EP.249 - PAULINE BLACK

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin.

Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening.

I took my microphone and found some human folk.

Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke.

My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man.

I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

Hey,

how are you doing?

It's Adam Buxton here, reporting to you from a Norfolk farm track, early June 2025.

I'm here with my dog friend Rosie.

She's a whippet poodle cross.

She's not that excited to be out for a walk, but she's trotting along beside me.

And like a brand of shampoo I once favored, she is

panting, panting, panting, panting.

That's dog legs panting.

How are you doing, though, podcats?

I hope you're doing okay, wherever you are.

Me?

Oh, I'm fine.

Thanks.

Can't complain.

Hello, techno bird.

Hovering above the field.

How high do you think that is, doglegs?

I strongly don't care.

I want to go back to the sofa.

I'd say that's about a hundred feet up.

It's very good hovering, plus techno.

Oh, look, there's a few of them.

Anyway, look, let me tell you a little bit about podcast number 249 with my guest, the English singer, actor, and author Pauline Black.

Pauline Blackfax, born Belinda Magnus in 1953 to a white Anglo-Jewish mother and a Nigerian father, Pauline was adopted by a family from Essex who gave her the name Pauline Vickers.

She studied science at Lanchester Polytechnic, now Coventry University, before training as a radiographer.

And she worked for the NHS for five years before she entered the music industry.

When the specials, then known as the Special aka, released their 1979 single Gangsters on the two-tone label, the B-side was an atmospheric instrumental by Neil Davis and John Bradbury called The Selector.

Following the success of the single, Neil Davis put together a seven-piece band made up of Coventry musicians that included Arthur Gaps Hendrickson and on vocals was Pauline, who took the stage name Pauline Black.

Singles like Three Minute Hero, Missing Words and the Evergreen On My Radio made The Selector one of the most successful scar bands of the two-tone era, alongside the specials, Madness, Bad Manners, The Beat, and The Body Snatchers.

But despite their popularity, internal tensions, financial disputes, and the pressure of the music industry led to The Selector parting ways in 1981, after which Pauline embarked on a career as an occasional TV presenter and as an actor on TV and in the theatre.

Pauline reformed The Selector in 1991 and the band have toured intermittently with a variety of lineups ever since.

In her memoir, Black by Design, a Two-Tone Story, published to great critical acclaim in 2011, Pauline writes about the challenges of growing up as one of the few black children in a predominantly white part of Essex, dealing with racism and with a sense of not fully belonging.

She also writes about her time at the forefront of the two-tone movement and about reconnecting with her biological mother and how doing so helped her to come to terms with an often painful childhood.

That memoir formed the basis for a documentary released earlier this year, Pauline Black, A Two-Tone Story, directed by photographer and filmmaker Jane Mingay.

In 2022, Pauline was awarded an OBE for services to entertainment, the same year she was appointed as a deputy lieutenant of the West Midlands.

As you'll hear, my determination to get Pauline on the podcast was sparked a few years ago when I saw a half-hour BBC documentary from 1980 called Rudy's Come Back, The Rise and Rise of Two-Tone.

I'm sure I mentioned it at the time on the podcast, and I've probably mentioned it a few times since.

It's a peach.

There's a link to the dock on the BBC iPlayer, which you'll find in the description of today's episode.

And that dock features some wonderful footage of the Selector at the very beginning of their career, alongside scenes of the specials on stage

and clowning around in the Coventry flat slash base of operations for Two Tone,

owned by label mastermind Jerry Dammers.

It was watching that dock that made me buy Pauline's book and I was delighted when she agreed to meet for an interview as long as I was able to get myself to Coventry where she still lives.

So last month, May 2025, I drove to Coventry to meet Pauline in a small studio that I had booked to record the session and we had a very nice chat.

However, the next day, when the studio sent through the files,

they apologised for the fact that Pauline's mic had not recorded and she could only be heard coming through faintly in the background on my microphone.

Disappointed!

Addendum.

Since I originally uploaded this episode, I have been able to improve the very roomy audio that I was left with thanks to a couple of listeners, Terry Lee and Joe Simmons.

They're not a team.

They're a couple of people who work with audio.

They got in touch separately to point me in the direction of a bit of AI powered software that gave me better results than the audio tools I was using.

The thing they recommended was Adobe Enhance.

I'm not sponsored by Adobe but it did do a really good job on this bit of audio so I thought it was worth calling out in case anyone else is out there in podcast world in a similar position.

It really improved things.

Anyway, thanks very much Terry and Joe and I was delighted because I really enjoyed meeting Pauline.

And I'm glad to be able to present our conversation about the early days of Two-Tone, her experiences growing up, feeling out of place in Essex, and how she came to be reunited with her biological mother in a much more listenable state than was originally the case.

I'll be back at the end to say goodbye, but right now, with Pauline Black, here we go.

Ramble chat, let's let's have a ramble chat.

We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that.

Come on, let's chew the fat and have a ramble chat.

Put on your conversation coat and find your talking hat.

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During the lockdown, I discovered that documentary Rudy Come Back, which was an arena program shown in 1980, I think, wasn't it?

Half an hour thing.

Have you seen it recently?

I've seen bits of it recently.

Yeah, Adrian Thrills.

Adrian Thrills, a couple.

Awful little Mac.

Everyone had an awful little Mac there that they tied too tight at the waist.

I've got my awful little MacBook Pro.

Whoa.

That's my version of the awful.

Awful little MacBook Air.

Pros are too big.

I absolutely love this documentary.

It's so evocative and exciting.

And as a little snapshot of a nascent scene.

Yeah.

Pretty hard to beat, beautifully shot, that kind of attention to quality that the BBC had in those days, you know, like the photographers and sound people at the very top of their game the way they filmed all the concert stuff and the way they filmed you guys in the studio at the Horizon studio Horizon Studios which is no more right the late lamented there was some old converted stables that used to back onto the

railway station it's kind of you know those awful

centers now, you know, where you find TK Max and that kind of business.

But it was very sad when that

the demise of that

yeah it looked like a cool place and you and the selector recorded a lot of stuff there right?

We the original band recorded too much pressure and celebrate the bullet there yeah.

Okay first two albums.

Do you remember that day when Arena came to film and you were playing well they acted as if you were recording

three minute hero.

But we were miming right you were sort of recreating the recording experience.

No, we weren't actually recording.

Yeah.

Oh yeah I can remember it.

I mean everything was new then.

That's what you have to remember.

And we were,

we probably, I don't know how many shows we'd done by then.

I mean, we got together in the May of 1979.

And by the

early autumn, well, it was end of August, early September, I think, when that was going on, when we were recording that album.

you know that was the first time really anyone had kind of taken an interest in us i think melody maker had been up and done our first interview.

So it was new to everyone.

We'd just been doing shows, a lot of them supporting the specials,

a lot of little clubs like the F Club in Leeds and, you know, Sheffield Lunich Club, which were all tiny.

And we would do matinees at that time because there were young kids who'd bunk off school or, you know, out of the orphanage and stuff like that and then decide to follow us and all of those things.

And so we were kind of building up that following because, you know, there were six black artists in it and one white guy kind of thing.

And it was just so different.

We weren't like the specials.

We certainly weren't like madness, you know, some white guys.

And kids, black kids at that time found that interesting.

This was a different take on things and something different was going on here.

The music is infectious.

So you can't do anything other than dance to it.

So it was like, dang it,

being in a youth club, to be perfectly honest.

And you know, the whole kind of way of the band, that's how it had originated to a certain extent with Hardtop 22, where a lot of the members had come from.

That was another local band.

That was, yeah, and the Hollyhead Youth Centre here was in the basement.

They were allowed to

rehearse.

I didn't know them at that time, much to everyone's derision back then.

I mean, I came from folk, which isn't exactly true.

I came from the back room of a pub, which was the old dyer's arms in Coventry and it was just a place where you could go and there would be folk people there would be some other people who did a bit of kind of alternative-y stuff somebody banged out I don't know Richie Haven stuff you know and you were playing a bit of Dylan and things like that yeah yeah yeah yeah and occasionally a couple of mine that I rudimentarily written the first one being about the leads uh serial killer oh um whose name has gone gone AWOR at the moment?

I'm not good on my serial killers.

One of the big serial killers.

Yeah, one of the big serial killers

called Bradford City and lamenting the fact of this poor young woman who'd ended up sort of, you know, becoming a prostitute and was prey to and she'd ended up dead at the hands of the serial killer.

Not exactly the fodder that you would think that somebody might fetch up with.

Yeah, did you what were the other subjects on the short list?

Or did you immediately go for that one?

The strange thing is that after making that film, Pauline Black, a two-toned story, Don Letz very nicely came along and did an interview and he just absolutely nailed it because he said what the select was about was social reportage.

And that's exactly what we were about.

And that's exactly what I was doing then.

And that's exactly what Hardtop 22 did.

I mean, that's what we kind of did.

Talked about what the environment was like.

Exactly.

I mean the things that were around us and our attitude towards it because we felt that it was important I suppose as you know British blacks growing up here being born here or whatever telling our side of the story and I've always thought that hybrid music's not completely you know, I'll take a bit of that and I'll take a bit of that and that kind of way of thinking, but

something that is fully formed butts up against something else and something wonderful happens and they kind of melt into each other and work but that takes work to make that thing happen yeah yeah because the word that would crop up when you're blending genres for some people is appropriation or cultural appropriation and where do you see the line between kind of exploitative bad quotes cultural appropriation and something more positive of blending genres and making something more interesting.

Cultural appropriation.

Myself, by the very definition of the fact that I exist.

You know, a black person from Nigeria came along and liked a white person from this country who happened to be Jewish as well.

And my mum, I think, was 17 when she was pregnant with me and

sparked off each other.

And here I am.

Well, you can't get much more cultural appropriation rather than a bit of miscegenation, can you?

I'm fully in favour of miscegenation.

Cultural appropriation, though, that's just Boderic the cornrows, you know.

What's the definition of miscegenation?

Miscegenation.

Oh, well, I mean, you know, having sex across the racial barriers.

Okay.

If you want to see them as barriers, I consider that

the white women here in this country at that time were pioneers.

As far as women are concerned, you're left holding the baby rather literally.

And at that time, if you'd got, you know, a brown baby, then you'd got a problem because there weren't very many people in this country who were accepting of the fact that,

you know, you were kind of mixing things up a bit.

Yes.

Why is it then thinking about your adoptive mother,

who was in some ways, I don't know about politically, but in other ways quite conservative, I suppose.

A working-class white family from Romford, Essex, with they already had a couple of boys, did they?

They had four sons.

Four sons, right?

Why were they adopting another girl?

Because she'd always wanted a girl

and

she'd had a hysterectomy, so she couldn't have one.

They were older, they were in their mid-40s by that time.

And

because

she

knew a woman who lived around the corner, as everyone knows a woman who lived around the corner, who was in some sort of church association thing.

And a lot of babies were adopted through church associations or something to do with the church because it was like saving these kind of you know little colonial creatures that sort of cropped up that nobody wanted so you either ended up in bonadoes which there was one and that was in dagnum in essex or you ended up in a home and i consider myself lucky in some ways being adopted being given the chances that i was because otherwise i would have ended up in bonadoes in dagnum but the problem was i didn't know any other black people.

I didn't know any other black kids.

My mother knew a couple of people who had adopted, but they were always young Nigerian kids and their parents were students over here and they would go back and they could be sort of plucked out of the home at a moment's notice and off they would go.

So, I mean, there was nothing to make friends with.

I was the only black kid in both, you know, sort of junior school and senior school.

Do you think, though, that your mum was on a sort of Christian mission to do the right thing with a mixed race

baby?

The opportunity had come about where there were Nigerian students or Ghanaian students coming here who were studying like my dad was.

You know, children would appear for whatever reason, young people, they like to fuck.

So I mean, you know, you're going to get a few accidents, as it were.

And we always got left with the mums, you were invariably white.

So those girls were then left with the child.

They'd been secreted away in a mother and baby home, so nobody actually knew they were pregnant.

And usually those places farm those babies out to people, either to foster initially, which I was fostered initially, and with a view, as they always used to say, to adoption at some later stage.

And sometimes the girls stayed in contact with the children.

and other times maybe they didn't depending on what their family's situation was like and paid some money towards the child while they were being fostered.

So that's how it was for me.

And when did you first start thinking about being different and feeling that you were different?

She told me I was adopted because she had to tell me when I was about four years old, just before I started school.

And do you have a clear memory of her?

Oh, God, yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I puked all over her.

She was doing the ironing and I puked all over her lovely ironing.

Pauline.

I know, Jackson parked her sheets.

What did it mean to you?

Do you remember?

Yes, well, it was a bit of a s it.

I always equate these things to like being smacked.

She was a bit handy with her hands, if you know what I mean.

A good smack in those days was considered sort of, you know, good medicine for that behaviour, i.e.

any inquiring behaviour, basically.

And I remembered her telling me, sort of saying, you know, well, when you go to school, some people may

things and call you names and all this, which never really occurred to me at all.

And then she told me about that, you know, my father had come from Nigeria, my mother was English and they couldn't stay together and they'd had me and they couldn't look after me, so she had me and they'd adopted me.

And so these were all new concepts kind of coming at you.

Well, I mean, my guts didn't take it very well, put it like that.

So that was a lot of thinking to be done.

But that was the the time when I started thinking, well,

you're not like anyone around here.

But it hadn't really come up until then.

But after that, once I knew, I was kind of sensitised to the thought that

being black didn't sound as though it was a really groovy thing to be if you lived in Romford and around, you know, where we were, in Essex, I should say.

I'm sure that's not true now.

It's not even true of the street that that I live in because I went back there to do some filming and I'm pleased to say that miscegenation has gone very well in Romford.

Half the street that I used to live in, which was wholly white apart from me, is

healthily kind of brown and black.

Job done.

Did you think about your biological parents a lot?

I thought about my mother.

a lot, less so about my father, because that didn't seem tangible to ever be able to find him, because nobody would give you any information other than he was Nigerian.

My mother, there was a little bit more information about her, which I'd snooped by looking through my mother's chest of drawers.

And then, you know, they always have things, don't they, in chest of drawers?

Sure.

Either screeted in there or some older handbag at the top of a...

And I was a nosy kid on a need to know basis.

And I had found in one of these drawers some documents and they were adoption papers.

I didn't necessarily know that they were adoption papers as such, but I was savvy enough to look at the birth date of this person called Belinda Magnus

and think,

I think that's me.

And I wasn't wrong.

And there were some court papers there.

So, and that actually said that Belinda Magnus changed into Pauline Jean Ann Vickers as I was known then.

So I put those two things together and there was a registered envelope which my mother used to send money to my mother.

This is my birth mother I'm talking about to my adoptive mother and that had an address on it, 32 Review Road and that was in Dagnum.

And I had that until I was 42 and I never acted off it.

What made you act when you did?

Age, really.

You know, you're doing the reckoning in your head and you think, well, if she was young, I'd always known she was 17 and my mother would have been very specific about it.

You know, she was 17, poor girl, and all this kind of thing being taken advantage of by black men and all this, which to a certain extent couldn't have been further from the truth.

I think it was my mother taking advantage of anything else.

So

at 42, you're thinking, well, you know, for a woman that's moving closer and closer towards 60 now.

It wasn't, but I mean, you know, my maths has never been great.

But,

and I thought, well, she might not be alive.

So I thought, well, she's going to be something like that kind of age.

Maybe I should get off my ass and do something.

And you found her in Australia?

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

By virtue of the fact that one of my brothers went round to that address.

Nobody lived there anymore of that name.

But the person who did live there, he said, oh, I'm sure three sisters used to live here.

He said, I think I've got the deeds somewhere or another.

And off he trundled.

And he came back and said, oh, yes, their name was Magnus.

And he said, I think they live in Surrey.

So that was how I found them.

And how was it meeting her for the first time?

Because, I mean, you know, families are weird anyway.

Whatever your arrangement, whether you're adopted or not, there's no guarantee that you're going to feel a close bond with other members of your family just because you're related by genes and chemicals.

But how was it to meet this person?

Well, the strange thing was, was that because she was in Australia, I didn't meet her straight away.

My first meeting was over the phone.

And I'd written her a very, very long letter because again, you don't know how this letter's going to land.

You don't know whether they're married, whether the husband knows any of those things, you know.

And I was black.

I thought, well, you don't know how that's gonna go I mean Australia isn't known for its welcoming carpet is it for was certainly back then

or so now yeah you know what I mean so I thought well I'll write a very discreet letter So do you have to talk to anyone else?

Do you have to tell anyone else about me?

Just talk to me if you can, expecting a letter back.

But I told her all my details.

And then, oh, because of the time difference, at some ungodly hour in the morning, the phone started ringing and this was a week later because that's how long it took a letter to get there and my husband got up and answered the phone and he said he thought it was dame edna everidge on the other end

and because she was going i want to talk to my belinda you know

because and she called me that for the first 10 years that we knew each other

she just couldn't get a head around that i was pulling

and had never equated me with uh with them.

But anyway, so that was a very rude awakening to my mother.

And within, I think, about a month or so, we were out there and spent a month with them.

The thing I suppose that every child is hoping for at some point in their life is for some answers for why they are the way they are.

And sometimes I regret personally not finding out more about my mother before she died.

And I do feel slightly as if I missed an opportunity to put a few of the pieces of the puzzle into place as to why I am the way I am, why I think the way I do, those kinds of things.

Were you interested in any of that and if so, did you get any answers?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I mean it's

a kind of a strange thing because I'd always been very much of that idea that it's nurture.

It's nothing to do with genes.

Right, okay.

Because

in the racist soup that we live in, in, you kind of have to believe that maybe that's true to a certain extent.

And you don't really want to go down that whole kind of eugenics road.

So I'd always steered away from that kind of idea.

And then I met my mother,

who

she had so many quirks, and they were all mine.

Pauline quirks.

Yeah, and we'd never met.

We'd never met.

You know, if she's relaxed and standing, she stands in in sort of, you know, third position ballet.

And

I hear myself sometimes laughing, and it's her laugh.

It's nothing to do with me.

Or you look down at your legs and you think, oh, they're my mum's legs.

It's like that.

And if she went to a restaurant and something wasn't quite right on the plate, she'd have to rearrange it.

Well, I'd do the same thing.

But I mean, we never met each other.

And that's scary.

It's kind of scary.

Yeah.

So it it was all a bit like that.

So we were just finding out about each other.

And she was quite mercurial because obviously they weren't practicing Jews, but I think that, you know, the Jewish heritage was considered something.

And certainly they got very worried during the war when it looked like, you know, we were going to be invaded by Hitler.

So, you know, they were as Jewish as far as that was concerned.

But she had married an Irishman in a Roman Catholic church in Clonakilty in Southern Ireland and she'd then gone to Australia and fallen in with the Jehovah's Witnesses.

It wasn't like she just tried anything.

Sure, give it a go.

And I thought, well, that's just so like me.

You know what I mean?

And I go to the hospital, but I think, well, I'll do that, or I won't do that.

And I end up in a band.

You know.

it was um so she was always kind of questing in that way she's on an adventure yeah she was on an adventure and and obviously my father

was like probably the biggest adventure of her life because eventually I plucked up courage to say,

By the way, do you happen to know my dad's name?

Do you?

Oh, yeah, well, you mean Gordon?

And out it all, you know, fell.

And was Gordon still around at that point?

No, he died the year.

Oh, really?

Which I didn't know about then.

Uh, she wanted to know whether I had found him or not.

Yeah, from that piece of information, I found one of his wives, He had eight.

He was a high-status Nigerian.

Yeah, he was a prince.

I mean, there's a lot of princes.

It's a bit of a joke, Nigerian princes, but he actually was.

And my grandfather was the Ober, which is like a king in a small kind of, you know, little kind of principality of the thing, I suppose.

And that was passed around between five families.

And it was his turn.

And he died on my birthday

in 1976

and had been a school teacher for a lot of his years

and ran the local grammar school and was a piano player and I played the piano quite unconsciously from that.

So there were a lot of overlaps.

And out of that, I found like lots of mixed race people who looked like me who suddenly became my half-brothers and half-sisters.

Okay.

Quite prolific, my dad.

Yeah.

Not as prolific as my grandfather, who had over 100 children,

20 wives.

Oh man.

Previagra days too.

That is bad daddy.

I mean that's a world of stress that's looming there.

I mean you know most people they're doing well if they can pin down one relationship

let alone that many.

But I suppose they just had a different attitude towards those things.

I guess they were not getting too bogged down with anything.

Which in itself is kind of an admirable quality.

Was your mum, though,

upbeat?

Did your mum seem kind of tortured by the fact that she'd had to give you away back in the day?

She had been tortured

two years after, which would have been, I mean, I was adopted at 18 months old, so a little while after that, I think that she had a nervous breakdown.

and told me that she had a nervous breakdown.

She couldn't do anything.

And then she'd met her present husband, an Irish labourer who was in Dagnum I think he came to live there at the house or something like that and they got together a very handsome man I mean he was great and he knew about me all of that generation knew about me but they'd never told their children who were my peers sort of thing They always said, I mean after I went there, they always said, we knew there was something a bit strange about Eileen, because every time she saw a black man, she'd run up to them, cuck their face in her hands and go, you're so beautiful.

I said, that sounds like my mother.

Do you know what I'm picking my hand?

I don't know.

I don't know.

But this is what they told me.

So they were unsurprised when I appeared.

And so everybody kind of knew.

So it was quite,

it must have been traumatic for her, but she had more front than more.

I mean, she just fronted it up.

This is my daughter.

So, I mean, that was the sort of person she was.

She was just going to brazen that one out.

Shut me down if you care.

Who was the singer then?

Was it her or Gordon?

She sang.

Right.

She sang.

She had a really good voice as well.

Did you arrive at your selector vocal style or was that the way you always sang?

No, it wasn't the way I always sang it.

Well, I have a very sweet voice.

That was my kind of folk singer-y voice, you know what I mean?

I mean, Joni Mitchelly kind of, you know, Joan Armitrading-y kind of voice, two were popular at that time.

So I used to to listen to an awful lot of them I had that voice but it was wholly unsuitable

for

that kind of band but I was desperate to be in a reggae band right

so

it was a little bit like well you can't really use that voice then it kind of went through romford a bit and then it went through the Caribbean a bit and then I was just doing that just mixing up all like I said you know that kind of slipping accents to just find this

relatively

strident in the early days young woman and a comfortable way to be on stage and didn't really look back much after that yeah it's such a great style kind of declamatory almost wide-eyed the way you are doing three-minute hero in that arena dog bizarre it's bizarre to me but it was it felt completely natural i mean look at hazel o'connor i mean there's no way that hazel o'connor sounds i mean i know the woman and there's no way she sounds like eighth day, you know, is very declamatory as well.

Yeah, yeah.

There was a lot of declamatory stuff going on then.

I mean, Lena Lovich was quite declamatory.

That's right.

So all of that had seeped in there somewhere and got repackaged deep in my grey matter

and just popped out.

And that was Pauline Black.

It got renamed.

I mean, Pauline Vickers became Pauline Black.

And it was just like someone who'd always been there just saying, well, here I am.

And this is me.

And this is not fully done, but we're going to go with this.

We're going to run with this bit.

And that's what we ran with.

Yeah, that was a good scene.

I loved that kind of music around that time.

That was when I was growing up in my adolescence.

And now

there's a lot of good musicians around and really talented women, especially.

But it's funny how, on the whole, the current crop of really talented female musicians, it's much more about being breathy and quiet.

My theory is that it's because a lot of them came up through DIY music and they're in their rooms making music on their laptops, like Billie Eilish and people like that.

And so they sing very close on the mic and they're very breathy.

But I do like the louder, more kind of strident, almost yelpy style.

Well, they were different

different times.

They were different times then because, you know, all the deaths were analogue.

As a vocalist, you were invariably in some awful small club with your feet stuck to the floor with possibly somebody on guitar who was a complete egomaniac and thought they were Clapton or, you know, the Who guy.

And so that would be terrifically loud.

You're screaming out over the foldback is absolutely useless.

So you've got to get over that.

Right.

None of this in ears stuff

then.

I mean, you know, you were flying by the seat of your pants and that's if the foldback worked and anyone cared enough

to put you in it.

The foldback being the monitors

front of stage so you can hear what the band actually sounds like.

Right.

Right.

And yourself.

So they've got amplified instruments to begin with, right?

Their egos are fully amplified.

So they're going to be at 11, not 10 even.

And all you've got is these monitors at the front, which has them in as well.

And you

trying to find yourself in there in very small venues where people are very loud and dancing.

So that's quite a loud thing too.

So you find a way to work with that.

And we came up through that.

We didn't come up through recording studios.

Recording came much later after

our people in London actually got off their asses to find out what the provinces were and maybe sign you.

Sorry if I sound cynical, but I am about the music industry.

Oh, I think that's...

I think everybody is probably.

Maybe less so now.

I don't know.

Because there were so many other ways to sort of, you know, come up through TikTok, all those kinds of things.

You know, we didn't have any of that.

We were reliant on somebody getting their Gucci loafers on a train and up here.

As Adrian Thrill said,

it's happening in Coventry, of all places.

But I I know, of all places.

What a thing to say.

You know, let's set this up.

Of all places.

Were you munching huge quantities of drugs in those days?

I was never very good with drugs.

I did acid one time.

That was complete and utter disaster.

And mostly people were sort of feeding orange juice into me to make me come down.

Because you were having a bad trip.

Yeah, I had a bad trip.

Yeah.

I used to smoke some marijuana and things, but nothing.

It made me paranoid, particularly after the trip.

Yeah.

And it didn't go well.

So I was never deeply, deeply into drugs, but I liked what it did.

And I would love to play the piano if I was high.

That was just a glory to me.

I could spend hours doing that.

Yeah, listening to music when you're a bit stoned.

Yes, it's good, but I like mine.

Yeah.

It was that in those days, you got to remember what music was.

So that was like oodles and grateful dead and stuff like that.

And, you know, you've got to be high to listen to that.

that.

It only makes sense when you're stoned.

It's funny, though, how drugs play such a central part in a scene.

Maybe you disagree.

But looking at the arena dock again and lots of footage from around that time, especially at two-tone gigs, well, it's the two-tone dance and watching the specials on stage and Linville Golding jumping around.

That energy.

I don't know if it's just excitement and adrenaline, probably a large part of that.

But also you would think there's probably some speed flying around and things like that.

Blues, what's blues?

Blues, just a form of amphetamine sulfane.

Yeah, I mean, you would find certainly skin heads back in those days, you know, with a bag full.

Right.

In the same way as your generation did ease, probably.

Well, they used to give speed to the soldiers.

My dad was in the Second World War and they were given speed.

And it's very fighty.

So if you're asking someone to sort of charge at somebody with a bayonet or whatever, you know, as your weapon of choice, you're going to need a bit of an incentive, aren't you?

And it probably does give a huge incentive.

And hence, you could wade into whole layers of skinheads seekiling at you.

Right, right.

You could think you were invincible.

And did it, I mean, it feels like it probably did kick off quite a bit around that time in those.

Yeah.

And how were you with that environment?

I mean, I'm a physical coward, so I would have been cowering in the back room.

I think I always went on the fact that

it takes a lot for a man to hit a woman in public.

So I always rested on that kind of side of things.

I was unlikely to get mullered,

but it was, you know, collateral damage around me in the band.

That was another thing.

It was obvious to me, I guess, that you've got to remember the time that it was.

I mean, Rock Against Racism was going on.

Late 70s.

What happened at Victoria Park?

It was the first time that racism was being openly discussed.

It was the first time that people were actually actively talking about the Suslaws.

Films were coming out like Babylon.

And so there was this youth culture, but it was a different youth culture to what it had been.

It had moved.

It wasn't even

necessarily punk, but there were a lot of tribes within it, you know, punks, rue boys, a whole business kind of thing, skinnids, all there for maybe lots of varying reasons, but brought together by the music.

That was the unifying thing.

How they felt in that space against, you know, some poor mod who was there in his Italian finery, that was something else.

They might not be quite so forgiving.

It's not like now people wear clothes, don't they, to kind of identify themselves in some posery way.

Back then, you were wearing those clothes because it was a way of life.

And you were in that space as a way of life using your youthful energy to if you saw someone with an inch longer hair than you then they had to belong to that tribe and not that tribe.

So it was very much like that.

But everybody knew what a racist was and a lot of them came with you know Doc Martins and short hair.

Not a lot of them, some of them.

Right.

And those would invariably be down the front, Zeke Heiling, particularly at us, because there were a lot of black people.

I mean, there's no point in Zeke Heiling at madness, is there?

I mean, what's that going to get you?

And that was a generation that had grown up in a newly multicultural Britain.

Oh, no one called it multicultural then.

I mean, that was a

retrospective term.

Much later.

But it was a country where the demography had been transformed by immigration.

And they were, correct me if I'm wrong about this is how I interpret it.

There were sort of young generation of people who had grown up and they were pushing back against it.

Why?

Because they're...

Kind of.

I mean, there were pockets of black people around the country, you know, like in Bradford.

There would be maybe a concentration of people, you know, Kenyan Asians, Ugandan Asians at that time, who had come in, who'd settled there.

So that was something, right?

There'd be St Paul's in Bristol.

with a whole tradition of black people growing up there.

There'd be Tiger Bay and Cardiff.

and in London obviously there was Brixton.

In Birmingham there was Handsworth.

But I mean if you went to rural Norwich

you'd be bloody hard pushed to find anyone who was black, any of the rural places.

So this whole concept that Enoch Powell was trying to run with that we were overrun with these you know people of a different colour and different culture and and all the rest of it couldn't have been further from the truth.

There were some, but even then it was too many.

So nobody was calling it multicultural.

We weren't even calling it multicultural.

It was just like, well, what's your problem?

We grew up here the same as you.

We've listened to all this crap sort of 70s pop music the same as you.

We've danced to all that.

You know, we've done the same things as you.

And here we are.

We've now found a form of music, sort of marrying up that whole kind of reggae thing with, you know some of the rock some of the punk and all this in melding it into something completely new which you love but you stand there and zeke hilatus

but did you ever have anyone kind of articulate no their racism could no okay

nobody could articulate it the person who was and really nobody really articulates racism now if you think about it they don't they find a leader that was enoch powell then it is nigel farage now or Trump, or Tommy Robinson, or whoever, yeah.

Tommy Robinson, exactly.

So they find a leader and say, yeah, I agree with him, but it's all sort of, you know, sotto voce and kind of down the pub.

And yeah, you know, I mean, they come over here and they do this, they do that.

And I'd heard that litany all the time I'd been growing up from my own family.

So I was very, very familiar with what white people thought about black people or anyone who didn't look like them, basically.

You know, I mean, it could be Jewish people it could be chinese people my family would never go to a chinese i mean we had one chinese restaurant in romford never went near there we're not meeting you know i mean my in my family that would be we're not eating that foreign muck

that was what they said yeah quite audibly i still don't understand why

why your parents thought it was a good idea to adopt a mixed-race girl if that's how they felt about the world yeah i mean i don't know yeah people are complicated it's not just that linear thing of, oh, well, you do that, so you're a racist.

It doesn't work like that.

They didn't like black people, but they loved me.

Now,

I can't figure that out.

You'd have to ask them, and they're not here to ask.

But isn't that very much kind of the nature of Britain?

It's,

well, I've got a black friend and he's great.

He's as, you know, I go to reggae concerts with him.

He's really nice.

But in the abstract, it's a different thing.

In the abstract of if, I don't know, they found themselves in a shebin or something down Notting Hill back in the day, they'd be horrified or whatever.

You know, that wouldn't be quite so friendly.

Did you have happy times though with your adoptive parents?

Yeah.

Of course.

You write about your dad certainly quite affectionately.

My dad was great.

Yeah.

And I don't believe that he,

I can't honestly say that he was ever racist.

I ever heard him use any pejorative term at all.

I heard my brothers, who were a bit older than me, but obviously much younger than my parents, I heard them use pejorative terms and aunts and uncles that kind of, you know, surrounded for whatever reason.

But one uncle in particular, who definitely thought that, you know, Powell,

had the right idea.

and was always talking about it.

But he fancied himself as a trade unionist, of all things,

and was a signalman at Schenfield, the station there.

So

yeah, that's families, though, isn't it?

Everyone's got one of those.

Everyone's got an Uncle Will.

Yeah.

That was my particular.

But I used to argue with him when I was about 11, I think.

You're right.

What would you say?

Well, we would argue about because I was aware at that time that

there was a Conservative Party in the Labour Party, and Conservative parties seemed to service rich people, and working-class people were serviced by Labour.

I'd worked that much out, but not really very much else.

So, I used to argue to him about those sorts of things.

But being a trade unionist, I said, Well, don't you think that you ought to think the Labour Party is better?

Not Enoch Powell.

I knew that much, but not really very much else.

But I'm good at you know, elasticating an argument

and trying to hold my own.

So if I can do that, I owe it to Uncle Will.

Would you have political discussions with the band, with the selector?

Oh, the original band, you didn't have to.

I mean, we were all on the same page.

Right.

We were all on the same page.

I mean, there's absolutely no doubt about that.

And were any members of the band, or for that matter, other people in other bands, who you were aware of them getting a bit frustrated?

Like, can't we just play music?

Why does it always have to be political?

Or was everyone on the...

No, no, not everyone was.

I mean, I think people have this very, very rosy idea of the Tuto movement as this sort of embracing umbrella of all these bands.

And I don't believe that anyone who was to do with it at the time, 1979, I can only speak for them, was racist, obviously not.

But in terms of talking about political things, certainly, you know, bands like Bad Manners or Madness just thought we should all bloody well shut up.

And it would be much better if we did about those sorts of things.

That this was good time music and, you know, everybody wanted to dance and have a good time.

Why are you banging on about this?

I mean, that was basically the kind of thinking that there was.

But it was a movement, and I really bought into that movement.

I really believed it.

I still do.

As

you know, it's like kind of the idea of Camelot, you know, for one shining moment.

Yeah, yeah.

And that sends shivers up my spine thinking for that one moment that it looked as though all the crap that has happened since was never going to happen.

But here we are.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I agree with you.

It's so utopian and exciting.

And everything about it, the look of it, the black and white Czech motif, everything made sense.

It was a totally integrated in every single sense of the word.

Idea, music, people.

It was so exciting.

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Continue.

Hey, welcome back, podcats.

That was Pauline Black.

And look, now I've come across my son, Frank, walking the other way across this farm track.

We both set out for a walk at the same time.

Frank would usually take Rosie for a walk in an afternoon, but today I said, no, I'm going to take Rosie because I'm doing my podcast intro and outro.

How are you, Frank?

I'm okay.

Yes, we've crossed paths.

I'm sorry.

You'd rather me not come along.

No, that's not true.

I'm very happy to cross paths with you, as you are, my son.

What are you listening to?

I am listening to Chico Boaque,

who is the Brazilian guy.

He's on the playlist that I gave you a while back.

I'm giving him a deeper dive

than I gave him last time.

Deep dive on Chico Boahe.

Is it Boahe?

I've no idea.

What did you say, Boaque?

Buaque, but maybe it's Boahe.

How are you spelling it?

B-U-A-R-Q-U-E.

B-U-A-R-Q-U-E.

Barque.

Barque.

I would go for Barque.

Okay.

Let's Google it.

Oh, man.

That's my brother calling now.

It's all happening at the same time.

Just decline the call.

How do you decline the the call?

Just click the red button.

Okay, it stopped.

Sorry, Uncle Dave.

I'll call you right back.

What are we typing in?

Boaque.

Chico.

Chico Boaque.

Just regular Chico.

B-U-A-R.

This is good stuff, isn't it?

Podcasts?

Q-U-E.

Barque, I'm saying.

Barque.

Chico Boaque.

Ah.

We were right.

You were right.

I was more right than you.

You were more right than I was.

Yeah, alright.

Don't gloat.

Cool.

Well, that's good to know.

Just calm down.

Don't say it again.

I can't make it stop!

There we go, we've both grown a little bit.

See you back at the ranch.

See ya.

I'll tell you what, I'll include a link to Frank's Spotify playlist that he was referring to,

in which he collected a lot of great Brazilian music.

I think it was all Brazilian.

Chico Buaque.

Oh, God.

It went off in my bucket.

Just stop.

Chico Buaque.

Stop saying it.

Anyway, yeah, I'll put that in the links today.

And you will find in the description of the podcast one link

that says pics and related links or something like that.

And that'll take you to my website, adam-buxton.co.uk.

And there you will find

other links to all sorts of stuff.

You can sign up for for the newsletter

and you can navigate to my single, Pizza Time.

I got a notification from Apple Music the other day.

Now Rosie is looking very nervous about the cannon that's up ahead.

But Rosie, I don't think it's activated at the moment.

I really hope it's not.

We're passing...

a sonic cannon, a gas-powered

big gun that scares birds over this field.

Let's run.

Rosie, run, run, run.

Run, I really hope it doesn't go off because Rosie hates it and so do I

go on.

It's called a scatter bird or something like that.

But I haven't heard it go off recently.

And so I'm hoping it's not going to go off to death.

Okay.

I think we're okay.

That is well stressful.

Anyway, what was I saying?

Oh yes, I got a notification from Apple Music because I registered myself as a artist on Apple Music and Spotify and all these kind of platforms

for the release of my single and I got this notification saying

artist Adam Buxton you have received 61,000 plays this week or something like that a big number or big for me anyway and I was thinking oh that's good numbers for pizza time

and then I realized that Apple Music has included all the listens for Tippy Toes,

which is the

song from Sing 2 that has my character, Klaus Kick and Klobber on it, saying, Tippy Toes, Tippy Toes, I can't see your tippy toes.

What do you mean you haven't heard Tippy Toes?

It's an absolute banger.

I should have mentioned it to Loyal Karner last week.

I mean, it makes Baby Shark look like a pathetic failure.

But it's got several million views on

YouTube and does quite well on the streaming platforms.

A little better than Pizza Time anyway.

So yeah go and listen to Pizza Time and discover lots of other great things via my website and the link in the description which will also take you to a post.

for this week's podcast.

You can see a picture of me and Pauline and you will also get a link to the BBC iPlayer where you can watch the fantastic Rudy's Comeback documentary.

Alright that's pretty much it for this week I think.

Got to get back,

get this uploaded.

Later in the week I'm off to Salford to record my appearances on Richard Osman's House of Games.

Quite a few friends and family members asking me to bring them home.

House of Games merch, salt and pepper shaker, just any merch really they'd be happy with.

And I've been saying, yeah, I'll do my best.

You never know if you're on with some brainiac and that's you toasted, then your only hope is to endear yourself to the brainiac and hope that they donate some of their merch out of pity.

But yeah, I've been studying maps.

Finding out where places are.

Timbuktu, I know where that is now.

Had no idea before.

Do you know where Timbuktu is?

Dog legs?

Just before Timbuktui.

The future's so bright, I've got to wear shades.

Deep cut?

Well, it's in Mali,

West Africa.

So fingers crossed, that comes up.

Although

I'm putting out this podcast before I do the recording, so there's a chance, I suppose, that someone might hear it and ensure that there is no Timbuktu-related question.

Okay, shush.

Thank you so much to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his invaluable production support and additional editing on this technically challenging episode.

Thank you so much to Helen Green for her beautiful artwork.

Thanks to everyone at ACAST for all their hard work,

liaising with my sponsors.

But thanks most especially

to you.

I appreciate you coming back.

May I lean in for a creepy hug?

Come here, hey,

there's a guy.

Good to see you.

Until next time, please go carefully and for what it's worth, I love you.

Bye.

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