Pauline Black – "We Protested and Were Heard"

Pauline Black and The Selecter may have had their 'moment' at the height of 2 Tone in the late 70s/early 80s alongside The Specials, Madness and The Beat, but that doesn't mean they have been inactive since. In fact, their latest album, Human Algebra, is merely the latest - their 16th in a line of long-players calling out injustice to a rocksteady beat. Not for nothing was Black awarded an OBE for services to entertainment - she's full of surprises, though that doesn't quite explain the telegram from Marlene Dietrich or marriage proposal from Fela Kuti. "I do like the double-take when people hear me open my mouth," she tells Lois Wilson

- By Lois Wilson 

As the formidable frontwoman of Coventry 2 Tone group The Selecter, Pauline Black has had to be tough. Performing night after night in front of audiences that often erupted into violence, she firmly held her ground. "We knew what we were getting into," she shrugs today. "If you were black it didn't come as a surprise. We knew we lived in violent times, and we knew what the world thought of us. But we also knew what we were doing was cutting edge; we owned that stage while we were on it, and we were saying who we were and how we felt. We were the embodiment of 2 Tone, of multicultural Britain. We were the future."

Black takes the mantle of 2 Tone incredibly seriously. But there is another side to her, the 'at home', more private side, where she is warm, relaxed, welcoming. Before our interview starts, we talk domestics: she's got a dog called Milo, a Basenji, rescued from Cyprus. He means the world to her. He sits with her husband Terry while we talk. Pauline and Terry have been married for over 40 years. "He makes me laugh," she says, and when she's not fighting the cause she leads "a very ordinary life, just walking the dog, doing stuff like that."

Black's life has never been ordinary, though. Born Belinda Magnus on 23 October 1953, she was adopted by a white couple, renamed Pauline Vickers, and spent her youth in Romford. In later life, she traced her birth parents - her mother was Anglo-Jewish and had settled in Australia; her father was a Nigerian prince who knew Fela Kuti and King Sunny Ade and shared her deep love of music.