that...

Like the music but they hate the people that...

That make it.

When you're faced at Hammersmith Palais

with thousands of skinheads Sieg Heil-ing at you

and then stopping when the music starts

that kind of takes a lot of processing!

I mean, I've been in a band,

I've been in a lot of tough situations

but I CANNOT imagine what it would be like

to have to deal with something like that!

The weight on the shoulders of people like Pauline,

it seemed like people were just about getting their heads around

the sort of mixed race bands

but I think because they were mostly Black

and she was female

that's double trouble!

They had it extra hard!

I mean, I think they got more Sieg Heils than anybody else!

I always remember playing in Bristol

and we went into a pub

and the landlady shouted out to both of us...

"Not your sort in here!" Mmm.

Somebody says, "You a wog!"

Dance, you are here to dance!

Oh, you remember the first BBC thing,

when they wouldn't let Charley into the bar afterwards

because he was wearing a hat?

And he had his locks under his hat...

I remember going into the make-up booth

and the woman turned around and said,

"Well, you know, I mean...

I've only got make-up for ordinary people!"

So, I asked her, quite clearly, "So, I'm extraordinary, am I?"

(BOTH LAUGHING)

# They asked you if you're all right

# And you say yes!

We were third on the bill of the two-tone tour

but we'd had a hit

and we were going on to have other hits!

I think all of us were more vulnerable, definitely,

than was perceived.

# Yeah! #

I think that people thought that we were far more savvy than what we actually were,

both about the business

and about how we presented ourselves

and in terms of writing music as well.

And we had internal conflicts...

I understand that you're pretty turned on by Billie Holiday

and some of the blues singers of the '20s and '30s?

No, just Billie Holiday, really.

And Janis Joplin. And Mick Jagger.

(LAUGHING)

Can you edit that out?

(JAMMING)

Within The Selecter,

it was a little bit like we were living out the microcosm

of what was going on racially out in the world.

We had three members from Jamaica,

Gaps Hendrickson,

he was from one of the smaller islands, Saint Kitts.

And you know, there's bad blood between Jamaicans and Kittitians

and we had this white guy who wrote the songs.

You know, well, the ones that were hits, anyway!

There were SO many issues at foot!

That made for a lot of tension!

You've got a tour bus full of young men and two women.

Clouds of sort of, you know, dope smoke.

That's all going on up the back.

Pauline, up until The Selecter and two-tone,

she'd never really spent much time with Black men.

She, uh, couldn't speak patois.

That made her feel very, very left out

and made her feel she wasn't Black enough

and she suddenly, I think, became hyperaware

of how little of that culture she'd really been exposed to

and been allowed to own for herself.

So, she turns inward and she becomes isolated and...

But also wants to be taken seriously!

There was too many things going on in that band.

Everybody wanted to be a leader, I suppose!

You're on tour with them, 24-7.

There is envy, competitiveness.

Who's up front? Who is the media talking to?

For Pauline, it would have been difficult

because, one, you're not a bloke,

so there's the thought processes, how can you speak for me?

You place a woman into this male vortex of egos

and it's extremely challenging.

# THE SELECTER: Everyday

The place was just swarming with blokes, you know?

And I mean, there was no real thought given

that there was a woman in the band

and maybe they might need a space or a room to change in.

# Things are getting worse every day

Boys, if they get any degree of success,

turn up to gigs to get pissed,

play music

and, three, get laid!

It's different for girls in bands.

People would have those words, you know, like slag or slut...

So, whatever you do,

you tend to keep relatively underground

but that makes for a fairly lonely existence.

# Things are getting worse...

I don't really think that guys in bands

ever really know what's going on with a female within their midst.

# I took him down to the marketplace #

I was more or less oblivious to what was going on.

I suppose I was, um, one of the lads,

never really take any notice

'cause I thought she was one of the lads as well!

But then you start to take notice of what a female goes through

when they're in a man's world, really...

You were always the coolest out of all of them!

Gaps was always very respectful in ways that others weren't!

(BOTH LAUGHING)

Sometimes the Black guys didn't like it

if I got more attention than anyone else in the band.

Feminism was something to be frowned upon.

They really didn't trust me

because where on earth was I coming from?

I had a white husband!

Their wives or partners would normally ring up Terry, say,

"Can you take us to the gig? Because they haven't invited us!"

And the reason was because they had some other girlfriend who was coming along that night!

That caused for a lot of diplomacy

and I'm not the most diplomatic person in the world!

(SOMBRE MUSIC)

You'd find some tearful young ladies sometimes in the hotel corridors.

I mean, there were disturbing things that happened.

If we had had access to the whole of the Me Too generations' backup,

women from my generation would all have a lot of stories to tell.

In retrospect, I felt unprotected.

She's very reserved, very contained.

So, I think a lot of people found that quite intimidating

and she very much had a sense of...

"This is my space,

and sort of don't cross it unless invited!"

(INAUDIBLE)

Because of the way I grew up, I had problems trusting people

and withdrawing was the default setting for dealing with life.

This new environment on the road triggered this withdrawal again

and I felt like an outsider.

Again, I had to rely on myself entirely

but this time it was harder...

EVERYONE made assumptions.

They thought they knew the real me but they didn't.

By that time,

the interpersonal kind of relationships within the band,

they weren't really going anywhere.

And it wasn't just that,

you then had to look outside yourself.

# Missing words, missing words...

# Missing words, missing words #

This band, they were showing so much promise.

A band that had only formed 11 months earlier

and a succession of hit singles

leading up to The Whisper,

which doesn't fare as well

but is as equally strong as anything they've done before.

# It's just a whisper

# Hey!

# It's just a whisper

# Hey! #

And then suddenly,

there's an argument within the band,

a real power struggle.

Desmond's and my relationship became a bit strange after a while.

We always got along very well,

in terms of the way that we, uh, worked onstage together.

But offstage,

I would never say that we had any kind of relationship.

I just think women were a mystery to him at that time

and certainly, a woman like me,

I think he looked at me with probably suspicion at that time.

But it just got worse and worse

until, in the end,

he launched himself at me on a tour bus,

put his hands around my throat

and decided he was going to strangle me

'cause he just couldn't bear looking at me anymore!

Sixteen stone of person just kind of launched themselves at me

with their hands around my throat and just started throttling me!

"You ain't no queen!"

It was awkward, wasn't it? Yeah.

It was awkward. Yeah, yeah.

And people had to drag him off.

I think that there was a lot to unpack there for him

and for me as well.

They lose two members

and with it they lose a fundamental identity and chemistry

that dictates the sound and the look of The Selecter.

I think that was incredibly difficult.

I was really, REALLY unhappy about a lot of things by that time

but I could also see that the boat had sailed...

Yeah.

..as far as two-tone was concerned.

Too Much Pressure had been very successful.

Celebrate the Bullet wasn't so.

# Celebrate the bullet

# Put your finger on the trigger but you don't have to pull it

Celebrate the Bullet came out at a time when, uh,

John Lennon had just been shot,

President Reagan had been shot but he hadn't died.

There was absolutely no appetite to play such a song.

Irony does not play well on records

and outside, New Romantics was coming along.

At the record company, people were no longer wearing black and white.

They were wearing kilts

and they'd signed Spandau Ballet

so you could see the writing was on the wall.

# Celebrate... #

You'd also got the advent of synthesisers.

Why have seven people in the band? You can have two!

You can have Yazoo! No trouble there!

Seven people, lots of trouble!

So, I thought... "I'm just gonna jump ship!"

(BUZZING)

From The Selecter, the whole of two-tone,

it's goodnight!

When the band split at the height of their popularity,

it must have been devastating!

What about the future?

What do you hope to do then?

There's varying things I'd like to do, I...

I think that I'd like to sort of get involved maybe with some kind of acting thing

or something.

If you took up acting, would you carry on singing or what? Oh, yes, yes!

I think I'd always carry on singing

'cause it's a good way of sort of giving vent to your feelings.

You have the freedom to step on a stage somewhere

and just get a whole load of stuff off your chest

and nobody's really gonna complain too much!

(CHEERING)

# Frontline out on the street

# Frontline out on the street

# Don't get me started, I'm all in a rut

# You wanna push me...

There are genres that are here and gone

with just a few hit singles.

Two-tone was bigger than that.

(BEAT CONTINUES)

It was sufficiently big to sustain several bands

over that three-year period

and then what tends to happen is the bands fall apart

because of all the pressures

and one member survives.

(CONTINUES)

And it's normally the front person,

if they've managed to hold it together.

So, I think...

Just to keep going is a major achievement!

# Frontline out on the street

# Frontline out on the street

I am outshone! No, you're not! Yes, I am!

Couldn't do anything else with it!

I think it's all right and the girls will all get a thrill, so...

# Frontline

# Frontline! #

(CHEERING)

Back in 1979, in The Selecter,

that had all fallen apart and it just didn't work.

I mean, everything was stacked against us.

I just thought, "Well, all of that is now dust...

So, you have to do something else now."

And if there's one thing I am, it's adaptable!

(UPBEAT A CAPPELLA)

That's when Alan Edward steps into the picture.

# Like a bolt of lightning and a ball of heat

He was working on someone else called Ian Grant at the time

and I believe they had Hazel O'Connor

and were managing her.

Alan approached me and said, "We would like to manage you!

And we'll set you up with a solo career!"

# Shoorah, shoorah, I can see ya comin'

# Shoorah, shoorah, but you won't catch me! #

The whole album got made

but Chrysalis didn't really like the direction that it had gone in.

# AM, FM, turn the dial

# Aphrodisiac of the wires

# Pirates on the airwaves

The, um, record company dropped me.

# Everythin' will be all right

# Yeah, pirates on the airwaves #

And it was a big blow, being dropped by a record company,

particularly when you'd had a solo deal

and you really hadn't kind of exploited it

maybe as best as you could.

# Freedom is just another word for nothin' left to lose

# Nothin'

# And that's all that Bobby left me #

That then led into TV presenting,

which is always the graveyard of anyone who's been an ex-pop star!

I didn't particularly enjoy that.

I did enjoy, though,

doing a programme called Black on Black.

# ASWAD: African Children #

Now, this year's reggae awards were dominated by one man

who managed to walk off with every award for which he was eligible!

(APPLAUSE)

Aswad is a band who write about reality, you know?

We write about love songs as well, you know,

but we write about reality.

So, what you're talking about is your lyrics are politically orientated?

Everyone seems to be labelling you as the face of '84

and Billie Holiday's second coming and all these kind of things.

I mean, how do you actually see yourself?

Well, I see myself as me!

I mean, I'm not in any way trying to be retrospective!

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)

This whole process of popstarism,

being in a band, becoming semi-famous,

you know, having a few hit singles and everything that comes with that,

nothing prepares you for failure.

When you are no longer the flavour of the month

or the next big thing

and whatever audience you had built up

falls out of favour with you...

They've moved on!

That's it from me tonight.

So, back to you, Louise.

The TV series that I was in, Black on Black,

that had come to an end

and it wasn't going to be commissioned for anything else.

I thought, "Well, what do I do? Do I go back to my day job?"

Which was a radiographer at that time.

And I thought, "How on earth am I gonna go and be back doing that?"

(SOFT MUSIC)

I began acting...

I started off at Riverside Studios

with a director called Trevor Laird

who plays the pill-popping rude boy in Quadrophenia.

We did a play by Farrukh Dhondy.

I was lucky enough to play a Black Cleopatra

on the stage with a white Antony

but people were far happier if you played something

they could solidly feel you were gonna be REALLY great in

and that was, you know, a play about Billie Holiday.

I was going to do

the Billie Holiday biographical play.

We'd started to hold, um, open auditions

and Pauline Black came along and sang a cappella.

And she blew us away and so I offered her the part.

So, she was luminescent

and you went through an emotional journey watching her.

And she gave herself to the part and the audiences loved her

and she won a Time Out award for the performance,

quite rightly,

but I think it was much more difficult being a Black actor at the time.

I mean, I was on something called the Afro-Asian Committee of Equity.

We had to oppose the BBC

because they were doing the Shakespeare cycle,

all 40 plays in one year,

and they didn't cast any Black people in any of them.

It is Julius Caesar. A modern version, yeah.

Shakespeare as Shakespeare intended.

Or nothing at all...

Some of the first roles I got were a cleaner, a prostitute,

somebody actually on The Bill who wasn't a prostitute

but was the daughter of a prostitute!

That's what you're having to contend with!

Well, it couldn't have been easy...

Havin' a brass for a mother? No, it wasn't!

And I don't want her money, either!

I mean, and that REALLY is what being Black is about!

You've got this extra LAYER to get through all the time

and then you have to say,

"Well, there's something rotten in that system.

That's just institutionalised."

You'd go for an audition all the way to Liverpool,

for Brookside,

and there would be every other Black actress

probably in the country

there chasing one role

and they can't really decide between someone who is 60

or someone who is 18.

That is just a dereliction of duty among casting.

They had a lot of catching up to do.

I'm afraid Bridgerton was NOT on the cards then!

Nobody was cross-casting or any of those kinds of things.

It was just frustrating...

So, that's why I stopped acting.

I mean, you do get depressed, yes.

You know, I mean, there's still a lot of things to learn

and I don't think you really stop learning.

You can process it in two ways.

It can either make you stronger or, you know, you end up sort of having to take...

Tranquillisers or something like this, you know, to get through the day!

I very clearly remember...

It was quite a hot day,

but there were threatening black clouds

and I was in London.

I stopped off at Selfridges

'cause it was getting a bit chilly by then

and I had a jacket that I had bought

and I thought, "I'll go in there and I'll just slip it on."

So, I went up to the toilets,

took the jacket out and popped it on

when suddenly I heard this voice...

"What on earth you doing?!

Come on, there's no toilet paper in these toilets!"

It suddenly dawned on me that she thought that I was the lavatory attendant!

And I said, "Who the fuck do you think I am?"

She said, "Well, I thought you worked here!"

And I said,

"Don't assume that every Black person that you see is here to serve you!"

It just completely and utterly shocked me

and I remember thinking then...

"What the FUCK do I have to do in this society

just to be seen as a person, a human being?"

And I remember standing on Bond Street tube station

and it was just an empty platform.

It was one of those times...

And I thought, "No one really cares whether I'm here or not...

I could just end it all here."

(HURTLING)

Then a train came through

and I didn't have the bottle to do it

but it was a cathartic moment.

(GENTLE MUSIC)

And I remember thinking,

"You know what you have to do!"

I knew that I had to go and find my mother

and, by extension, find my father.

I needed to know the man who coloured me Black.

And then I went looking...

When I found my birth mother, I was 42 by then.

She had emigrated to... To Australia.

I found out that her heritage was Jewish,

which made me Jewish.

She told me that she had a nervous breakdown after my birth

and she wasn't married.

My mother had produced a Black child.

She didn't want to give me up

but in those days

it was considered that you were better off if you were adopted

and preferably by a white family.

She fell apart...

And often took the bus to Romford to look for me.

And on a couple of occasions, she saw me with my adoptive mother,

Ivy,

but legally she couldn't make herself known to me.

And it took her about two years to get back on her feet

and then she married an Irishman

and she had my brother and my sister with him.

And I wasn't too sure how to unravel all of that

and I just thought, "Wow...!"

And then... A bombshell!

I finally get to know who my father was!

My mother tells me he was an engineering student

from Nigeria

who was studying in London.

A little investigation led me to a second wife,

who showed me a photo which changed my life forever.

(EMOTIONAL MUSIC)

(INTENSIFIES AND FADES)

My father was Prince Gordon Oladosu Adenle,

the first-born of a tribal king, Samuel Adenle I,

the ruler of a fiefdom within the Yoruba Tribe.

I had NO idea my grandfather was a king,

making me, my father's first born, a princess.

Tragically, my father had died only the year before.

But when I looked into the eyes of the man in the photo,

it was like looking into my own in the mirror.

I felt a physical connection with him.

For the first time in my life,

I was perfectly comfortable in my Black skin!

If it was good enough for my father, then it was good enough for me!

That is the first time I think in her whole life

she finally gets that last piece where it's,

"OK, I have found my Blackness!

And it makes me feel wonderful and I am proud of it

and I can own it

and I finally know this whole other side of me,

who I am!"

(EMOTIONAL MUSIC CONTINUES)

I've only started feeling whole since I found out who my father is.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

Hello, Wembley!

The difference between myself performing today

is that I'm much more sure about what I'm doing,

who I am!

I'm not in an identity crisis anymore.

I know who Pauline Black is when she steps onstage,

what she does.

(MUSIC CONTINUES)

Often, after a really good show with The Selecter,

I lie in bed at night trying to calm down and relax

before sleeping in some anonymous hotel by myself

and I wonder how my life might have turned out

if I'd been allowed to stay with my birth mother

and, more importantly, had known my birth father.

Would it have been so different?

(CONTINUES AND FADES)

# Cold ground was his bed last night

# Rock his pillow too

# Cold ground was his bed last night

# Rock his pillow too

# Mama's so blue, mama's so blue

# Mama's so blue

# Mama's so blue, mama's so blue

# Mama's so blue

# Oh, boy, you'd better run

# Look what you've done!

# No joy will ever come from that kind of fun

# Y'all friends just ran away

# Left you all alone

# Blood red stains the grey, cold, fading stones

# Mama's so blue, mama's so blue

# Mama's so blue

# Mama's so blue, mama's so blue

# Mama's so blue... #