Black by Design

by Pauline Black

  Back in Coventry it was time to record. Jerry Dammers, in the wake of the enormous success of ‘Gangsters’, which peaked in the pop charts at No. 6 in July 1979, had signed the Specials to the Chrysalis record company. Ever a stickler for detail, he negotiated one of the best recording deals imaginable at the time. He’d asked for and been given his own label, 2-Tone, and the monetary facility to sign and record up to ten bands of his choice. Madness had been the first recipient of this deal. They had already recorded ‘The Prince’, a musical eulogy to the famed Prince Buster, one of the original luminaries of the Jamaican ska movement, and if Charley was to be believed, one of his long-lost cousins. Now it was our turn to record our debut single as a seven-piece band with the aid of a £1,000 recording budget from the 2-Tone label.

  Neol decided to use Roger Lomas, the same record producer who had helped him record his instrumental song ‘The Selecter’ in 1977 in a tiny four-track studio in Roger’s back garden shed on Broad Street, in Foleshill. Roger Lomas was now producing bands at Horizon studios, a converted stables adjacent to Coventry station, owned by local businessman/entrepreneur Barry Thomas.

  Horizon was a bitch of a studio for access. I lost count of how many times we risked serious back injury lugging our equipment up the vertiginous wooden staircase to get to the studio, poor Desmond with his enormous Hammond and a Leslie. That normally sorted out the men from the boys.

  Horizon housed a 16-track recording machine and mixing desk, not exactly state of the art, but a big improvement on Neol’s first recording excursion for The Selecter. Roger Lomas proved to be an easy-going, gnome-like man, with an interesting party trick of touching the end of his nose with his tongue. His long hair and penchant for form-fitting, flared jeans made him look as if he would be more at home producing a heavy metal album. But he was an excellent bloke who knew his onions when it came to the recording process. He really liked what we did, the foremost prerequisite of any producer. Otherwise you just get an off-the-peg production sound from a jobbing hack who doesn’t give a damn about your music and is just using your money to get himself into a good studio and get his mates in to play overdubs.

  He used an in-house studio engineer, Kim Holmes, and tape-op, Moose. All of them were used to working late, late hours in the studio. We recorded three songs, ‘Street Feeling’, ‘Too Much Pressure’ and ‘On My Radio’ over a three-day period. Most days we were in the studio until the sun came up.

  It was my first time in a studio. I thought that music was recorded with everybody in the room just as you performed it live, but straight on to tape. I did not know about the wonderful process called ‘overdubbing’, which allowed a musician to put his part on separately. Each instrument was independently miked up so that if a mistake was made during the process of the recording, then it could be repaired at a later date. Therefore a song could be orchestrated and a proper arrangement decided upon.

  This was a phenomenally quick learning curve. Initially the band records their individual instruments onto a backing track. In order for the musicians to know where they are in a song, the vocalist is expected to provide a ‘guide vocal’. Often, the band takes an inordinate amount of time to get the backing track down, so that the poor vocalist is hoarse by the time they come to put down their lead vocal overdub. And usually things have to be done in a hurry, especially if you are a novice band on a tight budget. As soon as you enter a studio, the clock is ticking and time means money. We had only three days to record, arrange and mix three songs. Crazy times.

  Roger was incredibly patient and helpful. He realised that I didn’t know about studios and helped me double-track my vocal to give the sound depth. He also came up with the idea of doing the chorus response ‘On My Radio’ in a falsetto voice. Magic: this and the odd-time signature of the bridge section was enough to lift an ordinary song into a classic one.

  His only problem was that he had a ‘catchphrase’. Just like Bruce Forsyth has ‘Nice to see you, to see you nice’, Roger’s was to give you a thumbs-up on greeting while innocently saying: ‘All right Boy’.

  To those of a nervous disposition, which meant any black person in a white person’s company in those days, this was tantamount to a red rag to a bull. The word ‘Boy’ is a hangover expression from slave times when applied to a black man. Back then and even in the civil rights years, it didn’t matter how old the ‘Boy’ in question was, it could be a young man or an old man, they were both addressed in the same derogatory way. It wasn’t nearly as bad as being called ‘nigger’, but not that far off.

  At first I didn’t notice it. I just accepted that it was one of Roger’s conversational tics; annoying but certainly not meant in any kind of racial manner. Roger liked the band and was putting his heart and soul into the recording process, so how could he be construed as a racist? However, there were more sensitive souls in the band than Neol and me. The former Hardtop 22 faction had taken real offence at this greeting. They didn’t realise or certainly could not be convinced that there wasn’t some kind of distinct racist overtone to this catchphrase. Gaps often sang ‘Simmer Down’ under his breath whenever the phrase was heard.

  Therefore a deep resentment was forged towards Roger, which rumbled under the surface for many months. Later this catchphrase would lead us to make the worst decision of our short-lived career. But that was still a way off.

  On 26 August, the day after liberation from the confines of Horizon studios, I was standing on the Lanchester Poly stage giving it big time to the packed house of students that had assembled for the Specials’ triumphant homecoming gig. Even a large posse of ‘townies’ had wisely been allowed in, otherwise they would probably have caused a riot outside – 2-Tone, they seemed to be saying, belonged to the whole of Coventry, not just to a bunch of work-shy students. We were in support, but I was on cloud nine. Here I was seven years later in the Main Hall again, not sweating over exam papers or watching a famous band passing through on tour, no – I was in a band on the verge of breaking through into the big-time. As Batman would have said, if he could have seen into the future: ‘Poor, deluded girl!’

  I didn’t care, this was the best delusion that I’d ever had, particularly when it was topped off the following day by our first gig at the Lyceum, in London, supporting mod-revivalist band Secret Affair and fellow Coventry girl-made-good, Hazel O’Connor.

  With the gig coverage in the local newspaper, all pretence of illness was over. I took the only step left open to me, I paid one last visit to the radiography department at Walsgrave Hospital to tender my resignation to the Superintendent Radiographer and to clear out my locker and say goodbye to some close colleagues. Far from being an embarrassing admission, my seemingly successful career change was met with interest and delight and much well-wishing for the future, even from some of the old stalwart doctors that worked in the department. I almost felt guilty that my subterfuge had gone on for so long. As I jauntily walked out of the hospital, my footsteps faltered as I suddenly realized that my future was now unpredictable. I’d left behind the surety of steady, plodding promotion in a good, worthwhile job, for the mercurial dizziness of supposed fame and perhaps fortune. I resolved then and there that I would have to make my new life work come what may, because there was no way that I wanted to re-enter those hospital doors and have to ignominiously beg for my old job back.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. We had a pivotal gig to do – a return to the F Club in Leeds, but this time as a fully fledged recording band with an identifiable image, an aggressive ‘take no prisoners’ attitude and a hastily forged pedigree in the dance halls of England. And what’s more, headlining. The rider was fabulous.

  The gig sounded and looked almost professional. Our set was now paced properly and worked to a crescendo for the last song, ‘Too Much Pressure’, in which we had initiated a splendid piece of theatricality. Mid-song we all had a mock fight in the centre of the stage. Strobe lighting added to its visual impact. Recently, there had been an escalation of troubl
e at some of our gigs. The Specials also suffered a similar plight at their shows. We had begun to be targeted by some members of the extreme right NF Party, who hid among the skinhead fraternity. Regularly, these fascist elements came to gigs to cause trouble. They would deliberately start fights with other members of the audience, or orchestrate repeated shouts of ‘Sieg Heil’ at the stage when we were performing, accompanied by raised right arms in the all-too-familiar Nazi salute. At first this behaviour happened sporadically, but gradually it increased in frequency and ferocity. We hoped our ‘mock fight’ would demonstrate to the audience that the business of fighting looked horrible and was ultimately futile in settling problems. It worked for a while. Audiences were shocked. The fighting was kept under control.

  We played a gig in Bristol on 29 September in Trinity Hall, an old church hall youth club, just before embarking on the 2-Tone tour. ‘On My Radio’ had just been released and the reviews for the single were brilliant. Everybody in the band was feeling good.

  The evening started out well, despite Trinity Hall being a cavernous, depressing meeting place overlooked by a new redbrick fortress, the local cop shop. The soundcheck was late, because the PA equipment arrived late and took ages to set up by the owner. A reggae/ska disco tried to take up the slack when the punters were let in early, despite the soundcheck not having finished. We all stomped unceremoniously off the stage. We were already acting like prima donnas and we had only been gigging for three months. Gaps and I had an interview to do, so we accompanied the journalist to a pub around the corner from the police station. As soon as we walked in, the landlady looked at us and pronounced audibly within the pub: ‘No, not in here.’

  A swift glance around the place showed me what she meant. No blacks in here. We could have argued it out with her, but who would have wanted to drink in the damn place after a reception like that. The landlady’s reaction had soured the evening and the mood swiftly went downhill. Gaps and I were simmering with anger and we probably off-loaded quite a lot of this on to the interviewer. We decided to return to the venue and carry on the interview in a backstage corridor, but just as we settled into chairs to chat about how well things were going with the band, five young blokes making a sharp exit saw us and begged sanctuary in the relative safety of our dressing room. They told us that a gang of Mods had tried to set on them for no reason at all. We let them hang out for a while, then they filtered back into the crowd, honour still intact.

  We resumed the interview, only to be angrily interrupted by a harassed promoter, who had obviously bitten off more than he could chew when he decided to book a 2-Tone band. ‘If you don’t get out there now, there ain’t gonna be no gig. It’s getting charged out there,’ he shouted, a look of abject terror on his face.

  He was right. We began the gig and the infectious sound of the music soothed the growing tensions between the different factions for a while, but halfway through the set the dark mood crept back in. In a bid to acknowledge that there were different factions present, I greeted each of them, Mods, skinheads, punks.

  Immediately the Mods chanted in time-honoured fashion: ‘We are the Mods, we are the Mods, we are, we are, we are the Mods.’

  The ‘Army and Navy’ parka brigade made a lot of noise. The sound of 500 pairs of Doc Martens pounding the floor is deafening in a confined space. We played the music again, but a group of skinheads to the left of the stage lowered their braces to their waists and raised high a large Union Jack right in front of the audience. Gaps and I tried to ignore the triumphal flapping of the ‘Butcher’s Apron’, but the flag offered a focal point for the aggro that had simmered all evening. ‘Too Much Pressure’ stoked the fiery tension in the room with another ton of coal. We fervently hoped that the mock stage fight would act as a release valve, a catharsis, forcing the disruptive elements in the audience to confront their hostility. Unfortunately it didn’t have the desired effect; after the all-too-familiar stage invasion a small skirmish broke out and escalated like a forest fire finding dry tinder. The battle that everybody came for happened even though the music they had just danced to had the message of unity attached to it in capital letters.

  That was when I realized this wasn’t just about us spreading a ‘unity’ message, it was about us being caught up in the maelstrom of competing teenage tribal factions. Until recently such Lord of the Flies disputes had been bloodily settled on the football terraces, but 2-Tone had the misfortune to coincide with a police crackdown on the beautiful game’s crowd violence. Robbed of causing trouble in their usual territory, disruptive elements had found a natural home at our gigs. All we had to do was figure out a way to deal with such divisive monsters without being eaten alive. Since we were mostly black in our band, the resonances that played out in the larger society were reflected in our tiny microcosm. Some of it was very ugly. As usual, I was caught in the middle and forced to take sides.

  The Selecter’s main problem at this stage – although we didn’t see it as a problem – was that we were all so earnest about society’s ills. We wanted to write political songs about socially charged stuff. We were talking about the life on the street from a largely black perspective. The predominantly white audience that followed the Specials found it difficult to identify with us. The identifying markers were not there; there were too many blacks and, horror of horrors, a woman fronting the band.

  Acceptance and identification are two separate things. For a band to be really successful, a large section of the population has not only accept the message conveyed in their songs, but also identify with them. The listener has to want to be in their gang because basically we are all tribal in our youth. We never gave people, black or white, the chance to identify with us, or perhaps the ‘times’ were just not conducive to such a thing happening.

  The ‘sus’ law (the power to stop and search by the police, if they had ‘reasonable suspicion’) was enforced on the streets. This archaic, draconian law, based on the Vagrancy Act of 1824, meant that any young black person just walking on the street or standing on a street corner with others could be picked up and taken down to the police station, searched, questioned and generally harassed, until maybe one of them lost their rag and became abusive, whereupon the police would then arrest them for public disturbance or obstructing a police officer. This caused deep resentment and divisiveness in the black communities of Britain. It was a calculated operation. The police knew exactly what they were doing. The ‘divide and rule’ tactic is a favourite of the thugs of the Establishment.

  Insulated as I had been from the black population in Coventry before joining the band, I had nevertheless been picked up by two policewomen on my way to work at the radiography department in Coventry, and driven round to the employees’ entrance of a big local department store, where two people intently peered through the window at me and to my relief shook their heads and went back inside. Even though I was not the person sought, the policewomen hauled me down to the cop shop and interrogated me for two hours, asking me at great length where I had been on a particular day three weeks before, and for more personal information than I was prepared to divulge. When I procrastinated about this I was met with the usual police rejoinder: ‘If you’re not guilty of anything, then what do you have to worry about by telling us what we want to know?’

  Eventually they could see it was leading nowhere. They drove me back to work and had the audacity to explain everything to the superintendent of the X-Ray department, who was told that they were looking for a shoplifter and I fitted the description. Their definition of a description was any young black female. I was mad as hell on that day. This was my introduction to the ‘sus’ law.

  The idea of multiculturalism hadn’t yet been invented, so a general racism pervaded society. Coventry was a violent city. At that time, nothing united the tribal configurations of the youth more than the general unspoken policy of hating the blacks or newly arrived Indians and Pakistanis. All of us, including Neol, understood this implicitly. Our music tried to convey
it explicitly. At first we were clumsy with our message. In those early days, all the bands, us, the Specials and Madness were fiercely committed to an anti-racist stance. We had been pushed up out of the masses, not imposed by some corporate music bigwig who wanted to have a bash at this new ‘multiethnic’ look. We were the real deal.

  As much as racism mired the streets of Britain in 1979, sexism was rife in society too. The boiler-suited and monkey-booted feminist movement was making itself heard in Britain for the first time, much to the chagrin of Britain’s as yet unreconstructed men. Some of these ladies also beat a path to the door of the 2-Tone movement. Sometimes it felt as though we were speaking for all the disaffected youth in Britain. That was a heavy, heavy burden, particularly in Coventry, where jobs were scarce. Once the Motor City of England, by 1979 Coventry city centre was just a rundown, concrete urban sprawl, with a ring road that only seemed to help you find the M1 going south, something that many city dwellers suggested was the only good thing about Coventry. The 2-Tone movement gave many young Coventrians hope, where before there had been none. Perhaps naively, The Selecter and the Specials wanted to spend their musical careers highlighting these problems. Unfortunately, we were dragged into the ‘entertainment business’, which was seriously at odds with 2-Tone thinking.

  The next crucial item on The Selecter’s agenda was sorting out which record company we should sign to. ‘On My Radio’, which hadn’t been released yet, was recorded for the 2-Tone label, but it had turned out so well and our popularity was rising so swiftly that album deals with major labels were now a possibility. Arista and Chrysalis wanted us. One day the band turned up at Charley’s house for a meeting, only to find a Rolls-Royce outside. The MD of Arista, accompanied by his right-hand man, the preposterously named Tarquin Gotch, had travelled all the way from London clutching a recording contract. The incongruity of a Rolls-Royce parked in a deprived area was lost on these London chancers. We reasoned that if they didn’t understand this irony, then there was no way that they could ever understand the music we played. They went away empty-handed. Chrysalis took a more ‘softly, softly’ approach and offered us a good deal. We signed. If it was good enough for the Specials, then it was deemed good enough for us. After all, Jerry Dammers was no slouch in the business. He had single-handedly negotiated the 2-Tone label and monies to fund it from Chrysalis already. We were invited to become joint directors with the Specials in furthering the aims of the 2-Tone label.