Bureau of Lost Culture16 Apr 2025

Becoming Black: A 2-Tone Story

"I was never going to be a nice little white girl" she says. Instead, she became an underground star, had hit records with the 2-Tone band The Selector, became a style-icon, an actor, a TV Presenter - and author. Whilst Margaret Thatcher was reshaping Britain and promoting her very own particular vision of what it meant to be British, in the urban jungle of Coventry, a young woman whose image couldn't be more different than Maggie's, was presenting a radically different vision of what it meant to be British Belinda Magnus, born on 23 October 1953 was given away as the baby of a white unmarried mother and an unknown black father. She was adopted by a white family and re-named Pauline Vickers. Growing up in a completely white neighbourhood as the only person of colour, she experienced first-hand the often racist attitudes of the time. She came to the Bureau to talk about all that, how she overcame it, her life as a star of the 2-tone musical scene with her band Selecter, and how, along the way, she became Pauline Black For more on Pauline

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Stephen

Image by Dean Chalkley

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