Pauline Black: A 2 Tone Story
Chronicling Pauline Black's four-decade career in music and her tireless advocacy for racial equality, this engrossing documentary delves into her adopted background, the challenges she faced due to racism and sexism…
Pauline Black: A 2 Tone Story, Jane Mingay
Marginalisation and microaggressions; we all know how it is to live under a white gaze which leaves us feeling restricted, lonely and questioning our inherent worth. Thankfully, at the end of the day most of us can go home and leave the malicious and malignant phenomenon behind, shut out, sheltered by the four walls and those within them.
The reverse was true for Pauline Black, born Belinda, the adopted daughter of a white couple from Essex, othered by a family where casual racism was the norm and Enoch Powell was lauded. It was at home where the white gaze was most penetrative and incessant and out in the world where Pauline became and felt safest being Black.
Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story (2024), a feature film directed by Jane Mangy, and loosely based on Paulline’s book Black by Design (2011). It provides Pauline with the stage to tell her story and that of the second half of the 20th century, of which she played an integral part, from her perspective. The use of archival footage containing words and imagery we hope are the echoes of Britain’s bygone age, but suspect is still prevalent under the surface, is balanced out with personal anecdotes. Pauline retraces her steps to houses and places central to her journey, and a scintillating soundtrack of music encompasses genres, generations and the globe itself. Some of the biggest moments of the century and most prominent and influential figures are intertwined with Pauline’s story, the monumental nestling alongside the personal that makes this docu-film so compelling.
“Some of the biggest moments of the century and most prominent and influential figures are intertwined with Pauline’s story”
The front woman of The Selecter band and the fitting face of 2-tone, the music that amalgamated reggae and rock-steady on one side and punk and rock on the other, and movement that stuck two fingers up at Thatcher-era policies which tried to pit Black against white; Pauline finally had the space and creative freedom to explore all sides of herself and become who she always was.
Her coming of age could have been stunted by a volatile late 1970s and early 1980s fraught with racial tension and class agitation, but alliances such as Rock Against Racism, and the 100,000 that showed up for their 1978 concert in Victoria Park, showed that her and other Black artists were welcome in music and this country no matter what Eric Clapton said a couple of years earlier at a concert in Birmingham, when he spewed racist vitriol about “get the foreigners out” and “keep Britain white”. As well as illustrating the unifying and redemptive power of music, the documentary demonstrates the importance of time and place and exemplifies how critical sub-cultures are to the formation of identity and giving individuals a place in the world.
Fun, but frank about the triumphs and troughs of life, including finding her biological father, her mother’s fandom and discovering the existence of 16 paternal siblings, Pauline’s performance pulsates and is central to the cinematic experience that also features interviews with Don Letts, Arthur ‘Gaps’ Hendrickson and Sonia Boyce. Into her 7th decade and finally comfortable in her skin, we get the impression that the length of the journey doesn’t matter, the arrival is all that counts.
Release Date: October 12th, 2024 (BFI London Film Festival Festival)
Directed by Jane Mingay
Written by Pauline Black, Jane Mingay
Produced by Keith Haviland
Starring Pauline Black, Arthur Hendrickson, Don Letts
Cinematography by Arushi Chugh
Distributor: TigerLily Two Productions
Runtime: 90 minutes.