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As the ska band release a new album, their formidable frontwoman talks candidly about the heyday of 2 Tone, doing battle with men and microaggressions, and finding her birth mother at 42“I like,” says Pauline Black, “to be mistress of my own shit.” It’s an admirable approach to life; also a sensible one, when you’ve had a life as varied as Black’s. Though she’s known as the singer in the Selecter, the Coventry 2 Tone band who gave us On My Radio and Three Minute Hero, Black has actually had many working lives. A quick CV: she started off as a hospital radiographer, before quitting in 1979 when the Selecter took off. Three years later, when the band split, she became a TV presenter, moving between kids’ telly (Granada TV’s Hold Tight!) and Black on Black, Channel 4’s British black magazine show. Then: an actor, winning Time Out’s best actress in 1991 for her stage portrayal of Billie Holiday. She found acting interesting, and liked “the discipline”, but got “fed up” with the lack of control. “I spent 10 years acting. Once I went back to music, I was happy. I don’t like being directed.”So, on and off for the past three decades, Black has been mistress of her most natural, joy-giving role: as singer, songwriter and frontperson of the Selecter. For the young’uns: the Selecter were one of the founding bands of 2 Tone, the multi-racial ska-punk-rocksteady independent record label set up by the Specials’ Jerry Dammers in the late 1970s (others included the Specials, Madness, the Beat, the Bodysnatchers). They were the blackest band on the roster, plus the only one with both a male and female frontperson, Arthur “Gaps” Hendrickson smooth skanking alongside Black’s peppy fire. Continue reading...