Growing up in a white working-class Essex family, Pauline Vickers had no idea her real parents were a teenage schoolgirl and a Nigerian prince. The Selecter star’s backstory, including childhood abuse and casual racism, would make a compelling movie, but for now it’s a documentary film.
Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story starts with the singer talking straight to camera – “It needed to be in my voice, not a narrator”, says Pauline who was 25 when she quit her job as an NHS radiographer and became a pop icon.
“If the band hadn’t worked out, I’d have gone back to being a radiographer, and I’d be retired by now and going on cruises,” she laughs.
Instead, she performs worldwide to new generations of Ska fans. Dagenham-born Pauline, 71, was flying home from sold-out shows in California when Arthur “Gaps” Hendrickson – her co-singer and friend for 45 years – passed away last June.
“We were contracted to go but Gaps was too ill,” she tells me. “He died four hours before we landed, which added to the awfulness for me. It’s been really difficult. We’d had 45 years of working together, performing together, recording together… it was a close relationship.”
They’d toured with Jools Holland’s Rhythm & Blues Orchestra for eight weeks leading up to Christmas in 2023. “Gaps was just amazing; he’d had chemo and then radiotherapy, but not enough to save him.”
The pair were dubbed ‘the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of Ska’. “It fitted what we did in a weird way,” she says. “When he used to do James Bond” – their spirited take on Monty Norman’s Bond theme – “I’d never seen anybody as powerful on stage.”
Within five months of forming in May 1979, The Selecter went Top Ten with their debut single On My Radio.
More hits – Three Minute Hero, Missing Words – followed quickly and their debut album, Too Much Pressure, sold more than half a million copies.
At their peak, they were each earning £150 a week. Pauline is better off now but insists her sole vice is clothes shopping. “Although my husband would probably say I don’t know when to shut up.”
Pauline, who received an OBE from King Charles in 2022, has been married to engineer Terry Button for 44 years.
“He’s the only man that can put up with me,” she says.
They met in 1972, months after she started a science course at Lanchester Polytechnic (now Coventry University). “I was a child bride,” she laughs.
They did try an open marriage but it didn’t last; in the film Pauline recalls “getting the hump” when she came home to find another woman using her frying pan.
She turned teenage heads in the eighties – despite her androgynous suit-and-trilby stage look.
Were you aware of your sex appeal back then?
“I wasn’t; I was a bit naïve about that. I realised later when men in their 50s and 60s told me. They still tell me. Too much information! Who knew?”
The band split after their first US tour. For Pauline, the low-point was having to perform after a wet t-shirt contest at the Bijou Showcase Club in Dallas, Texas.
Highs included their week of sold-out shows at the Whiskey A Go Go in Los Angeles. One night, Hollywood legend Bette Midler came backstage “looking like a bag lady” and introduced herself by grabbing Pauline’s breasts, asking “Don’t it hurt your boobies jumping around so much on stage?”
Pauline recalls, “I told her, ‘Not if you’re wearing the right bra’, and we both collapsed in fits of laughter.”
Debbie Harry came to one of their New York shows at Hurrah’s nightclub; so did Mick Jagger.
“Nobody told me! I had a headache that night and went straight back to the hotel. Mick was in his late 30s and still bonk-able.” She laughs, “He was the great could-have-been…”
Born Belinda Magnus in 1953 to Jewish schoolgirl Eileen and Nigerian engineering student Gordon, Black was adopted at 18months by Ivy and Arthur Vickers, a mechanic who worked on articulated lorries at Ford’s.
When Ivy died, Pauline traced her birth parents. Sadly Prince Gordon had recently passed, but she kept in touch with her mother – a £10 pom who’d emigrated to Australia – for years, and still hears from her African relatives.
Her documentary, which premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in October, is currently touring nationwide with Pauline taking questions from the audience.
“They ask about politics and about music and they ask, ‘Where did you buy your hat?’ If you want to get ahead get a hat,” she laughs. (And thanks to her 2021 appearance on the Antiques Roadshow, we know her old sweat-stained Trilby would go for £600 at auction).
Ask the wrong question though and Pauline gets spikier than a prairie cactus. We were both far-Left when we met in 1979, but when I enquire if she still is, Pauline gets a little defensive.
“Well, I have my views, but are you the same as you were then? No? Well, there you are.”
Similarly, when I ask about political lyrics, she retorts “What else is there to write about?”
Anyone accusing her of having a chip on a shoulder gets told “I’ve got a chip on both shoulders”, but in more colourful language.
Sexually abused by an adult neighbour at ten, Pauline withdrew into herself, her books and music, finding role models in HAIR-star Marsha Hunt, Tina Turner and Rita Marley of The Three-Is.
When multiracial pop stars The Foundations played at her school dance, they took a shine to her. “I ran home,” she says. “I could’ve been a groupie…”
One of her uncles supported Enoch Powell – “a lot of people did; not my parents, but it had an impact. You think about the world you live in a lot earlier when you’re different…I was the only black kid in school; I didn’t experience hatred, just a sense of otherness.”
In 1976, while working at Walsgrave Hospital, she frequently a folk club in the backroom of Coventry’s Old Dyer Arms. Watching the promoter’s girlfriend sing Donovan’s Colours, she thought, “I can do that” and worked out a few numbers at home on Terry’s guitar, including Dylan’s Hey, Mr Tambourine Man and Joni Mitchell covers.
“Then I wrote my own. The first was about the Ripper before he was found and convicted. For the film, they found a tiny piece of a recording of it.”
Soon she was playing a ten-song set for £1 a song. Which is where serendipity kicks in. Her stunning voice impressed local musician Lawton Brown and The Specials’ guitarist Lynval Golding who steered her towards reggae. Lynval introduced Pauline to Neol Davies – whose instrumental The Selecter had been the flip-side of Gangsters, their first hit – and they became The Selecter by merging with roots reggae veterans Hardtop 22.
Most of the 2-Tone bands (The Specials, Madness, The Selecter, The Beat etc) married Jamaican ska to punk attitude, The Selecter more than most. When Pauline calls herself “the living embodiment of 2-Tone,” she’s referring to her mixed-race background as much as her music.
Their first gig was in a small Worcester pub, their second was supporting the Specials in Leeds with Elvis Costello in the audience. “We had to learn very quickly, playing on bills with Secret Affair and Hazel O’Connor.”
Pauline, who quit her job that September, learnt her moves from watching Mick Jagger in action.
“I knew that if I was going to be anything on stage, it would at least be something forceful, because that’s how I’d feel.”
The Selecter fizzled out in 1982. Their ill-fated single Celebrate The Bullet sped their decline. US President Ronald Reagan had been shot just before the release, and their motives were misunderstood. “We were sending up gun culture but Radio One didn’t get irony. It killed the single and our second album.”
Pauline became a TV presenter, moving between kids’ telly and Channel 4’s Black On Black; then she acted, famously portraying Billie Holiday on stage, as well as notching up parts in The Bill and Hollyoaks.
She liked the discipline, but got “fed up” with the lack of control. “Once I went back to music, I was happy. I don’t like being directed.”
After various reunions, Pauline’s The Selecter, with Gaps, had been going strong since 2010, touring South America with Gorillaz and joining their Wembley Stadium bill last July.
“Our best gigs were the early ones at the Electric Ballroom, but Wembley came very close.”
She has found new audiences of fans around the world, acknowledged as an influencer by younger bands, and awarded with an OBE. “The OBE was a bit surreal, but I thought if it’s good enough for Elvis Costello it’s good enough for me.”
She has no plans to stop. “We’ve got festivals for this year, five dates with Steel Pulse, we’re playing with Ali Campbell’s UB40 at Dreamland, Margate, then Ireland and back to South America.
“I’ve always loved being on stage. It’s the place I feel completely myself.”
*Details on where to see Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story are at docnrollfestival.com/films/pauline-black-a-2-tone-story/
