Latest news with #2Tone
BBC News
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Godiva Festival 'a must' for The Specials' Neville Staple
"I love being on stage and I had to do Coventry."Despite serious health concerns, there was no way The Specials' Neville Staple was going to miss playing the city's Godiva one of the founders of the legendary ska revivalists, has been told he can only play five gigs a year, after having to cancel several gigs and festival sets last year when he was diagnosed with a serious heart Godiva performance on Saturday saw him back in the city where The Specials first took to the stage after forming in 1977. "I've missed being on stage so much," Staple told BBC CWR, explaining that after discussions with his wife and his doctor he accepted he had to cut back on wife and fellow musician Christine "Sugary" Staple knew his heart was immediately set on playing Godiva, where she also played in the band's line-up."He said I've got to do Coventry – out of the five [shows], Coventry is a must," she said. The three-day Godiva festival, which showcases local acts as well as famous bands, will end later with a headline set from Ocean Colour Specials were at the forefront of the 2 Tone movement that started in Coventry in the late 1970s, quickly gaining national acclaim. The genre blended Jamaican reggae, ska, and British punk with the likes of The Beat, The Selecter and Madness, the band captured the mood of the late 1970s, when future prospects for young people looked bleak. Now firmly fixed in Coventry's cultural heritage, 2 Tone continues to inspire successive generations, with tributes posted across the city when The Specials' frontman Terry Hall died in of Hall's piano's has been on display at Godiva this year, alongside a stall from Tonic Music for Mental Health, a charity he supported. "Sugary" Staple described the gig as "a homecoming" and added that "we love Godiva, we've got history at Godiva."The couple have also been involved with anti-knife crime campaigning in recent years, after their grandson Fidel Glasgow was fatally stabbed in Coventry in Saturday, Staple's message to people in the city was: "Stay positive, love one another, and put away those knives." Follow BBC Coventry & Warwickshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
The Guardian
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story review – original rude girl is still impossibly cool
'I was never going to be a nice little white girl,' says Pauline Black, singer with the ska band the Selecter – and a woman with an amazing personal story to tell. There's her childhood growing up as an adopted mixed-race girl in a white family in 1960s Romford in east London, and her time as the impossibly cool frontwoman of the Selecter. Black is a brilliantly blunt straight-talker and very funny. Here she is joking about her open marriage in the hippy 70s: 'I did get the hump one time, when I came home, and she was using my frying pan.' (She is still happily married to her husband.) Black was adopted as a baby and at that time in Romford racism was everywhere. 'It would come at you like a slap.' Even in her family, she remembers an uncle singing the praises of Enoch Powell. When she was 10, Black was sexually abused by a neighbour (her parents' reaction was appalling). Her childhood made her mistrustful; lonely and alienated, she spent hours practising the piano and reading. In 1979, Black was working as a radiographer in Coventry when the Selecter took off – and she changed her name from Pauline Vickers to Pauline Black. ('I don't think my family ever forgave me.') The Selecter were not the biggest band signed to 2-Tone Records, but they were pioneering: six out of seven members were people of colour and they had a female singer. DJ Don Letts says Black was the first lady of 2 Tone and today, she is still rocking her 70s rude girl look: the sharp boy's suits and pork pie hats. After three years, she left the band, did some acting and TV presenting before the Selecter re-formed. Black co-wrote this documentary, and arguably she exercises a bit too much control; that said, given everything in her personal history, you can see why she wants to tell it her way. Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story is on Sky Arts and Now on 16 April.
