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Sharp … Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story.
Sharp … Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story. Photograph: Sky UK Ltd
Sharp … Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story. Photograph: Sky UK Ltd

Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story review – original rude girl is still impossibly cool

The Selecter frontwoman recounts her own astonishing personal journey interwoven with her pioneering presence in 70s musical history

‘I was never going to be a nice little white girl,” says Pauline Black, singer with the ska band the Selecter – and a woman with an amazing personal story to tell. There’s her childhood growing up as an adopted mixed-race girl in a white family in 1960s Romford in east London, and her time as the impossibly cool frontwoman of the Selecter. Black is a brilliantly blunt straight-talker and very funny. Here she is joking about her open marriage in the hippy 70s: “I did get the hump one time, when I came home, and she was using my frying pan.” (She is still happily married to her husband.)

Black was adopted as a baby and at that time in Romford racism was everywhere. “It would come at you like a slap.” Even in her family, she remembers an uncle singing the praises of Enoch Powell. When she was 10, Black was sexually abused by a neighbour (her parents’ reaction was appalling). Her childhood made her mistrustful; lonely and alienated, she spent hours practising the piano and reading. In 1979, Black was working as a radiographer in Coventry when the Selecter took off – and she changed her name from Pauline Vickers to Pauline Black. (“I don’t think my family ever forgave me.”)

The Selecter were not the biggest band signed to 2-Tone Records, but they were pioneering: six out of seven members were people of colour and they had a female singer. DJ Don Letts says Black was the first lady of 2 Tone and today, she is still rocking her 70s rude girl look: the sharp boy’s suits and pork pie hats. After three years, she left the band, did some acting and TV presenting before the Selecter re-formed. Black co-wrote this documentary, and arguably she exercises a bit too much control; that said, given everything in her personal history, you can see why she wants to tell it her way.

Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story is on Sky Arts and Now on 16 April.

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