Q&A With The Selecter’s Pauline Black

Originating in Coventry, England, in the late 1970s, The Selecter, along with bands such as Madness, The Beat (The English Beat) and The Specials, helped spearhead what would be called 2 Tone ska.  A mixture of ska, punk, reggae, new wave and other elements, the genre often combined political commentary with music as bands delivered their take on many of the issues of the day.

As with many great acts, The Selecter shined bright and furious until members went their separate ways in 1982.  After reforming in 1991 co-founder Neol Davies eventually left to form his own version of the group, resulting in two bands performing under The Selecter moniker. However, in 2011 Black obtained ownership of the name and trademark, resulting in today’s band.  The group’s latest album, String Theory, was released earlier this year.

Black proudly carries the 2 Tone banner forward.  Not only is she the lead singer of one of the genre’s most respected bands, but she’s also an author, having published her autobiographical memoir, “Black By Design,” in 2011.

The lady is also an actress and has appeared in several British television shows as well as in the horror flick “Funny Man” opposite Peter Cushing.  In 1991 she won the “Time Out” award for her portrayal of Billie Holiday in the play “All Or Nothing At All.”

But when she spoke with Pollstar a couple of weeks before the band’s U.S. tour, she was simply Pauline from The Selecter.  And she was fascinating.

Thirty years after 2 Tone ska emerged; are you comfortable with that label?

Yes, I’m comfortable with it. I feel the two planks of 2 Tone at the time – and now – were an anti-racist stance and an anti-sexist stance.  We now live in a time when certainly racism hasn’t gone away.  Also, I feel violence towards women seems to be at an all-time high all over the world.  So I would say 2 Tone is as relevant today as it was back then.

The Selecter was formed more three decades ago.  Have you seen any improvements in the way promoters and venues accommodate women artists compared to the band’s early days?

To a certain extent, yes.  But you still find yourself getting changed in the ladies’ [room]. If there’s a support band which has quite a lot of people in it, you can’t hope for two dressing rooms or even three.  Those things don’t seem to change very much.  It’s still … a male-oriented music scene.

Speaking of bands with several members – The Selecter is pretty much its own party wherever it goes, isn’t it?

It is.  It’s good traveling with quite a big party.  You just have to be very organized about things. … Maybe it’s because we’re all a bit older now and stuff like that.  We’re very organized, get to places on time and all those kind of things.  We don’t bump into the furniture when we go on stage.

Does the stage seem a bit crowded at times as well? Some club stages aren’t all that accommodating to large bands.

That’s true.  They’re certainly not stadium size.  We’re as happy on a big stage in an outdoor stage as we are in a small club.  Sometimes the intimacy of a small club can make for a different kind of exchange between you and the audience.  I think there are bands who like performing and there are bands who see it as a means to an end between selling albums.  We actually like performing.

Do you see touring as The Selecter’s main occupation when compared to recording and selling albums?

In the past few years the one thing we wanted to do was make sure when we got together and started branching out more into the wild world and touring internationally … that we didn’t want to do it just on the strength of the heritage of this band. … We wanted to make some new albums and talk about things that are going on today.  Very much, I feel, the stance of 2 Tone has metamorphosed into a much wider question which is multiculturalism and what that means to countries around the world. 

There are other questions, too. There’s the whole business of what’s going on with same-sex marriage, gay liberation, all those kind of things, what that means in Russia at the moment.  There’s a whole raft of questions which I feel fit very much into the 2 Tone bag in terms of those two things I was talking about – anti-racism and an anti-sexist stance.

During the band’s hiatus were there current events that made you wish the band was still together if only to provide a platform from which to comment?

I went off and did other things about it.  I did quite a lot of acting during the ’90s. I had a book written and I’m writing another one, my first novel. So I have lots of ways that I can explore how I feel about what’s going on in the world.  It’s not just music – but music is my favorite way of exploring it.  And certainly performing, touring, meeting people in other countries and things like that are obviously good because you can set up a whole different dialogue.  Maybe people see things differently.

The Selecter played Coachella earlier this year.  Coming from a country with a very rich history of music festivals, what were your perceptions of Coachella?

Coachella was great. It’s a very well organized festival.  I very much got the impression that nobody really knew who the hell we were. … That really makes for the best audience.  We have to work very hard and win people over.  Not just play for fans as it were.  I always think that’s a test of a good band.  That’s the thing I like about festivals.  It’s not like playing club dates or a tour of your home.  There’s … other stuff [at festivals] people can go and see.  But the mere fact that they come to your stage to see you, I think if you can keep them there for the entire set, that says a lot about the band. I think we managed that.

Performing now, what kind of audiences are you seeing?

It can be anything from 50-year-old people all the way down to 16.  There’s a lot to be said about hipster kids and their tastes in music.  I love them dearly. Obviously there is a range age, maybe 35 to 45, which is the core audience.  They were about 10 or 12 when we were around the first time.  They’re very much reliving, in a way, their youth, what was good about their youth.

There are young kids there as well. I really like that because they see something in the band that’s good for them, I guess. When you look at young people these days they have this whole kind of smorgasbord out there.  They can listen to anything at any time.  They can cherry-pick whatever they want, which was denied people of my generation.  We had to rely on what was in the Top of the Pops or [music] from our brothers’ and sisters’ record collections. I feel that young kids are very sophisticated now in their tastes, so it’s a complete honor to be able to play for them at our age.

What were you listening to when you were growing up?

I was listening, [at] 10, 12 years [to] Stevie Wonder.  Anything Motown, I just thought was brilliant.  As it kind of progressed from there, I started listening to people like Bob Dylan.

So you were untouched by the metal scene while growing up?

Do I look like someone who would be into metal [laughs]?

No, but we’re talking about when you were younger, a time when Led Zeppelin was one of the biggest bands on the planet.

I had an afro.  I’ve never really been into metal.  Some of the more melodic punk and stuff like that, I really like. I’ve always been into sourcing female singers.  I grew up with a whole load of really great female singers like Buffy Sainte-Marie, Joni Mitchell, Julie Felix, all those kind of people. That’s really how I started out, accompanying myself on guitar. … I was more into the folk scene, sort of protest music.

Do you see some of the kids coming to your shows as ones who will form bands themselves, and further 2 Tone ska?

I would hope so.  I don’t see any reason why not.  One thing for keeping ska around is because [it] isn’t even listed as a genre if you look at things like Spotify and iTunes.  It’s kind of lumped in with reggae.  There’s nothing kind of wrong with that, in a sense.  Under “rock music” there’s a whole lot of indie, alternative, metal and all these different genres.  [But] I don’t see why ska can’t be seen as a relevant genre in its own right. There are a lot of bands out there, even young people today performing in bands, listening to us in the same way as we listened to [acts] like Prince Buster and The Skatalites … from the era 20 years before us. Therefore it kind of passes on.

What I like to see is young bands eclectically taking from various genres and doing a mash-up of it.  Because that’s pretty much what we did. We put together punk and reggae, a bit of ska, a bit of soul … and fashioned something that was essentially for us.  The Selecter version of 2 Tone.  The Specials had a different mash-up.  Madness had a different mashup.

You released your memoir, “Black By Design,” a few years ago.  Did you see similarities in the book’s release compared to releasing music?

[Publishing] is totally different.  It’s nothing at all like the music business. Publishers generally are very kind of straight, sort of frosty kind of people who have liberal leanings.  One has to negotiate that whole kind of thing.

I was very lucky because the publisher who took my memoir worked for an imprint called “Serpent’s Tale” and he was a bit of a punk in his youth.  He was very eager to get the 2 Tone experience from, not just a female point of view, but a black female point of view. Anything that has been written about 2 Tone, either from a biographical point of view or from an outsider’s point of view, has been written by white males. … It isn’t really even a question of being from a black perspective.  It’s from a mixed race perspective.  Somebody who was searching for her identity and had been displaced out of what their society may have been, into another.  Therefore, they were able, with a black skin, to eavesdrop through most of their childhood of what white folks did.  A lot of that influenced me, my life and the reason I joined 2 Tone or thought 2 Tone would be a very, very good fit for me.  That led to how the book pans out and finding my real parents.  In that way, to find my identity.

About what you said about viewpoints coming from “white males:” Why do you think that is the case?

Most of the narrative of history is from that perspective.  I think I’m correct in saying that.  So why should music be any different?  Even if it is different these days, which I believe there’s certainly more people paying attention to what women say … women are marginalized, largely. … It’s usually a male narrative, isn’t it?  It’s very, very rare that it is the other way.  That’s what you’re up against. That’s what you live with.  All you can do is tell your story at the end of the day.

The first track on the latest album, String Theory, begins with a 2 Tone take on the theme show to the 1960s Avengers TV show.  Who’s The Avengers fan in the band?

[laughs] I think we’re all of a certain age, so we’re all Avengers fans. … I feel very much that we’re out there kind of on a mission.  We feel very much, like The Avengers, as it were.  We’re trying to put our stamp back on what we feel may have been lost as to how people see 2 Tone or ska music, the origins of it.  Back into the mix, I guess.  But just not back into the mix of, “Hey!  We did this 30 years ago.  This album sold-out, it was called Too Much Pressure.”  We put it back into the mix and say, “Yeah, we did that, but we’re doing this now and we think we have a future.”

Then you have the album’s title – String Theory.  You don’t see many albums that bundle the theme to a 1960s TV spy show with particle physics.

You probably don’t get that all that much.  It was a progression.  The album we put out in 2012 was Made In Britain.  On that album we wanted to make a dialogue about what multiculturalism meant, what it meant to us.  We felt that there had been a shift in society, that it wasn’t just a straight black-white thing anymore.  There were lots of different shades within that. … We felt if we didn’t mention that on an album or do songs that made some nod towards that, we were actually doing a disservice to the audience and fans.

We kind of messed around with that title in our heads for a while.  But it’s like there is a string which connects us to our past and we’re following it, but it’s attached to all these other things and other people.  It’s this web of humanity is what we’re talking about with this string thing.  With String Theory we boil that down, we’re all made of the same stuff.  It actually goes beyond multiculturalism, it goes beyond any kind of anti-racist stance.  It’s really saying humanity is made of the same stuff. You either like it or don’t like it.

Race relations, multiculturalism – do you think we’re improving?

I do. I think we have to trust that we are improving. I know when you look around the world and there are wars everywhere … people aren’t getting on, they’re not doing this, doing that – but there are so many positives.  I’m 60 this year and the things I have seen in my lifetime, the end of apartheid … to what we have in America now with Obama, a mixed-race president, the most powerful man in the world.  Sometimes I have to pinch myself and think, “How did that happen?”

Those are all forward-thinking things.  But, at the same time, things regress as well.  There’s an idiot in Russia who thinks any dialogue with gay people is going to be suppressed. At the same time there’s a whole bunch of people in America who think same-sex marriage is a bad thing.

Again, it comes back to the string. It’s being pulled and pushed and pulled and pushed.  Just like a tug of war.

Has life been good for Pauline Black?

I guess it’s how you measure what is good.  If you measure it in terms of, am I on my sixth mansion, it’s probably been absolutely appalling.

I am just amazed I am still here, for one thing.  I am still functioning as an artist in a lot of different ways.  I’m still knocked out that I put a book out and people took some notice of it.  And we can still put some albums out and some people take notice. … I think life has been good.

What could you tell a young female singer/songwriter just beginning her career?

I think the main advice is to stay true to yourself.  There’s a reason why you want to step onto a stage. Find the reason … and that reason will somewhere lay in what you want to say.  And remember that when you’re saying it, particularly these days with Facebook and all this social networking, you’re basically saying it to the world.  Make sure that message you put out there is of your devising, not somebody else’s.  And certainly not Simon Cowell’s.

Upcoming shows for The Selecter:

Sept. 13 – Minneapolis, Minn., Cedar Cultural Center
Sept. 14 – Chicago, Ill., Humboldt Park (Riot Fest)
Sept. 16 – London, Ontario, Call The Office
Sept. 17 – Toronto, Ontario, Lee’s Palace
Sept. 18 – Waterloo, Ontario,  Starlight Social Club
Sept. 19 – Philadelphia, Pa., Trocadero Theatre
Sept. 20 – New York, N.Y., The Gramercy Theatre
Sept. 21 – Boston, Mass., Paradise Rock Club
Sept. 22 – Falls Church, Va., The State Theatre
Sept. 26 – Rome, Italy, Angelo Mai
Sept. 27 – Bologna, Italy, Labcrash
Sept. 28 – Milan, Italy, Bloom Club
Oct. 12 – Bristol, England, O2 Academy Bristol (with Public Image Ltd.)
Oct. 13 – Bournmouth, England, O2 Academy (with Public Image Ltd.)
Oct. 16 – Liverpool, England, O2 Academy Liverpool (with Public Image Ltd.)
Oct. 17 – Leeds, England, O2 Academy Leeds (with Public Image Ltd.)
Oct. 18 – Glasgow, Scotland, O2 Academy Glasgow (with Public Image Ltd.)
Oct. 20 – Birmingham, England, O2 Academy Birmingham (with Public Image Ltd.)
Oct. 21 – London, England, O2 Shepherds Bush Empire (with Public Image Ltd.)
Nov. 14 – Goes, Netherlands, ‘T Beest
Nov. 15 – Hengelo, Netherlands, Metropol
Nov. 16 – Arnhem, Netherlands, Luxor Live

Please visit TheSelecter.net for more information.