Black by Design

by Pauline Black

  It was draining work, but I enjoyed the responsibility. Armed with a new resolve, I decided to further my studies with hospital work in mind. In those days, I was over-qualified for nursing, but a friendly staff nurse suggested that I try a vocational course like radiography or physiotherapy. I took her advice and applied to Coventry School of Radiography. After a lengthy interview, I was accepted. I began my course in September 1973. I had been in Coventry for two years.

  Perhaps I should have given the future course of my life more serious thought. Suffice to say that I hadn’t. Would it have made any difference back then? I doubt it. Radiography suited me. It was practically based with an easily assimilated theory, plus I got paid while studying. It was hard work, but a thoroughly good training. For the first time in a long time, I had to be disciplined. Work began at 9 a.m. sharp every weekday. More importantly, I worked in a variety of hospitals with other black people, many Caribbean nurses, Ugandan and Kenyan Asian technicians, and Nigerian or Egyptian doctors. I belonged.

  I was walking to work one morning, not long after I started my new job, when I saw a lost glove lying on the pavement. It looked so lonely. I knew it would remain there until either the owner found it again or, more than likely, a road sweeper deposited it in a dustcart, before its final journey to the local tip. Suddenly tears pricked my eyes. In that moment I remembered how I had felt so abruptly and hopelessly abandoned after Ken had died – just like the glove.

  Graduation day as a fully fledged radiographer, summer 1976

  Terry had been in a similar situation after relocating to Coventry, having been made redundant from the draughtsman’s job that he had loved, staring at the job scrap heap – just another lost glove. By chance we had found each other. Together we made a pair, albeit mismatched, but who said that was important? After all, the primary function of a pair of gloves is to keep the hands warm in cold weather. We have been keeping each other warm for the past thirty-eight years.

  FIVE

  ‘DO YOU WANNA BE IN MY GANG?’

  My singing career began in 1976, a few months after my adoptive dad died of lung cancer. His death was no great surprise. He had smoked an ounce of Old Holborn a day in Rizla’d rollies for most of his adult life. Let’s face it, eventually that’s going to kill you.

  Ever since I knew him, a skinny rollie would be clamped in the left-hand side of his mouth, in a ready prepared groove in his lip, which had an unsightly slick of tar adhering to it most of the time. Each cigarette pushed the tar further and further into his airways until it caused an abnormal cell to reproduce. Within six months these cells had spread all over his body, including his brain. Nonetheless, he invariably had a smile on his face, even though his sense of reality was severely warped due to all the morphine he was given. He once told me, with a giggle in his voice, that the Tiller Girls had just got out of the television during a popular Saturday night family entertainment programme and danced round his bedroom. It was good to hear this flight of fancy because I knew someone was still at home in his shrunken head and emaciated body. Eventually his skin and bones clung to life by a yellowed fingernail. Soon he was gone. I missed him desperately. He had always been there for me, unconditionally. Nobody could replace that kind of love.

  After the funeral my mother moved into sheltered accommodation because she said that the family house reminded her too much of Dad. I returned to Coventry and poured my grief into my new hobby, singing.

  Terry and I had been together for four years when my dad died. At first, we had rented a tiny detached bungalow in Kenilworth, near Leamington Spa. The layout comprised a quarry-tiled corridor with five rooms leading from it: two bedrooms, a sparsely furnished living room at the front of the house and a large, ill-equipped kitchen and tiny shower room at the back.

  Among Terry’s meagre belongings was a Spanish guitar that lay neglected in a cardboard box in the front room. His intention was to learn to play it. He had bought a ‘Play In A Day’ manual, but at the age of thirty-eight, he lacked the perseverance required to master a musical instrument. I, on the other hand, with the over-arching chutzpah of youth, taught myself to play in a few weeks. Before I knew it I could sing and play most of Leonard Cohen’s Songbook. You can tell I was depressed.

  All I wanted at this point in my life was normality. Living with Terry provided it. He taught me a work ethic. He was a member of the Socialist Labour League when I met him. By the time I joined it had become the Workers Revolutionary Party.

  Together we formed a branch of the organization in Leamington Spa. If you know this town, then you will realize that bringing Marxist politics to the attention of the masses in this spa idyll was a tough call. We valiantly aligned ourselves with folk who were getting community-based projects together in the Bath Place area of town, but our branch never amounted to many more than six people trying to sell the Workers Press, our daily paper, outside the Potterton factory when the shift changed in the early morning or organizing Young Socialist discos and five-a-side football matches every week. Needless to say, it was a hard slog. I valiantly threw myself into learning about Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky but, if I’m honest, I was still more concerned with solving the black-white divide in society than I was with workers’ power.

  Just as the party membership began to wane in Leamington, our landlady asked us to move to a house that she owned in Earlsdon, Coventry. We were glad to be back in the city, because the daily commute to work was a strain and Kenilworth was an unfriendly place to live as a mixed-race couple. If we went for a drink in a pub, our arrival could cause a lengthy silence among the punters until we had been served. Coventry pubs were much more forgiving. As a bit of light relief from our political rigours, Terry and I recharged our batteries at our new local every Sunday afternoon and evening.

  The Old Dyers Arms in Spon End was run by Mavis, ably assisted by her long-suffering husband Barry. Mavis was a Yorkshirewoman of ample girth, whose backcombed beehive stood up as proud as the foam head on her pints. She ruled her clientele with an iron fist and pulled the pints with the muscular dexterity of a wrestler, but most of all she was fun. Mavis and Barry were an entertaining double act, just like the sitcom characters George and Mildred.

  Often a couple of the Fureys, a famous radical Irish band, would turn up in the back room for the Sunday afternoon folk session and wow everybody with their pro-republican songs. Mavis always allowed a drinking ‘stayback’ when they played, because invariably the room would be heaving with Guinness drinkers, which meant more money in her till. It was an exciting place to be in the mid-’70s.

  The bloke who ran the backroom folk club was Dave Bennett. He was an excellent guitar player, with a penchant for John Martyn songs. During one Sunday evening session, he asked his girlfriend, who sported a blonde, pudding-bowl hairdo reminiscent of comedienne Victoria Wood, to sing. She chose a Donovan song, ‘Yellow is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair’. As soon as she began, I knew I could sing as well as her, if not better. The blokes in the pub lapped it up. I decided then and there that the following week I would attempt a song at the Sunday afternoon session. Probably a surfeit of bitter shandy influenced my decision. I spent the following week practising singing while accompanying myself on guitar. Terry wasn’t too happy about my decision to perform, but I ignored him.

  The first song I sang in public was Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowing in the Wind’. I had typed the words out on a piece of paper and written in the relevant guitar chord changes. My hands shook and my voice wobbled for the opening stanzas, but then I just forgot that the audience was there and performed. I loved it. Polite applause greeted my rendition, but I could see that I’d impressed Dave Bennett and Terry. I didn’t much care about the others in the room.

  The following week I turned up to the session again. Dave Bennett smiled knowingly at me and said: ‘Bang one out, Pauline.’

  I’d chosen Bob Dylan’s ‘Girl from the North Country’, complete with complicated finger picking. Dave winked at me after I’d fi
nished and said the immortal words: ‘Yeah, you can stay.’

  My musical career began with those four words.

  Soon after my debut, I got to know another male singer who had an anarchic streak to his performance that I found captivating. His name was Tim Crowe. His after-hours party piece was a mean version of ‘Brown Sugar’; little did I know that he was also smoking it. Tim had an idiosyncratic style of playing and singing that was beautiful to listen to. He had that knack of the best performers, the unique ability to take a song and make it their own. His version of ‘Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat’ easily rivalled that of Dylan. I liked him. He was a maverick. Musically we supported each other. Sometimes he became so raucous that he would get thrown out of the pub. On those occasions I would leave too in solidarity and take him back to our house, where we would sit up half the night rolling joints, drinking Terry’s home-made wine and singing and playing guitar. Terry would record everything we did on an old Akai reel-to-reel machine.

  Unfortunately, Tim was an uncompromising fellow and within a few short years died of cirrhosis of the liver in Walsgrave Hospital. I only found out about his demise much later. I left him behind, as I did many others, but he is often in my thoughts. I knew nothing about his personal life, just his music. I don’t even know where he is buried.

  By the end of 1977, I outgrew the Dyers Arms. I was offered a gig in a folk club at The Golden Cup on Far Gosford Street. They needed a support act quickly, because somebody else had cancelled. I think I was chosen out of desperation, because nobody else was available. I wasn’t sure what was expected of me, until the guy who ran the evening and booked the acts said that ten songs would be enough and would I accept £10 for the performance? Ten songs! For ten pounds! A pound a song, what a result.

  Ever the optimist, I dug out my songbook and settled on my first set list: a few of mine, a couple of Joni Mitchell, some Bob Dylan and some Joan Armatrading. Most of them were far beyond my capabilities, but I carried on, oblivious to any technical deficiencies that I had.

  Singing in the Old Dyers Arms, Spon End, 1978

  My self-confidence knew no bounds. I led a double life. By day I was mild-mannered Pauline, the hospital radiographer, in a fetching white uniform and matching clogs, and by night I was Pauline the singer/guitarist, clad in a yellow linen shirt and brown corduroy dungarees, performing at any folk club that gave me a gig. I didn’t try too hard to be anything very much. I just enjoyed myself.

  I can’t remember exactly how that first gig went, mainly because I was so nervous. There wasn’t any PA system, so no enhancement was offered to my vocals or guitar playing. About thirty people sat quietly and dutifully applauded when I finished each song. What I hadn’t reckoned on was what you’re meant to say between songs during the set. I had never played a whole set before. I had been so intent on rehearsing the songs that I had forgotten about how I was going to introduce them. The slick patter of a professional was replaced with innumerable ‘ums’ and ‘aahs’, while every introduction began with the words: ‘This song is about…’ I remember wishing that I had taken more notice of an old stalwart folkie who had once advised me after a performance: ‘You should learn a few jokes, lovey, breaks the ice.’

  Probably my novice level of stagecraft became very monotonous after the third song. But if it did nobody complained. To be honest, the audience was waiting for the main attraction, the rather more famous singer/guitarist Bert Jansch.

  The pièce de résistance of my set was a bleak, self-penned song entitled ‘A Whore’s Life’, about the dreadful spate of killings in and around Bradford, perpetrated by a man dubbed ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’. At the time, the killer’s name was unknown. The song was written from the perspective of a young prostitute on the streets and dealt with the fear she felt every night.

  In Bradford City, on the wrong side of town

  Mary used to be pretty, when she first came around

  Now she’s waiting for the man with the knife

  Waiting to be reborn.

  Macabre indeed.

  As I was packing away my guitar, a young, bespectacled, clean-cut black man bearing a strong resemblance to Malcolm X approached me. He shook my hand and said that he had enjoyed my performance. His name was Lawton Brown, and he was a politics student at Warwick University.

  He must have impressed me because we instantly fell into a discussion about music, our likes and dislikes, and then on to the much thornier subject, black politics. He liked the fact that I had tried out a couple of my own songs, which were even then about the dispossessed: young mums, prostitutes and dead black people. I pricked up my ears when he told me that he was a guitarist and songwriter too. He wanted to know if I had listened to much reggae music?

  Performing in the downstairs bar at Lanchester Poly

  I’d listened to a few Bob Marley albums at a friend’s house, but I thought that was probably too mainstream for his more sophisticated and knowledgeable tastes. So I said no. He looked surprised and suggested that I needed an immediate black musical education. I agreed. He invited me round to his flat the following day. In retrospect I think he was just chatting me up, but I took him at his word and, much to his amazement, turned up on his doorstep the following evening.

  He played me Third World’s legendary album 96 Degrees in the Shade. The only other sound in the room was the gentle rustle of Rizla papers as he built one spliff after another with generous amounts of Sensimilla. Until then I’d only smoked Moroccan or Afghan Black. Sensi was an altogether much more enlightening, almost mystical experience. There was no need for conversation, because the song lyrics spoke for us.

  Next he played Bunny Wailer’s Blackheart Man, then Culture’s Two Sevens Clash. This music was special. Conscious lyrics coupled with righteous music. What a combination. Lastly, he played his trump card, a tape recording of the Last Poets’ ‘Wake Up Niggers’. This tension-filled rhythmic rap artfully used rhyming couplets to describe the inner-city predicament of blacks, imploring them to ‘stop drowning in the white man’s spit’. It is almost hip-hop, but preceded that particular music genre by more than a decade. The chanted refrain, ‘Wake Up Niggers or You’re All Through’, built in intensity as the song progressed, like an orgasm waiting to happen during particularly good sex. The relief I felt when it finished only made me want to hear it again. Lawton’s eyes twinkled behind his gold-rimmed glasses.

  ‘Who are they?’ I blurted out, eager to know who penned these kinds of lyrics. He patiently explained that the Last Poets were a group of American poets and musicians claiming to be black nationalists within the civil rights movement. Their name came from a poem by a South African revolutionary poet, Keorapetse Kgositsile, who believed he was in the last era of poetry before guns would take over. ‘An interesting concept,’ I replied. ‘Got any more?’

  From that moment on I was hooked. This music went way beyond the mere protest song. It was a clarion call to the uninitiated. An epiphany. ‘Wake up nigger!’ I silently told myself. I was eager to write songs as forthright as this.

  ‘Well, perhaps you can help me with this,’ Lawton responded, handing me a yellow sheet of lined paper with a few lines of lyrics written in his sprawling handwriting. ‘They use their fancy words to control your mind, but since I never did no elocution rhymes, made me think that everything they said was fine.’

  He played a few chords on his guitar and sang the words to show me the melody. Immediately we finished the verse and came up with a chorus. Before I left an hour later I’d written the words to a second verse and we had a complete song. Thus began our writing partnership. The song ‘They Make Me Mad’ later found its way onto the first Selecter album, Too Much Pressure.

  Lawton shared the house on the Foleshill Road, near the Wheatsheaf pub, with a short, stocky musician-cum-painter and decorator, ‘Aitch’, aka Charles Bembridge. It was a typical student house, a couple of bedsits with a communal bathroom and kitchen. The downstairs space was piled high with musical equipment and sound-sy
stem paraphernalia. The smell of spliff and sweaty socks pervaded the house.

  Lawton was my conduit into Coventry’s black community. He took me to see a show of Coventry’s premier reggae band, Hardtop 22, at Sydney Stringer School in Hillfields. I was surprised to see Aitch among the raggle-taggle bunch of musicians on stage. Lyrically they were hardly the Last Poets, but I enjoyed the relaxed sound they made.

  The bandleader, Charley Anderson, was the big cheese on the Coventry black music scene in those days. He was tall and rangy with a head full of red Rasta locks, which usually remained hidden beneath a variety of high-brimmed hats. He had obviously modelled his appearance on that of Bob Marley, but couldn’t yet produce the quality of his idol’s authentic Jamaican reggae sound, whose music was successfully spreading throughout Britain and the rest of the world. When Charley smiled it was like staring at rows of marble tombstones on a full moon.

  After a while, a band began to coalesce around our song-writing efforts. Aitch became interested in our songs, probably because he was forced to listen to us singing them every Sunday morning. Sometimes he would jam along with whatever instrument was to hand. He was a versatile musician and could play Hammond, bass and guitar, and offer sweet harmonies to any newly penned tune.