‘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.”)
