Mixed Race Studies

2 Tone legend Pauline Black to get honorary degree from Coventry University

The Coventry Telegraph
2016-11-21

Catherine Lillington

Pauline Black

“It’s really important women don’t reach the menopause and go away and knit”

Ska and 2 Tone legend Pauline Black is being honoured by Coventry University for her support of the city’s music scene.

The lead singer of The Selecter will get an honorary degree following a career that has seen her create platinum-selling albums and an award-winning autobiography.

She will be among 6,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students receiving their degrees, 45 years after she moved to Coventry to study at Lanchester Polytechnic…

Pauline Black performing at The Tic Toc Club in Coventry in July 1981

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Pauline Black launches her autobiography

Louder Than War
2011-08-04

Miles Barter

Pauline Black launches her autobiography, ‘Black By Design’
 
Music was hardly mentioned as Selecter frontwoman Pauline Black launched her autobiography at Houseman’s radical bookshop in London on Wednesday evening (last night 3 Aug).
 
She told the 70 people packed into a sweltering store that Black by Design was the story of her journey from being a mixed race baby adopted by a white family in Romford, Essex, to Top of the Pops and reconciliation with her own black culture.

Her family refered to her as “coloured” because they thought it was the most polite term available.

Pauline described adoption as “legalised identity theft” and said she had changed her surname from Vickers to Black so people “had to call me black”.
 
She read excerpts from the book about her struggle to find her true self.
 
Her birth mother was white British, her father was black Nigerian. She had originally been named Belinda Magnus…

…Many audience members talked of their own experiences as black and mixed race youngsters in Britain.
 
There was a discussion on whether things were better or whether prejudice was just more hidden now…

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Black by Design: A 2-Tone Memoir

Serpent’s Tail
2011-07-14
320 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781846687907

Pauline Black

Powerful autobiography from the front woman of influential ska band, The Selecter

Lead singer for platinum-selling 2-tone band The Selecter, Pauline Black has been in the music business for over thirty years. The only woman in a movement dominated by men, she was very much the Queen of British Ska. She saw The Specials, Madness, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and all the other top bands of that generation at their very best… and worst. Black was born in 1953 of Anglo-Jewish/Nigerian parents. Adopted by a white, working class family in Romford in the fifties, Pauline was always made to feel different, both by the local community and members of her extended family, who saw her at best as a curiosity, at worst as an embarrassing inconvenience. Weaving her rise to fame and recollections of the 2-tone phenomenon with her moving search for her birth parents, Black By Design is a funny and enlightening memoir of music and roots.

Born in Romford, Pauline Black is a singer and actress who gained fame as the lead singer of seminal 2-tone band The Selecter. After the band split in 1982, Black developed an acting career in television and theatre, appearing in dramas such as The Vice, The Bill, Hearts and Minds and 2000 Acres of Sky. She won the 1991 Time Out award for Best Actress, for her portrayal of Billie Holiday in the play All or Nothing At All.