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  I hated every minute of it. My co-presenter, thirty-five-year-old Colin Crispen, a former PE teacher, looked like one half of that ridiculous duo who do the ‘118 118 BT’ advert dressed in ’70s gear with droopy moustaches. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I had to talk to children, something I mostly tried very hard to avoid. Worse still, I was expected to introduce whatever chart band had been booked that week. This meant that I had to suffer the ignominy of interviewing Buster Bloodvessel of Bad Manners (who I hadn’t seen since recording days at Horizon studios, Coventry) on the first show. During the interview, Doug Trendle (aka Buster Bloodvessel) insisted on talking about ‘grimble’ at every opportunity. As I was not in on the joke, he succeeded in making me look rather stupid. I later learned that it was a code word for their drug de jour, ‘speed’. They even had the dubious honour of writing and recording the title music for the show.

  A publicity still from 1982. Photo © brianaris.com

  Kevin Rowland (who I hadn’t seen since the 2-Tone tour) and his ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsies’ turned up to promote their No. 1 hit ‘Come On, Eileen’. It was more torture than I could stand. My musical career had stalled and becalmed me on the continually up-ending pirate ship at Alton bloody Towers, while salt was vigorously rubbed into my wounds by super-successful contemporaries. Surely something had to give. But no, the gods were cruel. I must have mightily offended them because they taunted me even further by providing Bob Carolgees and Spit the Dog as interviewees – not an experience that anybody can emerge from with much dignity.

  An expensive change of management solved having to do any more presenting jobs of that nature. I ditched the song collaborators, asked Juliet De Vie to be my manager again and with her help got back on track. An album’s worth of material had been written at snatched moments during the past year and Chrysalis brought a new producer, Adam Kidron, on board. He had just produced Scritti Politti’s album Songs to Remember but, more importantly as far as the record company was concerned, he had helped fashion a new sound for the band, which culminated in a hit song, ‘The Sweetest Girl’.

  True to his word, Adam also helped me establish a new personal sound, alternative gospel soul. As I write the words, I wonder how I ever managed to convince anybody that this was a good idea, but fortunately for me, the mouthy Liverpool wag, Pete Wylie, had just recorded ‘The Story of the Blues’ with his band Wah! Heat. His song was a gospel-tinged rocker too. It was very close to the sound that I had in my head for the songs that I was currently writing. I began to think that I was getting somewhere.

  On the Hold Tight set at Alton Towers

  Adam was from a very interesting political family; his father Michael Kidron and uncle Tony Cliff were actively involved in left-wing politics, so my songs about IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, ‘Nameless’, a young Arab woman’s lament for her dead Palestinian lover, ‘Cedars of Lebanon’, and ‘Something’s Burning’ about the New Cross fire in a house where thirteen young blacks burned to death were easy for him to assimilate without lengthy explanations about why I wanted to write about such subjects.

  A change of image for ‘Shoorah!, Shoorah!’ single cover photo, 1983

  During the summer of 1982 Adam helped me assemble a trusted group of session musicians, which included a fabulous, three-part harmony girl group made up of Lorenza Johnson, Jackie Challenor and Mae McKenna, who had already worked in the studio with Green Gartside. We recorded the Betty Wright classic ‘Shoorah! Shoorah!’ and a self-penned title ‘Call of the Wild’ for the ‘B’ side. We even drafted in Liverpudlian male singing group The Real Thing to back up the girls on vocals. The finished tracks sounded great and radio pluggers were eager to get down to Radio 1 to push the record as a potential hit single. A New Orleans mock-up bordello was built in a south London garage for a day’s video shoot in support of the single. Suddenly everything that was happening was fun, in direct contrast to the last laboured efforts of The Selecter. I was happy and ready to start on an album. Unfortunately the song got a lot of radio play, but stubbornly refused to climb the charts.

  There was a new practice doing the rounds, whereby musicians went to clubs with remixes of their singles. The DJ would spin it and the artist would do a PA or personal appearance that involved singing live or miming to the backing track. The record company suggested that I do a short PA tour, mainly taking in London clubs, but also ranging as far south as Brighton and as far north as Manchester. It was my first experience of the club circuit. Many of the ones I visited were gay clubs, particularly in Brighton, full of outrageously dressed rejects from Village People. I was unable to deliver the necessary over-the-top exuberance required for such an event. I was being marketed as Millie Jackson, but probably coming across as a frightened rabbit. I tried, but I felt hopelessly out of my depth. The nadir of the tour was a PA at the National Ballroom on Kilburn High Road on a club night when Tony Blackburn happened to be there as MC. Dressed in a ridiculous, luminous-green leprechaun outfit, replete with a bell-tipped pointy cap and upturned pointy-toed shoes, he introduced me to the sizeable crowd. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he then proceeded to caper about the stage while I sang to the audience. That was the last time I set foot on a stage in a club. The mere memory of such unbridled ignominy brings me out in a rash.

  Another new development expected of artists was to make the rounds of the new commercial radio stations that had sprung up everywhere. The artist turned up to be interviewed by some twerp DJ on air, who, in return for a spot of abject grovelling, played their latest single and said positive things about it. The hope was that the song would be added to the radio station’s playlist. For some people this probably came naturally, but for me it was akin to purgatory. I was told that if I was nice then goodwill was built up for future releases, so I tried to be ‘nice’, never a good fit for me. My rictus grin when answering questions like ‘How’s your body-popping coming along, Pauline?’ must have said it all.

  Undeterred after the failure of ‘Shoorah! Shoorah!’ to make a chart dent, Adam and I carried on recording an album, but this time we augmented the three backing singers with the London Community Gospel Choir. A big rehearsal studio was booked where we could rehearse all the songs with the band, which now included the Blockheads rhythm section, Norman Watt Roy and the late Charlie Charles. The grandiose idea being floated at the time was that the whole album would be recorded live in St John’s Church in Smith Square, Westminster, which is often used as a concert venue. This spectacular feat was attempted but abandoned when the mobile recording unit proved totally unsuited to recording amplified instruments in such a venue. I can’t even bring myself to think about the recoupable cost of this venture.

  Beaten but unbowed – assuming the foetal position for picture disc of ‘Threw It Away’, 1984, © Pennie Smith

  Sticking to my motto of ‘forever onwards, undeterred’, it was back to Basing Street studios in November 1983 to record the album which spawned the single ‘Threw It Away’ backed with ‘I Can See Clearly Now’ in a more conventional setting. I wrote ‘Threw It Away’ with Phil Pickett, Culture Club keyboardist, in a tiny studio under Kew Bridge in mid-1982. I added lyrics to his eerily beautiful backing track. I loved the song and my recorded version of it is a favourite from that time. Again it didn’t find favour with Radio 1 DJs. The odious Peter Powell went so far as to ridicule it on air by dragging it off his turntable and deliberately throwing it away into the corner of his studio. To make matters worse, he followed my song with the Eurythmics new track ‘Sweet Dreams’ which had been co-produced by Dave Stewart and ex-Selecter bassist Adam Williams. But it didn’t end there; after Chrysalis heard the album they feared the political subject matter of some of the songs and shelved it. I was devastated.

  I moved back to Coventry to lick my wounds. By that time I’d had enough of the music industry. I seemed to be fighting an uphill battle and my meagre defences had been overwhelmed. Terry was pleased to have me home, particularly after two years of seeing me only at weekends. I
enjoyed being back home in familiar surroundings, but I couldn’t shake off the feeling that everything I did musically was doomed to failure. Try as I might, I just couldn’t get with the bland musical sensibility of the ’80s.

  My theatre agent suggested I audition for the part of Lola Lola in an adaptation of Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel at Liverpool Playhouse. It was to be directed by Pip Broughton, a young woman full of left-wing political fervour and eager to make a big splash in the theatre. It was the first time that I had encountered a female director and I liked her fierce energy. I think she liked mine too, because she gave me the part, which was casting against type, a new fashionable experiment in British theatre. I was amazed that she wanted me to play a role that had been made famous by Marlene Dietrich, but if she thought I could do it, then I was happy to oblige. At the time Pip was in a relationship with black actor Joe Charles, so I felt safe in the knowledge that she had some notion about mixed relationships.

  The Blue Angel tells a story about a professor and a cabaret singer in 1930s Berlin, who seek each other across barriers of age, class and education, ultimately finding society’s hurdles too high to cross. My casting had added race into the mix too.

  I moved to Liverpool and boarded in a house just round the corner from Penny Lane of Beatles fame. Released from the stress of having to come up with a hit single, I threw myself into rehearsal, learning to dance and sing in a ’30s pre-war cabaret style.

  The production was timely for Liverpool. The city was just beginning to claw itself out of the post-riot pit that it had fallen into. Positive images of blacks were suddenly fashionable. Indeed, I discovered that black actor/director Trevor Laird was directing a play with a gritty, realist, anti-racist theme in the Liverpool Playhouse studio at the same time. One evening he and I attended a ‘blues’ party in Toxteth and I was shocked when he stopped off in the car to pick up some money from a hole-in-the-wall ATM. There in the middle of what looked liked a rubble-strewn, bombed-out site stood a brand new drive-through bank with a money dispenser. It was the last thing that this poverty-stricken area actually needed at that time.

  Despite the new multicultural sensibility in Liverpool, I was somewhat taken aback on opening night, 9 September 1983, when I discovered that the programme notes offered copious explanations for the predominantly white theatregoers about why they would be seeing a black woman instead of the customary cool Aryan woman straddling the iconic gilt chair while crooning the play’s much-loved theme tune ‘Falling in Love Again’. It suggested that Lola Lola could just as well have been Josephine Baker, the great black American entertainer who had performed in Europe in the ’30s. The director figured that such casting added a ‘complexity and strength’ to the relationship that Lola had with the older professor, who is both attracted and ultimately humiliated by her. I took the stage that night somewhat apprehensively, wondering whether the audience would accept me in the role, but I needn’t have worried; yet again I found myself battling white middle-class theatre’s conservatism and winning. I even got a telegram and a bouquet of flowers from Marlene Dietrich wishing me luck. Unbelievable!

  Marlene Dietrich would have been proud of me – a publicity still for The Blue Angel, Liverpool Playhouse

  Shortly after I finished The Blue Angel, I auditioned for a fortnightly Channel 4 programme, Black on Black. It had already been on the air for a whole series, but the original presenter, the somewhat matronly Beverley Anderson, had left for a BBC news programme. They were looking for a younger presenter to deal with the ‘youth’ issues alongside the more evergreen Jamaican import ‘Miss Lou’, Louise Bennett, a much-revered poet, who it was hoped would appeal to the older black generation. I got the job and presented my first show in November 1983.

  Having only one programme every fortnight that attempted to cover the needs of the entire black community in post-racial riots Britain was both bravely commendable and incredibly short-sighted of Channel 4, especially as it was transmitted on the graveyard shift at 11 p.m. Needless to say, the programme received a great deal of flak about its subject matter from the very community that it was meant to serve. Rasta youth thought it wasn’t representative of them, the older black generation found nothing to satisfy them either and white people dismissed it as ghetto programming and nothing to do with them.

  Imagine the furore in Britain if the white community had had a similar fortnightly programme to take on all their issues? But British television was wall-to-wall white-orientated programming, so the Establishment expected blacks to be grateful for this fortnightly sop. As for me, I loved the show despite the inherent limitations. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet all the heroes and heroines of my adolescence and also to discuss political issues that directly impacted on the black community, such as female circumcision, police harassment and racial discrimination, South African apartheid, as well as more frivolous subjects like black hair care, or Caribbean cooking with the extrovert Jamaican Brummie, Rustie Lee.

  Every fortnight I would tape a ‘live’ show in front of an invited audience at London Weekend Television studios on the Southbank. Guests included such diverse stars as Nina Simone, Eartha Kitt, Clive Lloyd, Stokely Carmichael, Viv Richards, John Barnes, Paul Boateng, Darcus Howe, C.L.R. James, Coretta Scott King, Yellowman, Fela Kuti, Gil Scott Heron, Sade, Smiley Culture, Aswad, Afrika Bambatta, Amazulu, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Benjamin Zephaniah, Hugh Masakela and Miriam Makeba.

  I enjoyed my job. I even had a marriage proposal from Fela Kuti to become his twelfth wife after he appeared on the show in January 1984. I am glad that I didn’t take him up on his offer because shortly after meeting him, his Lagos compound was raided, his mother was thrown to her death from a first-floor window and rumour had it that his wives were raped with broken bottles by the forces of the Nigerian state.

  After a few months the executive producer at LWT, Jane Hewland, decided that Louise Bennett’s style wasn’t working for the show. Trevor Phillips informed me that I would be presenting the shows on my own in the immediate future. If there were any ‘heavyweight’ interviews to do, Trevor would do them.

  Although Black on Black’s agenda appeared to be driven by blacks, behind the scenes in the boardrooms it was a completely different story. The higher management echelons that oversaw it and our sister programme Eastern Eye were white. The white hegemony still ruled. The Weekend World and The Southbank Show offices were on the floor above. Lord Peter Mandelson was a researcher on Weekend World at the time and every now and again I would bump into him, the Rottweilerish Brian Walden or the urbane Lord Melvyn Bragg in the elevator. Rubbing shoulders with the ‘Prince of Darkness’ – who could have predicted that!

  On Black on Black set with Trevor Phillips, 1985

  In an effort to recoup their outlay on my shelved album project, Chrysalis put me together with the newly redundant ex-Specials, and now ex-Fun Boy Three members, Lynval Golding and Neville Staple. Apparently, Terry Hall had informed them by phone that he was leaving the band. Without the eminently marketable white boy fronting the pop trio, the two black guys were out of a job. Under new band name moniker, Sunday Best, we wrote a song together, ‘Pirates on the Airwaves’, about the newest subversive broadcast method, pirate radio. Suddenly, inner-city urban areas were awash with illegal home-made MW/AM transmitters secreted in biscuit tins. These Heath Robinson devices broadcast pre-recorded programmes on cassette tapes inserted into a portable cassette recorder. The whole mess was powered by a car battery and connected to a long wire antenna (often a coat hanger) slung from a high roof. Tower blocks, those imposing mansions of the poor, offered ideal conditions for illegal transmission of overlooked musical genres on mainstream radio, like reggae, jazz, bhangra and the newly emergent hip-hop.

  Chrysalis A&R were very excited when they heard the new song and a video was filmed on the ninth floor of Coventry’s most notorious high rise, 9C Pioneer House, in the rundown Hillfields area. The single was released as 7-inch and 12-inch remix versions backed wi
th my track ‘Streetheart’. It entered the charts at No. 93 and stalled. It was probably naive of us to assume that mainstream radio would champion a song glorifying their direct enemy, but the failure of this single saw all three of us out on our ears at Chrysalis by midsummer.

  I consoled myself with the fact that Black on Black was sending me out to America to cover the 1984 Democratic Convention’s election of their future leader, who would fight as the Democratic nominee in that year’s presidential election. My job was to report on the candidacy of Reverend Jesse Jackson who, if elected, would be the first black presidential candidate.

  In 1984 the thought of a future black president seemed a mere pipe-dream, but Reverend Jackson’s superb oratory skills and principled fight for his revolutionary idea of a ‘Rainbow Coalition’ paved the way for the extraordinary events of twenty-four years later.

  The director, Trevor Hampton, his PA Julie Villard, and I flew into Atlanta on 5 July 1984. It had been four years since I last set foot on US soil and the wet-blanket humidity of the south had lost none of its ferocity. The producer should have been Trevor Phillips, but he was replaced at the last minute because Trevor’s first wife was about to have a baby and wanted him at the birth. Michael Wills, Trevor’s replacement, had flown in a few days before and it was difficult to hide my disappointment when I met him because it was apparent that the whole production team was white. Frankly it worried me to be in a foreign country, covering what was essentially an important ‘black’ story, without anybody on board who could understand the political nuances of racism that I knew Trevor Phillips instinctively understood as well as I did. The team was competent enough to do the job, but lacked the necessary insights to make the story truly extraordinary.