The best song by The Selecter, according to Pauline Black
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(Credit: Alamy)
When it comes to pop music, timing is everything. Tragically, making great music isn’t the be-all and end-all of what makes you an icon. If that was the case, then many of the most forward-thinking artists of their time, like Iggy Pop, The Velvet Underground and Nick Drake, would have got the success they deserved in their heyday. The Selecter, though, are a strange case. They came up when British ska music was at its commercial peak and, lead by Pauline Black, had one of the most iconic singers of their age upfront.
Yet still, their career is a case of what could have been. After guitarist Neol Davies released their self-titled debut single in 1979, he put together the band we know today to capitalize on its success. After their debut album, Too Much Pressure, reached number five on the album charts, and its lead single, ‘On My Radio’, reached the top ten of the singles charts, the band seemed set for the big time.
However, they never got the sustained commercial success their peers like Madness and close confidants The Specials did. Most of that has to do with Black leaving the band in 1981. However, perhaps she wouldn’t have done so if the song she considered to be their creative peak wasn’t released at the worst possible time it could have been.
The band released their second album on February 27th, 1981, with the album’s lead single of the same name coming earlier, on February 6th. This was two months after John Lennon’s assassination and one month before Ronald Reagan’s assassination attempt. None of this would have been a problem if the album and single hadn’t been called Celebrate The Bullet.
This lead to an almost blanket ban on the single from most radio stations and a struggle to get shops to stock the album. This tanked both the album and the single and lead to the band’s split not long afterwards. This is a crying shame because the album and the single are brilliant. In fact, when making a list of the ten best 2-Tone songs for Louder, Pauline Black ranked ‘Celebrate The Bullet’ as her band’s best song.
Of the song, she said: “This is a brilliant song that completely got overlooked because, unfortunately, it came out around the same time that they shot John Lennon and Ronald Reagan. I wasn’t so sad about Ronald Reagan, but I was absolutely mortified about John Lennon. And Radio 1 refused to play it. So, without airplay, it really wasn’t going anywhere. Also, it was probably a big departure from what we’d been doing, and it probably wasn’t the most auspicious track to promote the second album. It’s an absolute gem of a song, and we still play it live today.”
She’s not wrong, either. The whole record is a lesser spotted gem, with the same socio-political bite that The Specials would be celebrated for. As for the music, it has a punky, more new wave edge than the majority of ska bands of that era would ever experiment with, without sacrificing the melodic joy that got them to the peak of pop stardom in the first place. In the end, stardom really is all about timing. Had that record come out at any other time, we’d rightfully remember it as a ska classic.
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