RICK ROGERS Addressing racism was never going to be as simple as resolving the obvious skin colour differences between black and white youth. The challenge was far greater. Class, gender, upbringing, all contributed to the social and political climate. And these divisions deeply affected not only how culture was received by 2 Tone audiences but created by the artists.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS 2 Tone was a natural reflection of society: a microcosm of the black–white issue, working class mixing it up with art-school middle class. Authenticity about background mattered a lot. It’s very easy to think that 2 Tone was a fully conceived idea that then got executed, but, to a degree, everyone was making it up and reacting to events as it went along: everyone was very young, and making their mistakes in public. What we were trying to do was really hard. And because of that it was very difficult and fraught with contradictions. There were going to be lots of failures and things going wrong and antagonism and misunderstanding. As everyone was going along they were learning about their own racism; things they hadn’t even challenged in themselves before. And there was a good dose of white middle-class guilt in there as well. So you throw that into the mix, and it can become overcompensatory, and skew things out of whack as well.
JERRY DAMMERS 2 Tone was a very strong expression of unity and solidarity. But it was a struggle to keep it to the original political ideals. There was always a tension between the commercial side and trying to keep the creativity and the politics involved.
HORACE PANTER In the Specials, Brad, Jerry and I all had fine art degrees. Neville was ‘from country’ whereas Lynval’s background was Jamaican middle class. The Goldings are one of the five families in Jamaica; the eighth prime minister was called Golding. Roddy’s dad worked at the Jaguar plant. He did leather-finishing, which was one of the top working-class jobs you could do in Coventry. Terry’s mum worked as a cleaner. Class had a big impact on the band when we started getting money. When you become famous what you were before becomes exaggerated, so if you were a bully you’re going to be an even bigger bully; if you were a drunk you’re going to be an even bigger drunk; if you were shy you’re going to be even shyer. You change. Fame has an impact on you. You’re not the person you were two and half years ago.
DAVE WAKELING In the Beat we were all educated differently but came up out of the same working-class system. Me, Andy, Everett and Roger had a very similar view of where we stood at this point in history. I was proud to be working-class and come from Balsall Heath and then I got to go to a posh school and talk a bit different from the other lads in the street. I liked the ambiguity of it.
NICKY SUMMERS 2 Tone was about people from different backgrounds making music together. I had what might be considered a working-class background: born in Hackney and grew up in Southgate. My mother was fairly bohemian and was into film, art, fashion and textiles. My father worked in Soho Market as a greengrocer and had been a singer in his youth. I helped out on the stall and remember it as a village where you met people from all walks of life; Paul McCartney and Lynne Franks were both customers.
RHODA DAKAR There was definitely a class split in the Bodysnatchers. It wasn’t about education. It was about, ‘Should we upset the neighbours or shouldn’t we upset the neighbours?’ For instance, there was talk of releasing ‘The Boiler’ as a single before Nicky and I recorded it with Jerry. The people that wanted to be a pop success were like, ‘No, we can’t. Oh, my God!’ It was kind of a class thing but then there were people who were ambiguous and weren’t worried because they had enough financially to not be worried. And then there was this class who didn’t care what anybody thought. Maybe it was education. SJ and Penny had both got art degrees, so they designed the band logo and the writing of the name Bodysnatchers and knew how to talk to art directors. That was a practical difference – it was much the same in the Specials with Horace and Jerry: if you can actually draw that vision and say, ‘It looks like this,’ that makes a huge difference because you’re not relying on someone else’s interpretation. And in the Selecter, Pauline and Neol were both well educated so therefore their conversations were about different things. Yes, Pauline was adopted into a white family but she also had a degree and a profession.
NEOL DAVIES We saw ourselves in the Selecter as a political expression just in our existence. I was white. Pauline was female and of African heritage. Compton was from Ghana. And the others were either from Jamaica or St Kitts. The common experience for them as children was being told very quickly they were leaving Jamaica to go to England. From the Caribbean to Britain at that age of puberty, brought up by parents you don’t know or by your grandparents who are a different generation and whose experience is the racism of the fifties: the Selecter was a prime expression of that cultural trauma, the anger that they felt and the racism they received day-to-day, walking down the street. It was everywhere. And there were seven of us, which was always difficult: seven strong opinions, seven really strong personalities. It was a very traumatic experience. We all treated each other badly.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS The Caribbean islands are incredibly different culturally. St Kitts is softer. Barbados polite. Jamaica is in-your-face culture and Trinidadians are somewhere in the middle; party people with a long-held rivalry with Jamaica who traditionally were seen to look down on them. None of it was simple, and the hierarchical nuances of the inter-island cultural mentality came over with many of their parents. It was not even black and white, it was every shade in between. Most of these bands were the first generation UK-born. They were the transition generation and that was very hard for them as well.
NEOL DAVIES We were all so angry. That’s why we started to think of ourselves as a political statement. We had something really strong to say about people and society and the way that functioned. ‘Look, we’re finding it difficult, but we’re doing it and you can do it, too.’ You can’t just say, ‘People should get on.’ It’s too easy. ‘Black and white unite?’ ‘Yeah, how?’
PAULINE BLACK It’s mainly white people who say, ‘I thought you were all about being together and unity.’ We were continually arguing. The mix of the Selecter was such that all our problems were like a microcosm of society. But I think that’s cool. It’s how you deal with those arguments. But it’s no damn use if people are arguing and being destructive, which went on within the band.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS The Selecter made all their mistakes in public and developed a reputation for being trouble. As individuals they were fine, but together they were hard work, invariably late and often arguing. They didn’t take to being challenged or organized in any way at all. They were a band that had huge potential for self-sabotage. The whole black–white thing was there every day waiting to trip us up, despite our willingness to engage with it. The black members were finely tuned and understandably sensitized to any perceived white favouritism, given they had grown up with that as an every-day experience. And Neol was hardwired to try and navigate this, which could lead to defensiveness on both sides. Different members had previous friendship bonds as well, so, once fault lines appeared, they tended to define the dynamic of sides taken.
PAULINE BLACK I’d always been interested in the ‘black’ question, for want of a better word. When I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, the best place to have a look at that was America. Then I came to Coventry and I met my husband, who worked at Rolls-Royce. The Socialist Labour League had just turned into the Workers Revolutionary Party and we formed a branch and used to go out selling the Workers Press outside the Potterton factory and around Coventry and Leamington. I was a Marxist and I wanted the overthrow of capitalism and for socialism to link up internationally with other countries in that fight. But I’m not sure my political views ever merged with culture and music. Music is a subjective art form. Politics is objective. I don’t know of any revolution that’s happened in the world that has been spearheaded by music, but hearts and minds may have been changed. It’s the spirit within the sound which is rebellious and against the status quo. Even something as mundane as ‘Bye-Bye Blackbird’ was about runaway slaves. The spirit of rebellion has always been within black people because of the nature of how the African diaspora has been treated throughout the world for the past 400 years.
DAVE WAKELING We made the Beat a socialist cooperative where everybody was earning the same. Me and David Steele had written the lion’s share of the songs at this point and we just said, ‘Everybody should get the same,’ but then we fell into freeloading socialism where if the wages were the same on a Thursday why would you bother going into the office on a Tuesday? And there’s my dad in the corner: ‘Ah, socialism, I tell you what, Dave, you ask them for a tenner if you’re ever short and they won’t bleedin’ have it.’ You can have too much cooperation and not enough competition.
NEOL DAVIES I’d written most of the songs in the Selecter and it was assumed that I was being greedy and running off with all the money. That perception grew and festered and was the source of many arguments, and I’m sure there were overtones of culture and colour. I was subjected to some serious verbal abuse but I believed in the band and carried on. But we had those issues to deal with and we dealt with them in public.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS There was always a bit of resentment about whether it was Neol’s band. The accusation, ‘Yeah, it’s his band because he’s white’, would be used in the heat of arguments at times. Band clashes over ownership are as old as the industry itself, but they don’t usually have to address it through the distorting prism of racism. It was difficult for Neol. And also he had this sparky, sparring relationship with Pauline, who always felt torn in the middle. She had been brought up in a white family in Essex, only later to find out she had an Anglo-Jewish mother and a Nigerian father. It seemed she had long wanted acceptance in the black community and suddenly she was being accepted into this black world but was then having to take sides in the arguments.
PAULINE BLACK Before the first 2 Tone tour I was working in a radiography department, having days off saying I was ill but really doing gigs. There was a music fan in the department who didn’t know what I did but I thought he was going to see my adoptive name, Pauline Vickers, in the music papers, so I thought, ‘Fuck it. I need another name.’ Charley Anderson was saying, ‘Pauline . . . Pauline . . . she’s black . . .’ And I shouted, ‘Yeah, Pauline is black.’ It was the one thing about me that was absolutely definitive. So I changed my name by deed poll. It was like someone who was always in me waiting to get out. You’ve always got this thing: black people want you to be black and women want you to be a woman. The glory of 2 Tone was that it was anti-racist but also anti-sexist. My main belief was, ‘I’m a black woman so I’m going to stick up for any feminist thing that I can by just existing and wearing what I wear and having an attitude.’
MYKAELL RILEY Pauline had to deal with being female in a very male chauvinistic industry. She played that card really well.
PAULINE BLACK On tour I’d never seen the male animal in that close proximity. At work it was mainly women and I’d come directly out of that to this: ‘Whoa!’ That was quite an adjustment.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS I may have been only twenty and appeared to be a ‘fluffy bottle-blonde’, but I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do as a proper manager, but had to square that with all the youthful testosterone unleashed on tour for the first time, with inevitable results. That was a real dilemma. The young feminist in me could be quite appalled and be thinking, ‘You can’t treat young women like this’. And then the other part of me would be, ‘But you’re my friends and I really like you and I don’t know what to do with this contradictory behaviour’. But it was hard to be assertive about it, not just because of being young and female, but primarily because this was the late seventies and deeply sexist attitudes were the acceptable norm; it was as if the female empowerment of the sixties had never happened. You’re on this rollercoaster and you’ve got to live with these people and you’re sharing profoundly formative experiences together. So it gets laughed off. Rock ’n’ roll was, and is, a deeply macho culture and universally accepted as a lifestyle. There was no sense of accountability because there was no sense of accountability in wider society towards those attitudes. In the same way as there was casual and institutionalized racism everywhere, there was also casual and institutionalized sexism.
PAULINE BLACK Lots of girls would be asked back after the show. There’s video evidence from one night of certainly more than two people present of both sexes and a bit of a free-for-all; apparently that did the rounds of the record companies. I don’t really care what people do. But there’s a difference between being a man in band and being a woman in a band and being on tour. If you’re going back to a hotel, I mean, come on, it’s not going to be just coffee, is it? Young women got disabused of that idea fairly quickly by Neville and his Rude Boy roadie friends Rex and Trevor, and occasionally were to be found occupying hotel corridors having a little cry. I would say, ‘Come and crash and use the other bed in my room.’ And of course the poor creatures would be seen in the lobby the following morning and then everybody thinks you’re a dyke. But hey-ho, I saved a few souls along the way, I’m sure.
FRANK MURRAY We stayed mainly in guest houses and B & Bs on the first tour so I didn’t see waifs and strays around. Most people went off and smoked. But two consenting adults going to a room, I didn’t have a problem with that.
RHODA DAKAR I didn’t have a lot of sympathy with groupies. ‘You got yourself into this; you get yourself out of it.’ It’s not my problem because they didn’t appreciate it. When the Bodysnatchers did the Seaside tour in the summer of 1980 with the Go-Go’s and the Specials it was much better to have more females on tour. There was less bullshit and nonsense. We didn’t have to wait ages for people to be woken up. Women could get up, get their breakfast, pack their suitcases and be on the coach at the time they’re supposed to be. Female musicians are generally more together than male musicians; if they know where their passport is you’re in luck.
NICKY SUMMERS We would have been twelve females on the Seaside tour. It was more relaxed. The Specials were outnumbered. Previously they used to room it with each other so they’d be two to a room and then they all chose a single room with a double bed. One of us did get off with someone. There were often groupies or girls turning up. They were going to get hurt. But it was nothing to do with me.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS Pauline made a point of being approachable, so at least if anybody felt they needed any protection they had a friendly ear. I was also a single girl in the midst of all of that, so you’re going to get knocks on your hotel door at one o’clock in the morning that you knew definitely not to answer. Loneliness is notoriously a big thing on the road, and Pauline and I were good company for each other, and mutually supportive as two young women in this intensely male environment – Pauline is quite male in her attitudes and approaches to life and I think she would be the first to agree with that. She was incredibly contained, very pragmatic, strong and focused, and with a withering wit. This tough persona also contained a softer, caring and empathetic person that was carefully guarded for much of the time – until the ill-fated relationship with our tour manager that wasn’t approved of.
PAULINE BLACK Juliet was respected as much as a twenty-year-old young blonde woman can be respected within the industry. She held her own. It was good to have another female to bounce around with, until she hooked up with our tour manager, Malcolm Rigby.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS The rest of the band were all finding companionship – Pauline had a one-night stand with one of them briefly, which she mentions in her autobiography – and I started what became a serious long-term relationship. That finished it. I was subjected to rules that a male manager wouldn’t have been. I felt that for as long as I remained this unobtainable self-contained island with no discernable needs of my own, I was the manager. Being a woman in that role, the expectations were very different. I was always there for them and suddenly there was a competing demand on my time. But you’re a human being and sooner or later you also get lonely and you need a relationship.
NICKY SUMMERS As a band you don’t all necessarily hang out with each other; socially you’re not always everyone’s cup of tea. We used to split off and come back for soundchecks. It was natural. By the Seaside tour we were more accomplished as a band, but the Go-Go’s suffered. They were on first and used to come offstage and say, ‘They’re waiting for you.’ The audience saw it as rock music and they didn’t want that. The Specials were more accomplished musicians than all of us. They had been playing their instruments ten years longer and were way ahead of the game. Initially, we played to predominantly male audiences, but towards the summer we had more young girls coming. It meant that we had reached out and inspired young women, in a way, to do something more with their lives; to take action for themselves. The few all-girl groups that had emerged, like the Slits and the Mo-dettes and Poly Styrene from X-Ray Spex and Pauline Murray from Penetration, had really inspired me and in turn I hoped the Bodysnatchers could inspire women also. But there was a point where motivation and intention changed.
RHODA DAKAR Five of the Bodysnatchers wanted to be pop tarts and Nicky and I wanted to keep going in the same tradition. They endured the politics but that wasn’t their motivation. Life had been good to them; they didn’t really need to change stuff. We played the Oxford Ball where Penny’s dad was a professor. It was like, ‘What do you need to change, particularly? Your life’s OK.’ There was no reason to swim against the tide.
NICKY SUMMERS We had gigged solidly for the best part of a year and it was tiring. I wanted us to take a break to regroup: to rehearse, practise, write new material, maybe look at what direction we were going in. And some members of the band were more interested that we’d achieved some public recognition and wanted to capitalize on that. ‘Do you just want to be, “Have I got the right T-shirt?” and, “Do I look good in a photoshoot?” or do you really want to say something and try and open up a new road?’
I was only twenty-one and wasn’t skilled enough at handing seven different personalities pulling in different directions. I was caught in the middle. There was an argument between two people: whether you just wanted to be a fun girl band or whether you wanted to do something else. Recording ‘The Boiler’ was something else.
PAULINE BLACK They got rid of Rhoda, the person that made them good, and became the Belle Stars. There’s never been anything like the Bodysnatchers since or before.
•
NEOL DAVIES The original line-up of the Selecter and the main thrust of success lasted less than a year – we’d had four chart singles and a top-five album – but we were all so angry and under pressure. We weren’t very nice to each other. We left 2 Tone in the summer of 1980 issuing the statement: ‘2 Tone was intended to be an alternative to the music industry, a label that took risks and, we hope, injected some energy into what had become a stale music scene. The time has come when we want to take risks again.’
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS They drafted in these two new white lads and the music changed. Then we went on the ‘Reasons To Be Fearful’ European tour and that was the beginning of the end. Again, the black–white issues had been raging: who had to share with whom; if somebody had a better room in a hotel. It was minefields everywhere you went. What we were trying to do was hard. The black and white mix had come together for a reason: to try and shine a really strong light on this issue. It made for very uncomfortable experiences at times and we had to deal with a lot of anger and resentments. It got to the point where you thought, ‘Anything we try to do gets sabotaged by finding racism in it; we trip up on it everywhere and can’t seem to find the way around it no matter how much we try’. It would often be something small that would become big and could tip over into physical confrontation. I’ll never forget having to peel Desmond off Pauline on the tour bus when he had her by the throat and was shouting, ‘You t’ink you’re the Queen.’ In later years, it turned out this was also the early signs of mental illness. Everything had become fractious and confrontational. I had naively thought that what I lacked in ‘male authority’ I could make up for in being super organized and conscientious, but that just backfired. In the end, it was all about firefighting most of the time. I defy anybody to have successfully navigated the Selecter out the other side of all that. The irony was that it was the sheer intensity of their interpersonal beliefs and relationships that made the band such a powerfully authentic force on stage – but it was also their undoing.
PAULINE BLACK We bought into the ethos of 2 Tone: celebrating the things that unite you rather than the things that divide you. But we were subjective animals. It was hard to do on a 24/7 basis, particularly if you were all trying to be creative, trying to do music, trying to get everyone to do this and this; and some stupid bloody touring schedule, and people’s pettiness going on, and the record industry are not necessarily on your side because they’d much rather have Madness’s fun and frivolity than this moody bunch of bastards over here. It was all of this kind of nonsense. We were our own worst enemy.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS We did three nights at the Michael Sobell Sports Centre supporting Ian Dury. It was a fuckin’ nightmare. They felt they were being limited in every way: the lighting, the PA, the rider, you name it. ‘We’re not the “support band”, we’re the “special guests”.’ It was, ‘We’re not doing it. We’re pulling out.’ I had to have mediating sessions, to- and fro-ing between the dressing rooms. The band was exhausted and fractious and didn’t want to be in each other’s company, let alone play together. I was still negotiating with Dury’s manager, Pete Jenner, while half of the Selecter were up the motorway going back to Coventry. It was shit, so I wrote the ‘Alternative Ten Commandments (or) The Selecter Shake-Up Manifesto’, based on Prince Buster’s ‘Ten Commandments Of Man’, which I sent them all in the post in the hope that the humour of it might cut through some tension. Commandment Ten was: If you care about THE SELECTER then you must care about each other. The idea was to let everybody simmer down over the holiday, get some rest and hopefully be able to commit to each other and to the venture in general in the new year. It didn’t fucking work.
NEOL DAVIES We were desperate, but I was determined to try and make it work. We put out the single ‘Celebrate The Bullet’ in February 1981 which had a staunch anti-violence, anti-war theme, but irony was its downfall and Mike Read at Radio 1 took it literally and wouldn’t play it, presumably because John Lennon had been murdered three months before.
PAULINE BLACK Irony very rarely works in music because it can mean different things to different people. A month after the album was released there was an assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS ‘Celebrate The Bullet’ was a disastrous choice for the single. The Selecter had gone through a very destabilizing personnel change which had also started to dilute and confuse their audience. The atmosphere and the underlying tension in the studio was pretty bad. It felt as if the music wasn’t really happening, but nobody wanted to admit it. My relationship with them had broken down, I wasn’t being listened to at all and they decided they could manage themselves, so I left during the recording of the album. Celebrate the Bullet was released shortly after, but seemed to be out of step with a new prevailing mood in pop taste and culture. And that was the end of the Selecter.
