HUMAN ALGEBRA

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There were about 30 people on the coach,” she says, “and I always used to sit up the front of the bus. And there’s a photo of me, and I’m reading Alien. And it fits the way that I felt on that bus. People gave me a wide berth. Because I wasn’t like Pepsi and Shirlie or whatever – not marriage material. And anyway, I already had a husband [she’s been with Terry since 1973]. And I wasn’t a bloke.” Between 50 and 58 I didn’t know where the hell I was,” she says. “You know when people say that oestrogen is a problem? It’s not a bloody problem. That’s your life fuel. I think I always produced a surfeit of oestrogen; I have a sister, who I discovered much later, and she has the same thing. In menopause, your oestrogen drops, and all that live wire-ness disappears. And when you don’t have it, then you really, really know. I couldn’t have HRT for various reasons. I thought: ‘I’m going to die here.’” Tone veterans prove their resurgent relevance……….haven’t sounded so energised since their 1979 debut” Mojo The Selecter continue to release new music, charting new albums in the UK in the last couple of years, proving that 2-Tone is still as relevant and important as it was 40 years ago. In October 2017 The Selecter released studio album Daylight – their most urgent, politically engaged and purely uplifting record since the days of Too Much Pressure and Celebrate The Bullet. Set for release on April 21, ‘Human Algebra’ is the sixteenth studio album from the reformed and ever-industriousThe Selecter. To commemorate the release, The Selecter will be touring across the UK, including a date at London’s majestic KOKO venue.

Pauline notes that many of the musicians from that era are still in touch and have also toured together. It’s a family, with all the kind of things that happen in families,” she observes. I ask how she felt about the death of the Specials’ singer, Terry Hall. She says she was far closer to Ranking Roger, from the Beat, and was very upset when he died, in 2019 (one of the songs on Human Algebra, Parade the Crown, is a tribute). About Hall, she says: “I didn’t know Terry that well. I didn’t know Terry from the 2 Tone tour, and he just wasn’t a person that… We didn’t warm to each other, but I did admire his talent. His talent was mighty.” Welcome to Aural Sculptors, a blog aimed at bringing the music of The Stranglers to as wide an audience as possible. Whilst all of the various members of the band that have passed through the ranks since 1974 are accomplished studio musicians, it is on stage where the band have for me had their biggest impact.Well, she was 10 years older than all of us. And if Debbie Harry turns up, everybody looks like chopped liver, don’t they? I often look at the picture because I’ve got it in my toilet. We were all interested in one another, but I see the expressions on my and Poly’s faces and they’re decidedly different from the others’ expressions… We’re like: ‘What are we doing here? Where do we fit into all this?’ There were other photos taken, she says, where she and Poly weren’t included.

The anarchic passion that fuelled Selecter gigs during the original 2-Tone era is still there, except the pair are more driven than ever. Their confidence is sky-high and they’re also writing the best songs of their career, which is saying something given the enduring popularity of hits like “ Three Minute Hero,” “ Missing Words,” “ Too Much Pressure” and “ On My Radio.” Also, she was sexually abused, over a period of months, by an adult neighbour. Telling her parents led to an awful scene (they made her retell her story in front of the neighbour and his pregnant wife). Aged 10, she went into herself. A lot of people have said, ‘Won’t you be daunted by the number of people?’ I did some work with Damon Albarn in 2018. We went out to South America with the Gorillaz, playing to about 80,000 people in stadiums. That was a baptism of fire for me but it was plenty of practice for Wembley Stadium. Do you enjoy guesting with Jools Holland’s Rhythm And Blues Orchestra? It’s our new album, it’s got 12 brand new songs on it. The single is the same title as the album and the song Human Algebra portrays the aftermath of a young man’s rather senseless death due to pretty much what is the current scourge, which is knife crime,” explains Pauline, who was awarded an OBE for services to entertainment in 2022. Tone was a crucial multi-racial, multi-cultural explosion borne out of Coventry and the Midlands that remade British pop from 1979 onwards. The main bands who pioneered the movement were The Selecter, The Beat, The Specials and Madness.And I think that it kind of shows the – I’m not going to say importance, but it shows that we had our finger on the pulse then and obviously that has translated into today’s thinking as well.” The Selecter. Picture: Dean Chalkley Forty-three years after The Selecter’s seminal debut album, Too Much Pressure, which still inspires and resonates today, can their sixteenth studio album, Human Algebra, claim a similar place in people’s affections? It is undoubtedly a high bar to clear. The earliest extant mathematical text from Egypt is the Rhind papyrus (c. 1650 bc). It and other texts attest to the ability of the ancient Egyptians to solve linear equations in one unknown. A linear equation is a first-degree equation, or one in which all the variables are only to the first power. (In today’s notation, such an equation in one unknown would be 7 x + 3 x = 10.) Evidence from about 300 bc indicates that the Egyptians also knew how to solve problems involving a system of two equations in two unknown quantities, including quadratic (second-degree, or squared unknowns) equations. For example, given that the perimeter of a rectangular plot of land is 100 units and its area is 600 square units, the ancient Egyptians could solve for the field’s length l and width w. (In modern notation, they could solve the pair of simultaneous equations 2 w + 2 l =100 and w l = 600.) However, throughout this period there was no use of symbols—problems were stated and solved verbally. The following problem is typical: From that time, she’s still friends with Rhoda Dakar, from the Bodysnatchers, but her closest friends are from when she was a radiographer. “Because I’m Miss Distrustful, Mistrustful. I don’t seek out people in the business, I don’t know how to hang out at parties and that kind of stuff. I’ve always been useless at that.”