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  The tour was over and we needed a hit, quickly, if we were to maintain the momentum of a successful band. Roger Lomas’s hastily re-mixed album version of ‘Missing Words’ backed with a cover of Justin Hines and the Dominoes’ ‘Carry Go Bring Come’ would hopefully fit the bill. Chrysalis even gave us a small video budget for this release. Some of the video had been shot in a telephone box outside Brighton Top Rank, just before we performed there (in those days a video was predominantly used on TOTP if the band were on tour and couldn’t make it to London for the show).

  The video didn’t get much airplay. It was not particularly original in concept and the melancholic mood of the song was lost in too much over-exuberant posturing from the rest of the band. Perhaps the director should have wielded a firmer hand, but he was probably intimidated by our general stroppiness. The power of band videos as a marketing tool hadn’t yet been realized. MTV wouldn’t appear on the scene until August 1981. The Selecter would be gone by then.

  Our 6:1 black:white ratio fronted by a woman singer was unique and had been our main weapon when first trying to get the band noticed. But in the commercial world of Chrysalis it was also a major obstacle. How did they market such an image to an overwhelmingly white audience? Particularly when you’d already got a band that had a more forgiving racial mix (only two blacks to five whites) and, even more importantly, a young, white, good-looking front-man. Once we were ‘in-house’ we were at their mercy. The Specials always commanded bigger video and marketing budgets for their product. Chrysalis seemed content to let us coast along in the Specials’ slipstream, which had been fine in the beginning when we were learning the ropes, but we were now in danger of coming severely adrift, unless we united ourselves behind a strong band manifesto.

  The Selecter, 1980 – the ‘don’t fuck with us’ look. Photo © brianaris.com

  Maybe it would have been easier if we had been a reggae band, instead of a new musical hybrid. We were just one headache too many for the record company. We never learned to play the social games. It was almost impossible for us to hide our feelings when confronted with hostile journalists or Keith Chegwin-type TV presenters. We never appeared on TOTP, Tiswas or Multi-Coloured Swap Shop dressed in comedy gear like Bad Manners and Madness, in order to ingratiate ourselves with our audience. Bad Manners gleefully donned grass skirts for one of their singles. If anybody had suggested that to any of us, they would have had their head ripped off, figuratively speaking of course. Gaps’s favourite rhyme, which he would mutter under his breath if some white record company executive pissed him off, was: ‘Gobble gobble gobble, munch munch munch/Six thousand savages sitting down to lunch.’

  That was as funny as fuck. But really it was just all too much pressure.

  NINE

  WAKE UP, NIGGERS!

  In April 1980, following the release of the Too Much Pressure album in the rest of the world, The Selecter tried their luck in America. We were sensibly following in the wake of Madness and the Specials, so we hoped that American ears had been already primed for yet another take on the 2-Tone sound. Stories and rumours abounded that the Specials had not exactly taken America to their hearts – or vice versa. A photo of Terry Hall sticking two fingers up to nothing much in particular other than the iconic Statue of Liberty in the background hadn’t helped when it appeared in the media. Neither did it help our preconceptions of what to expect.

  I’m not altogether sure why none of the 2-Tone bands really made it in the States. After all, the Clash were currently tearing up the place with their punky reggae-meets-rock-and-roll recipe, so our poppier take on that basic sound should have been a successful clincher. Perhaps one of the reasons why none of us reached the upper echelons of the Billboard 100 chart was that the cognoscenti on the east and west coasts, who had possibly explored a broader horizon than the World Series (the only world event happening in one country that I know of!), may have been open to new fashions in music, but the vast expanse of ‘good ole boy and girl’ ten-gallon hat wearers and wet T-shirt bosom jigglers inhabiting the midwest and beyond thought we were a bunch of aliens that had just landed in their backyards. In America’s defence, a small number of black people regularly attended each gig and either left bemused or, if they were sympathetic reggae enthusiasts, congratulated us on a job well done, but seemed somewhat baffled as to why we played everything at such breakneck speed.

  When it had first been mooted that a tour of the Land of the Free was on the cards, my excitement knew no bounds. In my mind, America was like a Mecca, an alma mater, the wellspring of my earliest political thoughts. The opportunity to finally see it at first hand felt indescribably lucky. Despite Terry Hall’s two-fingered gesture, I was prepared to give America the benefit of the doubt, particularly since we were going there armed with a new music and style that couldn’t fail to knock some sense into the meanest of ornery hombres.

  We flew into Vancouver in April 1980 and worked our way down the western seaboard. This Canadian city proved to be an exciting and vibrant place to kick off a tour. Everybody had a day off to acclimatize, because it was our first experience of jet lag. If only the tour agent had told us that we were expected to play two shows the following night, then perhaps we would have taken it easy and not rushed around the city savouring the many delights. Two performances a night was a new phenomenon for us. We used up huge amounts of energy in our stage shows, so to do that twice in a night was initially very difficult. After Vancouver we realized that we would have to learn to pace ourselves. Next stop American soil – Seattle, then Portland, Oregon.

  The motel we booked into on the outskirts of Portland after a lengthy overnight drive fulfilled our romantic vision of being on the road in America. My room even had a waterbed. Unfortunately the front desk omitted to tell me that it needed to be plugged in and warmed up for some hours before you sleep on it. Oblivious to this, I treated the bed as trampoline and joyously bounced around on it for the next half an hour while I phoned several friends in England just to tell them: ‘Hey, guess what? I’ve got a waterbed in my room!’ This information was generally met with squeals of delight.

  Selecter members left to right: Neol Davies, Commie Amanor, Desmond Brown, Charles ‘Aitch’ Bembridge, Jane Davies and Gaps Hendrickson at a truckstop somewhere in the USA.

  An hour later we left to do the show, returning in the early hours of the morning, completely exhausted after another couple of tiring shows. I remember collapsing into my bouncy bed and falling asleep almost immediately. A couple of hours later, I awoke with a serious case of hypothermia. God alone knows what would have happened if I hadn’t woken up. I might have died, because my core body temperature was seriously low. I was shivering uncontrollably. I knew that my condition had something to do with the waterbed. But what was wrong?

  Then I saw the typewritten notice pinned by the side of the bed. It was headed: PLEASE HEAT BED BEFORE USE with copious instructions about the dos and don’ts of waterbed use. Too late now. My teeth wouldn’t stop chattering as I dragged all the bedding off the bed and made myself a nest on the floor. I crawled under the blankets, hoping that they would be enough to alleviate my obvious hypothermia. It took me almost two hours to stop shivering.

  Everybody laughed at my nocturnal misfortune the following morning as I related my story at the breakfast table. By this time, I guess I could see the funny side of it too, but the upshot was that I developed a bad cold and laryngitis. Almost immediately I lost my voice, which pretty much remained AWOL until I got back to England. It did nothing to improve my mood. I felt totally miserable. A singer with a hoarse, croaky voice is rarely a happy bunny, particularly when two shows a night, plus endless interviews are expected at every venue. Nonetheless, America loved the band.

  Nina Myskow interviewed me poolside at the Tropicana Hotel after our first gig in Los Angeles for the British tabloid, the Sun. By this time I could hardly speak due to laryngitis, exacerbated by the after-effects of a particularly energetic gig the night before. She vividl
y describes the band’s performance style as ‘stolen from a frog on pep pills’. Towards the end of her article, she says: ‘The voice may be hoarse but the accent is distinctly middle-class. Pauline is the adopted daughter of white English parents, so hers is a truly two-tone tale.’

  It’s interesting that she picks up on my middle-class accent. People often remark on it, as if I ought to talk like a cockney given where I grew up. I suppose they are correct in their assertion; the way I talk is odd, given my upbringing. To put it into context, let me advance this hypothesis: Mick Jagger talks like a cockney, but really he’s a nice middle-class boy from Surrey. It suits his purpose to ‘culturally slum’. Nobody has a problem with that. Nobody pretends that they can’t understand what he says.

  I grew up in a place where I would be asked to repeat everything twice in a shop or even if I was just passing the time of day with strangers. It wasn’t because they didn’t understand me the first time, it was because they didn’t expect to understand me. As far as they were concerned, black people had come from somewhere else, somewhere foreign. Rather than take the time to listen, they stared, so they missed what was initially said to them. It is probably a natural way for people to be when confronted with something or somebody out of their ordinary social sphere, but I used to get incensed at this behaviour when I was younger. It’s like the way many of us talk loudly and somewhat childishly to elderly people, who are actually perfectly compos mentis with non-impaired hearing. The only reason why we do that is because they are old.

  From an early age I picked up on this annoying trait of strangers asking me to repeat everything I said, so I decided to speak in a manner that nobody could misunderstand, crystal-clear English, with no discernible regional accent. Unfortunately, give or take a few vowel distortions, this is similar to how many middle-class people talk. But for me it is not a pretence, or a way of shuffling up the class ladder from my working-class beginnings, it is just a way of being emphatically understood in the country where I was born. I also enjoy the double take that some people make whom I have never met before, but with whom I have enjoyed a prior telephone conversation. Their reaction often says much about their personal prejudices. My motto when I was younger was, if they’re going to stare, give them a bloody good reason to.

  But issues about accent aside, this article is quite disturbing to read. In retrospect I think I was just covering up my real feelings and blurting out anything that would keep people from probing too deeply. It is obvious that I didn’t want to upset my mother, who collected many of these often incorrectly reported newspaper articles. I hated this new chore of being interviewed. Nobody ever wanted to talk about the music, just personal stuff.

  We stayed at the Tropicana Hotel at 8585 Santa Monica Boulevard (the famous Route 66) in Los Angeles; in the greater scheme of things, it was possibly a dump of a place, but its fame preceded it. It had been the former residence of Jim Morrison of the Doors and Tom Waits. Frequent guests had included such luminaries as Janis Joplin, Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Cochrane, the Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, Martha & the Vandellas and Frank Zappa. It was a first stop on the way up the rock-and-roll ladder, as well as a place to stay once you’d made it. Sadly, it is no longer there. It was demolished in 1988 and replaced by the Ramada Hotel, another landmark gone from old Hollywood. Apart from the black tiled swimming pool and the rock mythology that surrounded it, the next best thing about the Tropicana was the fact that it housed Dukes Coffee Shop, which was also regularly used by the dead and not-so-dead denizens of the pop and rock world. The Selecter soaked up the stories of long-gone heroes like a sponge.

  Poolside at the Tropicana waiting for Ms Hunt. Photo © brianaris.com

  I adored the American breakfast – the many ways to have your eggs was a constant fascination for me. Plus the culinary delight of having blueberry pie and ice cream delivered to your motel door at any time of the day or night. These were innocent pleasures compared with what some members of the band were experiencing. The main thing I remember about the Tropicana stay was that Charley managed to damage his back while in the shower with some ladies, which warranted a visit from Jack Nicholson’s doctor, at great expense I would guess, and having to blow out a couple of LA shows, at even more expense!

  The Tropicana was the embodiment of late ’70s/early ’80s LA excess. Dealers, groupies, drug casualties, strippers, musos, porn stars and maniacs floated in and out of rooms which usually weren’t their own. There were banana trees growing outside my first-floor room balcony and below a huge swimming pool which only seemed to see any action when someone fell in. Our first press conference was held beside this pool. It was also my first introduction to my teenage crush, the mighty Marsha Hunt.

  There is a time in the lives of most women when they can be considered to be at their best, much like a sun-burnished, juicy, ripe peach that has been picked at just the right moment to preserve its freshness. For Ms Hunt, I suspect that time was in May 1980. She fetched up by the poolside of the Tropicana with a tape recorder and microphone, eager to interview us for her weekly report on British bands performing in Los Angeles. Armed with her taped insights, she hopped on a plane to London once a week to deliver her work. The whole band was smitten when they first saw her, it was like a Tom & Jerry cartoon, where the cartoon characters’ eyes come out on stalks, their tongues flop out onto the floor and their hearts beat like jackhammers. To add to her sexual allure, Ms Hunt was rumoured to be Mick Jagger’s ‘Babymother’. Gone was her signature Afro. Her liquorice-coloured hair now hung long down her back, forming a cloud of natural beauty that gently bobbed with her every elegant movement. The perfection of her brown skin and the languid sound of her mellifluous voice completed a picture of overwhelming femininity. Desmond’s opening line to her was ‘I’ve always wanted to fuck you.’

  To her credit, she just smiled at him as though he were a court jester, before getting down to the serious business of collecting usable soundbites for her show. I could hardly believe that this woman, to whom I had been in thrall since the age of fifteen, was interviewing us. I croaked my way through her kind questions, totally mesmerised by her cool and self-assured demeanour. Unfortunately she was in a queue of several other journalists and her allotted time was up. The record company press officer was eager to get as much journalistic throughput as possible, so the interview was wrapped up quickly. Before she left, she asked if it was possible to do a more in-depth interview for a magazine that she wrote for. She specifically wanted to interview Neol and me, presumably because she thought that in our capacities as songwriter and lead singer of the band, we would have the most to say.

  She offered to collect us in her car and drive to her house later that day. Naturally we accepted her offer – anything to get out of the hotel’s stir-crazy environment.

  At her surprisingly compact home in a quiet suburban LA street, we were almost immediately herded into a bedroom to have a look at her sleeping daughter, Karis. The child was probably about ten and at first glance there was no mistaking that she carried the genes of her famous father. I felt that this was a ritual that had to be acted out every time a stranger came to call. It was as if Karis validated her mother’s ’60s lifestyle choice as the concubine of rock royalty.

  Marsha Hunt graciously hoisting my unpublished novel, The Goldfinches, into the air at a book fair in the mid-’90s

  Despite having encountered the goddess of my teenage dreams in Los Angeles, I found the actual city, at least the small part to which the band had been exposed, curiously underwhelming. The endless roads lined with anonymous-looking single-storey buildings, some of which were shops, often gave the appearance of a shanty town more than a seething metropolis. Of course, there were skyscrapers to be seen in the far-off downtown area, but nobody from the record company seemed eager to show us these delights. So for a bit of exercise, or just to relieve the boredom, some of us rambled around the streets near the hotel or ventured further along Sunset Boulevard to the touristy Su
nset Strip to buy cheap tacky souvenirs.

  On one such exploration of the hotel’s immediate hinterland, a police car slowly cruised past me, then turned around and stopped close by. Two burly cops got out of the vehicle and approached me. I was asked what I was doing. Since I was alone, I felt extremely apprehensive about their enquiries, particularly because both of them were armed with handguns in hip holsters. I answered their questions as politely as possible under the intimidating circumstances. As soon as they heard I was English, they visibly relaxed. They explained that one of the local residents had spotted me walking in the area and dialled 911. I was warned that it was unusual to see people walking in suburban streets. Los Angeles residents drove everywhere, so automatically suspicion was aroused when strangers were seen on foot in the neighbourhood. The upshot of this was that I promised never to do anything as stupid again as use my own legs as a means of exercise in Los Angeles, unless it was in a park. The same thing also happened to Desmond. I would have paid good money to listen to his LAPD encounter. I doubt whether he greeted them with the same opening gambit that he used on Ms Hunt.

  Such vigilance on the part of the police seemed misplaced, when I considered that they might have been more gainfully employed apprehending the constant bevy of young, tall, tanned, blonde girls with large bags of coke who frequented our gigs and the Tropicana. The Land of the Free certainly lived up to its name when it came to sexual favours and gratis lines of cocaine being doled out. Our colourful minder, Steve English, picked up one of these young honeys almost as soon as we checked into the Tropicana. Her name was Duffy, she was cute as a button, and along with all the other would-be ‘starlets’ who waited tables and served beer, she was just waiting for her opportunity to step on to the silver screen. Unfortunately, in reality she was just another ‘boy toy’ who would get old and used up as quickly as the grams of coke she racked out by the pool.