SeeYouSound 12 - tonight an amazing evening with Pauline Black, lead singer and founder of The Selecter, and the award-winning director Jane Mingay with the documentary A 2-Tone Story

Planet Claire
22 hours ago
2 min read

Tonight at the International Music Film Festival SeeYouSound (at Cinema Massimo in Turin, Italy) we'll have the pleasure to meet Pauline Black in person with the director Jane Mingay, who will present the documentary A 2-Tone Story, which tells the story of Pauline, founder and lead singer of The Selecter, and of her later career as an actress, author and performer.

The evening should not be seen as a nostalgic or revival event, as the material presented by Pauline Black is completely up-to-date.

By clicking on this link you can see beautiful photographs by Jane Mingay who, before becoming a filmmaker, is an internationally award-winning photojournalist. As a filmmaker, Mingay is active in UK Jewish Film, whose primary value is the idea that cinema is universal. It transcends cultural barriers and divisions and can unite, engage and educate a diverse audience through the telling of cinematic stories that offer a stimulating vision of Jewish and Israeli life and culture.

The documentary about Pauline Black is a compelling film that recounts the artist’s forty-year musical career and her tireless struggle for racial equality, exploring her adoptive origins and the challenges she had to face because of racism and sexism.

Pauline Black today is older, she is beautiful, immensely talented, and she will come to tell the wonderful story of when second-generation Caribbean immigrants together with young white Britons revolutionised London and other British cities at the end of the Seventies with the Ska revival movement (drawing on the Sixties), with fabulous bands such as The Specials and Madness, and with the emblematic Two-Tone (of course Black & White) which, in the early Eighties, fused the genres of traditional Jamaican ska, rocksteady and reggae music with elements of punk rock and new wave.

Pauline Black is a very interesting person: she received a higher education, she was the natural daughter of an English Jewish woman and a Nigerian Yoruba prince, and she was adopted in Essex by a white couple. Only at the age of 42 did Pauline trace her biological mother.

She founded The Selecter in Coventry (West Midlands, UK) in 1979 at the age of 26, and the debut album Too Much Pressure was released soon afterwards.

Pauline chose the stage surname Black in reaction to her adoptive family, who used the euphemistic term “coloured” instead of the word Pauline proudly wanted to use: “black”.

In recent years (2017) she went on tour with Gorillaz.

She wrote her autobiography Black by Design (2011).