Pauline Black was born Belinda Magnus in Romford, Essex in 1953 to an Anglo-Jewish teenage mother and Nigerian father. Adopted by a white couple, she was given the name Pauline Vickers. After leaving school she studied biochemistry at Lanchester Polytechnic (now Coventry University) before training as a radiographer, working for the NHS for a spell before her life changed beyond recognition.
Black, who took that stage name partly as a reaction to her upbringing, was a founding member of the ska band The Selecter, who came together in Coventry in 1979. They became one of the iconic local label 2-Tone’s biggest bands, scoring a string of hits including On My Radio, Too Much Pressure and Missing Words.
The band split in 1982 but have reformed sporadically since 1994. Pauline Black has also undertaken other musical ventures, such as guesting with Gorillaz on their Humanz world tour of 2017/2018. She has also had a notable TV and acting career, co-hosting the 80s kids TV show Hold Tight! and appearing in The Bill, Hollyoaks and winning the Time Out award for Best Actress in 1991 for her portrayal of Billie Holliday in the play All or Nothing at All. She was awarded an OBE in 2022 for services to entertainment and made a deputy lieutenant of the West Midlands the same year.
Speaking to the Big Issue for her Letter to My Younger Self, Pauline Black recalls her eventful upbringing and how she ended up becoming a British music icon.
My main preoccupation at 16 was finding some other people that looked like myself. I grew up in Romford in Essex, and Black people in those days were as rare as hens’ teeth. I was the only Black pupil in the school, and I was just desperate to get out. And I could see all the things that were going on in America with the civil rights movement. I think I just wanted to be Marsha Hunt. She was appearing in Hair in the West End at that time. I was trying my best to look as though I had an enormous afro.
Ours wasn’t a close-knit family. I was brought up in a white family. So immediately I was on the outside. And they held the casually racist kind of views which most white people at that time held. So they would complain about having a Black doctor or just generally seeing Black people. They were in their mid-40s and they heard there were some children available for adoption in a place in Braintree. But white children weren’t available. They met me, a poor child with no parents. I’d end up in an orphanage if I didn’t find a family.
1980: Performing with The Selecter on a 2-Tone tour. Image: Virginia Turbett / Redferns
Taking a Black baby in is a very different thing to a Black family moving in next door to you. They weren’t racist towards me – people are rarely so direct, are they? But I had an uncle who thought that Enoch Powell was the way to go.
I think I was quite a lonely kid. I didn’t really take it on board as that at the time. I didn’t have loads and loads of friends, though I did have one particular friend I went through school with. But mostly I kept myself to myself, and I lived in a world full of books. I read everything around for a girl growing up at that time, books like Little Women, books that had absolutely nothing to do with me. I liked science fiction too. By the time I was 16, I was probably onto Jane Austen. I think I did like Pride and Prejudice rather a lot. But again, to a little Black girl growing up in Romford, that was about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
I think if you met the teenage me, I would be fairly guarded. I was always guarded as a kid. I wasn’t very forthcoming. I was very opinionated, but that’s a different thing. You might think that the things that I was into weren’t the regular things 16-year-olds were into. I was looking at what Dr Martin Luther King was doing in America, looking at what Malcolm X was doing, and finding a common currency with all those kinds of things, searching out anything I could about Black people.
2015: On stage with Arthur Hendrickson at the Royal Albert Hall performing with Jools Holland. Image: Christie Goodwin / Redferns
I never thought that I’d have a career in music. I’d read John Wyndham’s Trouble with Lichen and the main protagonist was a woman, and she was a biochemist. And I thought, wow, a female biochemist. That’ll do for me. So by the time I got to Coventry, that’s what I wanted to be. I had no notion about becoming a musician. That happened much later. In the end I dropped out of my biochemistry course after two years because I just knew that life pushing test tubes was not for me. So I trained to become a radiographer. I trained for three years, and I worked for three or four years in the NHS, and then I joined [2-Tone band] The Selecter.
I’d been playing guitar around folk clubs in Coventry, doing some of my own stuff. And a bit of Joan Armatrading, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan. I remember a gig when I was paid £10, and I did 10 songs. I thought, a quid a song, that’s quite good. And at that particular gig, I met a friend who I would then go on to write songs with. He was doing a course at Warwick University. He was really the first Black person that I met in Coventry that introduced me to other music that I hadn’t really heard about.
I got to know everybody who was in The Selecter through him. We tried to start a reggae band. Then I met Neol Davies, who wanted to form a band that was going up the chart, so I ended up as the lead singer of that.
Was it brave to take the leap from my job in the NHS? No. That’s the thing about me. If I’m going to do something, I do it, and I don’t really listen to what anyone might have to say. Everybody was saying to me, you don’t know what’s going to happen. Blah, blah, blah. But if you’re given a chance to do something you’re very passionate about, just take it and run with it. And I’ve always done that. Listening to other people would just mess your head up. Somebody’s always going to tell you that you should do this, or you should do that. The thing to do is trust your own innate spirit. If you love being on a stage, then you’re a performer. If you don’t love being on a stage, then don’t even try it, because it’s not really something you grow into. You can either do it or you can’t do it.
2024: At the BFI London Film Festival. Image: Tristan Fewings / Getty
If your first single [On My Radio] goes to number eight in the charts, and you’re on tour with Madness and The Specials, you quickly think you must have made the right decision. We did 40 dates in the autumn of 1979 and then people wanted us to go to America as well. So I just thought, I’m not going back to my day job, I’m going to make this work. I always loved being on stage. It’s a place where I feel naturally myself, completely.
Back in 1979 there weren’t many Black people in the media at all. And the kind of stereotype they had of Black women, particularly singers, was you were either the angry young woman, or you were this very cool, chic woman. There wasn’t really much in between. I was fairly opinionated, and I was quite happy to tell people what I thought about the society that I lived in, and be an advocate for 2-Tone as well. That must have come across as a bit brazen. But Black men were being hoisted off to the police station just for hanging around street corners. That was the kind of thing that was going on at that time. So there was plenty to be angry about.
If I could go back to any time I think I would go back to last year. Blur asked us to support them at Wembley. I mean, there is probably no other way that I could play Wembley Stadium. To be asked by them was great, because I had worked with Damon Albarn in Gorillaz, so that relationship was there, but it was just such a fantastic opportunity. Paul Weller was on the same bill as well as Blur so there were my favourites from different generations.
If I could have one last conversation with anyone it would be with my fellow performer Arthur Hendrickson, who has just passed with cancer. Unfortunately, we were in America when he died, and when he was on his deathbed I was trying to talk to him transatlantic, and I didn’t know whether he could hear me or not. And I was just telling him that I really loved him, and I was just so sorry about what had happened.
Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story is showing at various locations around the UK as part of the Doc’n Roll Festival until 4 December. The documentary will also be screening on Sky Arts early in the new year
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