Interview: Music, race, life and family at heart of festival talk for Queen of Ska Pauline Black
She's the Queen of Ska, a fierce campaigner for racial equality and a performer who still records and sings as she enters her seventh decade.
Pauline Black has dedicated more than 40 years to the music scene as the lead singer of the Selecter, with songs like On My Radio and Three Minute Hero still being played and sung by people, and she has travelled the world to share her passion and artistry with hundreds of thousands of fans.
The 70-year-old has also achieved great success as an actor and broadcaster and comes to the Newhampton Arts Centre on Thursday as part of Wolverhampton Literature Festival to talk about her life in music, but also her life as an adopted child and the search for her birth parents.
Pauline documented her stories of music, race, family and roots in her memoir "Black By Design", which came out in 2012 and has led to a documentary about her life being created.
She said she wrote the book herself and said one of the central messages was to show that multiculturalism wasn't dead after hearing some powerful people proclaim its demise.
She said: "I wrote the book in 2010 and there were people like David Cameron saying that multiculturalism was dead and even Trevor Phillips was saying the same sort of thing, goodness knows why they thought that.
"There was a Reggae Britannia thing on TV which I was invited to play on, so the first thing I said when I got on the stage at the Barbican was that it isn't dead, it's alive and kicking and there was a huge audience of people who had been into British reggae and ska and Two Tone and they were all represented there."
Pauline said the book was also a good way to dissect what made her who she was, looking at life and relationships, having been Belinda Magnus in 1953 to Anglo-Jewish/Nigerian parents and, as a baby, being adopted by a middle-aged white couple in Romford, Essex, and becoming Pauline Vickers.
She said the book and documentary helped her to look at the times she grew up, as well as her experiences as a mixed-race woman in those times.
