Black by Design Read online

  The band that was coming together remained nameless. Aitch took on bass duties and new member Silverton Hutchinson on drums completed the rhythm section. Silverton was still sore about being kicked out of the Specials and replaced by John Bradbury, so he wanted to prove his worth in a new band. I thought he was a really good drummer. Some people said that he had a bit of an attitude problem, but I didn’t see any signs of it. In those days, most white people, musicians or not, thought you had an attitude problem if you were black and complained about something. Often I’ve heard the position advanced that 2-Tone got whiter and whiter in choice of personnel, as time went on. I guess that’s one way of eliminating potential troublespots!

  At some point in the band’s growth, Aitch’s friend Desmond turned up to rehearsal. He was a huge bear of a man with some of the most obtuse turns of phrase I’d ever heard. When I told him that I didn’t understand what he meant he would do a little jig on one leg, turning his large frame round and round, while laughing to himself. He was a strange man, but his fearsome Hammond playing more than made up for his oddities. He had that indefinable thing called ‘touch’ which only the finest keyboardists master. His musical ideas were always understandable, even though he spoke for the most part in riddles.

  Our rehearsals happened in various places – school halls, back rooms of pubs, anywhere that gave us a space for a reasonable price. The band improved after a couple of rehearsals. I sang through a makeshift PA that offered no voice enhancement tricks except volume, but picked up every passing taxi radio signal. It’s not very helpful having your vocal interrupted every minute with: ‘Roger, 22, where are you? Over.’

  But even this minor inconvenience couldn’t dampen my spirits. I was in a reggae band. That was all that mattered. I had some black friends. My dream had come true.

  Desmond’s Hammond organ and Leslie amplifier were stored in Lawton’s house. They looked like huge wooden pieces of furniture. We had found a good rehearsal space in the Wheatsheaf pub, up the road from Lawton’s house. The easiest way to get the Hammond and Leslie there was to push them along the pavement. It took more time to get the equipment there than it did to rehearse, but nobody could afford the cost of hiring a van.

  One evening at rehearsal in early 1979, a slick, bespectacled, young black guy sporting a natty pork-pie hat turned up. Immediately he indulged in the obligatory hand clasping and high fiving with everybody. He shook my hand and introduced himself as Lynval Golding. He looked different from the others. It wasn’t just his fastidious dress sense either. He had an aura about him, an indefinable shininess that personal success delivers to some people. For a local musician, success in those days meant playing a gig outside Coventry, but this guy started telling stories about touring all over the country with the No. 1 punk band of the moment, the Clash. Even the immaculate creases in his Levi Sta-Prest trousers weren’t as sharp as those credentials.

  Eventually Lynval ran out of stories, so we began playing a song. Within a few verses Desmond motioned for us to stop. Immediately, Lynval and Desmond pounced on Lawton’s reggae rhythm guitar technique. Together they hopped about in a macabre impromptu dance, shaking their right arms so that their fingers made a snapping sound, their voices loudly deriding what they had just heard.

  ‘No maan, no maan. Blood claat!’ Desmond repeated over and over again, the word ‘claat’ exactly a perfect fifth in pitch above ‘blood’. They made several attempts to communicate to Lawton what they wanted to hear, but apparently he did not have the necessary musical chops to evince the particular sound that they were looking for. I felt sorry for Lawton. Ridicule from one’s peers is a bitter pill to swallow. These guys were merciless with one another. Somewhere the politeness gene had got lost and the diplomacy gene had never been inherited. This was a completely different scenario to the whimsical folk scene that tolerated all kinds of amateur performance. This was a dog-eat-dog world that I’d entered, where everybody behaved like a pit-bull.

  They mostly talked as if I wasn’t there. I didn’t much mind, because I didn’t understand Jamaican patois anyway. When Desmond discovered that I didn’t know what he was saying much of the time, he made it his business to talk patois all the time. He couldn’t understand how you could be black and not understand the language. I couldn’t be bothered to explain. He wouldn’t have listened anyway. I should have tried conversing with him in French, perhaps then he might have seen the error in his logic.

  Eventually the rehearsal finished. Lawton packed away his guitar and, looking visibly shaken, bade everyone goodnight. Aitch asked the landlord if it was okay to leave the equipment there overnight, because nobody fancied wheeling it back up the road. He reluctantly agreed.

  I offered Desmond a lift in my car back to where he lived in Radford. Lynval asked if he could come too. On the way, Lynval suggested that I meet up with some of his friends the following evening. Apparently they were looking for a singer for a new band. I dropped them off outside a nondescript house somewhere just off Beake Avenue in Radford. Before he left the car, Lynval pressed something into my hand. ‘That’s the address. Be there about 7.30 tomorrow evening. Desmond will be there too.’

  The words 33, Adderley Street, Hillfields were scrawled in pencil on the inside flap of an empty giant Rizla packet. Indeed these were exciting times. It was the end of May 1979.

  When I explained to Terry what had happened at rehearsal, he looked perturbed.

  ‘Who is this bloke, Lynval?’ he asked.

  I explained as best I could, but I wasn’t exactly sure and therefore sounded like it.

  ‘I hope you know what you’re getting yourself into,’ was all he said in reply.

  I should explain that Terry was one in a million when it came to putting up with my crazy ideas and mercurial decision-making processes. He did what all men should do with their partners, gave them the space to make their mistakes or triumphs, without fear of recrimination. When I look back on this time, I realise he probably felt particularly threatened by my sudden penchant for hanging out with cool black dudes from the Coventry music scene, but if he did, then he was secure enough in our relationship not to show it.

  The following evening at the appointed time, I knocked on the door of a one-up, one-down terraced house in Hillfields, an area infamously populated with varying ethnic groups, some more recently arrived than others, who lived cheek by jowl with students, druggies, dealers, pimps, prostitutes and dole scratchers. The door swung open to reveal a resplendent Charley Anderson dressed in a light tan, neatly pressed safari suit, flashing his trademark toothsome smile.

  ‘Come in, come in, everybody is here already,’ he said, motioning me into the house. This was difficult, because the front room was small, but full of people. A long ’60s-style sofa that had seen better days took up almost the entire length of wall by the door. It was just about possible to squeeze through without bumping into the end of the sofa. Ensconced on this sofa was a tall, blond, angular-featured man rolling a conical spliff on the back of a record sleeve. Next to him sat a beautiful dark-haired young woman with piercing violet-blue eyes. Her face reminded me of a young Elizabeth Taylor. They were obviously an item. I couldn’t help noticing their studied stylishness. She was dressed in a black polo-necked jumper and black ski pants, artfully accessorised with cheap jewellery, which magically looked expensive on her. He was dressed in a cream-coloured Ben Sherman shirt and light tan Sta-Prest trousers that finished about an inch above his black loafers, exposing an expanse of white sock.

  Charley introduced them to me as Neol and Jane Davies. They were the only white people in the room. We smiled at each other. Nervously I scanned the room for Desmond and Aitch. Both of them were sitting on the floor rolling spliffs. A young, mixed-race, almond-eyed boy was strumming an unplugged electric guitar in a corner of the room. ‘Hi, Pauline, I’m Compton, Commie for short,’ he said between strums. He was trying to follow the rhythmic pattern of the record playing in the background. I could just about hear that it
was ‘Kaya’ from Bob Marley’s album of the same name. Even at first glance, his reggae skank guitar action looked so much better than Lawton’s heavy-handed attempt. I self-consciously perched on the sofa next to Jane, secretly wishing that I wasn’t wearing flares. Spliffs were passed until another tap on the door heralded the entry of a tall, slim, smooth-faced and strikingly handsome young black guy, who introduced himself as ‘Gappa’ – but everyone called him ‘Gaps’.

  As I looked around at everybody through the thick ganja smoke, I noticed the door to the kitchen swing open. A homely looking young black woman poked her head into the room and whispered something to Charley. I could just see a little girl, no more than three or four, hanging on to her skirt, staring wide-eyed at the assembled company.

  Immediately, Gaps called out: ‘Hi, Sonia, got any tea?’ She smiled at him and disappeared back into the kitchen, re-emerging after a few minutes with a large pot of tea, a pile of cups and a bottle of milk on a tray. She handed it to Charley and went back inside. That was the last I saw of her on that particular evening.

  When the album had finished, the spliffs had been smoked and the tea drunk, Charley suggested that Neol play his record. Neol’s long slender fingers reached into Jane’s handbag and extracted a 45 rpm vinyl single in a plain white cover. I could just about see the words The Special A.K.A. Gangsters vs. The Selecter crudely stamped onto one side of the sleeve.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but 5,000 of these singles had been pressed up and released via Rough Trade. The Special A.K.A. was slowly building a huge countrywide following, due in part to the success of their dynamite live performances, but more importantly due to their song ‘Gangsters’, which described the vicissitudes of the music business using a new musical hybrid punky/ska. The Selecter track, an instrumental written by Neol, had been gathering dust on a shelf for the past two years, but had been hastily tarted up with the addition of a ska rhythm guitar track and invited along for the ride by Specials kingpin Jerry Dammers because he didn’t have enough money left for the Specials to record a ‘B’ side. Overnight the Selecter had gained its own distinctive momentum. It had even been played on DJ John Peel’s BBC Radio One show, on which he had erroneously said that it was a Specials song. Neol Davies had immediately phoned him between songs and put him right.

  Neol delicately slid the record out of the sleeve and, holding its edges by his palms, gingerly stepped over the floor paraphernalia and elegantly knelt down beside the red Dansette record player in the far corner of the room. He dropped it onto the spindle and waited while the player’s internal mechanisms whirred and clunked before spinning the precious record into life.

  By this time, I was very stoned. The spliffs were even stronger than those that Lawton rolled. As the record began I was mainly aware of the curious jumpy beat, which was not as smooth and relaxed as the Jamaican reggae we had just been listening to. Then a haunting trombone melody kicked in which was good enough to withstand many repetitions. Charley was listening to the record with his head bobbing in time to the metronomic tchk, tchk of the rhythm guitar. At intervals he murmured: ‘Yes, maan. Rocksteady, Rasta,’ whenever he heard something he really liked.

  Then an unearthly-sounding guitar took up the trombone melody, but this time the musician’s dexterity pulled and pushed the melody within the confines of the beat. The music was reshaped, until it took on a deeper poignancy that was somehow missing in the trombone’s efforts.

  Instinctively I knew it was an accomplished piece of work. Everything about the music and the sound was so much better than our mediocre rehearsal efforts. When the record finished everybody congratulated Neol. He smiled beatifically, then loped back over to the Dansette and played the record again. Nobody complained.

  While it played, various people made comments about the mix and sound balance of the instruments. Compton was eager to know how Neol got his weird guitar sound. Neol told him that he used a chorus and delay pedal. Much of this techno-speak went over my head.

  Then Neol addressed the whole room. ‘I need a band,’ he said, ‘to build on the success of my single. That’s why we are all here tonight.’ Then he broke out in a broad smile and started singing Gary Glitter’s 1973 hit, ‘Do you wanna be in my gang, my gang, my gang.’

  The incongruity of the moment made us all laugh and we shouted back in unison: ‘Oh yeah.’

  Jane looked lovingly at Neol and Neol looked lovingly back at her, content to see his brilliance reflected in her eyes. I could see that they would be a force to be reckoned with in the future.

  And thus the 2-Tone band that became known as The Selecter was born. For once I was in the right place at the right time.

  PART TWO

  BLACK & WHITE

  SIX

  WHITE HEAT

  Early photo of Selecter in Charley’s kitchen. Photo by John Coles

  Between 1979 and 1981 everything changed, my identity, my music, my style, in some ways my very being, as I became a fully paid-up member of the 2-Tone movement. Reinvention seemed part of me these days. Perhaps it is easier for an adopted child to adapt to new situations? That risk-taking capability had been finely tuned over the years. I’d never harboured any deep-seated dream to be a pop singer, but when the opportunity presented itself, I grabbed it with both hands. I was reminded of the title of Black Power leader Bobby Seale’s book Seize the Time, written while he was incarcerated; it summed up my attitude to this exciting new career path that had opened up. This is the most rational explanation that I can offer for why I threw up a well-paid job with promotion possibilities to follow a bunch of argumentative guys into the decadent world of pop music.

  Although we got together in Charley’s front room, the deal between us wasn’t completely done and dusted. I was the last piece of the puzzle that was to become the Selecter and as such, I had to prove my mettle to Neol, who I have always thought was none too keen to have a female member gumming up the male workings of the band.

  In retrospect, I have no idea why any of them thought that it would be a good idea to have a girl in the band. There was enough evidence already that women in bands who were not of the wallflower, backing-singer variety were a liability, because the press and media tended to focus on them to the detriment of the band. Somebody, I guess, must have thought that this was likely to happen, so I was paired with Gaps Hendrickson, who could sing, look handsome and dance divinely, but essentially was a very shy man on stage; not a leader. In Neol’s defence he is quoted as saying: ‘As soon as she sang, it was obvious.’

  I think I shall take that as a compliment.

  But more to the point, I think he was astute enough to realize that just another seven blokes in a ska band was not a favourable comparison to the Specials. So a woman in the band was a talking point for the press and made the band visually different. As if we needed that when six of the band were black?

  Charley and Neol had been in bands together in the past and both had taken on the duties of lead singer, but I think that neither wanted to be the vocal linchpin in a band that was destined to gig outside Coventry. Our main aim was to capitalize on the success of the instrumental track ‘The Selecter’, which was easy, because vocally it was like starting with a clean slate.

  Even the name, The Selecter, was in doubt at one point during this period. Charley wanted to call the band Stryder. Under normal circumstances, that name might have suited a late-’70s rock band destined to play working men’s clubs, but these were not normal times. The Selecter was being manufactured to do a job – to give flesh and bones and musical acumen to a ‘B’ side of an increasingly successful record (it was released as a double ‘A’-sided record, but only Neol Davies seems to remember that particular fact!). Every month saw the record inching its way up the charts. It seemed pure madness (no pun intended) to throw away that particular piece of immediate identification. So the name The Selecter stayed.

  I was duly summoned to a rehearsal at the end of May 1979. All I can remember is where it took p
lace. The Binley Oak is a large, unprepossessing pub in Paynes Lane, Hillfields. Historically the building dates from about 1850. It was rebuilt in 1885 on the larger scale that is seen today. In 1896 it was the headquarters of Singers Football Club, later to become Coventry City FC. In fact, the old Coventry City football ground was just up the road. These were the directions that I was given to find it. Not as good as a sat nav, but good enough.

  I was asked to present myself for vocal inspection in the very cold and draughty back room of the pub. Everybody was already there when I arrived and a solitary microphone in the middle of the room awaited me. Since I had never auditioned for anybody before, I didn’t understand the significance of what I was about to undergo. I told them I had a song, ‘They Make Me Mad’, and would it be okay if they jammed around those chords while I sang it to them. The band picked up the simple minor chord sequence very quickly, especially Desmond, whose distinctive ‘creamy’ Hammond organ sound could lift any run-of-the-mill song into orbit. His bouncy intro set up the awkward entry of the vocal in half time.

  I had performed this song in rehearsal with my former, now-aborted band, but these guys ripped up the blueprint and refashioned it anew. Lawton had taken my defection badly. There was no way of sugar-coating the bitter pill of rejection that he had to swallow. I doubt whether he has ever forgiven me for such duplicity. But the truth was that the song had never sounded as good before. The Selecter laid the rhythmic and musical basis for it to come alive. Suddenly I was singing in an uninhibited manner, almost shouting the chorus ‘They Make Me Mad’. My voice gushed out of my mouth with the force of an oil-strike. Pure anger moulded every syllable. It was a totally cathartic experience and set the vocal tone for the band. It surprised me, but I knew it was right for the kind of band that we hoped to become. It was a raw, strident tone, not at all like the ladylike folksy vocals that I had been delivering hitherto. There was a ‘new kid on the block’ and I liked her. Apparently, so did everybody else.