Scritti Politti introduced critical theory to the top 10. Now frontman Green Gartside is too sensitive to listen to pop ? or finish his songs
Any touring band is used to fans who turn up backstage with old singles, photographs and bits of ephemera to be signed. When Scritti Politti toured America for the first time in 2006, as part of their first live dates of any kind in 26 years, something different would happen. Earnest young men would approach Green Gartside ? since 1977 Scritti's singer, songwriter-ideologue and sole constant member ? and show him their published works of philosophy, claiming that they owed their interest in critical thought to Scritti's music.
"The ratio of tactically deployed pop banality to smartarse references to Kant and Gramsci was occasionally uncomfortably high," admits Gartside of his band-cum-vehicle's commercial zenith in the mid-80s, when hits such as Absolute and The Word Girl snuck such subjects as unconditional reality and semiotics into the pop charts. Or rather he reads it because, brilliantly, Gartside has brought prepared notes to our interview, from a talk he's giving later at The Wire magazine's Off the Page festival in Whitstable. More pop stars should do this.
The life of the mind figures highly in the Scritti canon, which is now ripe for revisiting with the release of a greatest hits album, Absolute, next week. Gartside is, famously, joint-holder with Brian Eno of the title Cleverest Man in Pop. As we enjoy an afternoon pint in the Pembury Tavern near his home in Hackney ? fittingly for a man who recorded an album called Cupid & Psyche 85, the beers are called Zeus, Dionysus and Sparta ? Gartside describes yesterday's hangover as "a moment of emotional lability". Later, he explains that one of the reasons he left Rough Trade Records in 1983 was a concern over the "reification of indie". These are not the words of someone who subscribes to modern rock's lumpen suspicion of thought, but neither is Gartside a pretentious individual. He just knows what he's talking about.
A well-read and inquiring mind whose background as a Young Communist in South Wales segued smoothly into the squat-scene theoretics of the punk era, Gartside set out his own mission statement on Scritti's reputation-making 1982 single The "Sweetest Girl". Drawing attention to the loaded nature of pop language, he put inverted commas inside the title. "The weakest link in every chain, I always want to find it," he sang, "The strongest words in each belief, and find out what's behind it." The tension between Gartside's appetite for deconstruction and his longing to abandon himself to the wordless joys of pop have nourished and tormented him ever since.
"I still look for disorienting moments in pop," he says. "Sometimes music can still be too powerful to deal with. It might just be an old Motown hit on the radio that is at the same time asking too much of me, and giving me too much. It happens to my wife, too. We'll have to stop listening to it because we'll be floored, or we won't be able to sleep. The Jacksons' Victory album for instance, the other day ? we actually had to turn it off."
The compilation Absolute begins in exactly that kind of delirious pop daze, with a five-track assault from Scritti's period of peak popularity. He recorded them in New York with Arif Mardin, the pasha of R&B who had produced such premium soul products as Anita Baker, Patti LaBelle and the Bee Gees. To work with such an elite craftsman was an outrageous move for anyone of the DIY punk generation, but Gartside did it anyway. "I wanted to know how it felt to make a record like that."
'Cocaine was briefly a problem'
In those days you had to declare any previous membership of the Communist party on your US visa application. Though Gartside had helped out at the party's HQ in Covent Garden ("Interesting times . . . there were letter bombs going off while I was organising gigs with Aswad and Sham 69"), he had never been a full adult member of the party. On his first visit to America, US immigration delayed him for hours for a different reason: an official had clipped a note with the word WEIRD on his passport. "I was wearing a tricorn hat at the time," Gartside recalls.
The New York sessions were the making of Scritti. "The same will behind my desire to make punk was behind my desire to make big beat pop," Gartside explains. "The idea of the critical privileging of rock music as the unmediated, the truthful and honest as against pop as the derivative, mediated, commercial and superficial . . . that interested me. After the album came out I got endless stick for making bourgeois pop music, but stick has never bothered me."
Mardin proved to be a "charming, delightful gentleman" who nurtured Gartside even though the singer knew he was out of his depth. At the end of each session they would repair to the producer's apartment on Central Park West where he would prepare his "Mardinis". The result was the planet-eating gorgeousness of Cupid & Psyche 85, but also pop stardom for Gartside, a burden he found insupportable. "A genuine breakdown ensued," he says, and the hastily recorded 1988 follow-up album Provision flopped.
"Promoting Cupid & Psyche knocked chunks out of my already fragile psyche," says Gartside. "I was in a poor state, physically and psychologically. I was living in various hotels and apartments in America. Cocaine was briefly a problem. After promoting Provision, that's when the complete collapse happened."
He returned to South Wales, to Usk, and the lost years began, whiling away the days in local pubs. His drinking was never a problem but nor was it an irrelevance. "I've always enjoyed beer," he says. "Drink is a recurring issue with me and it is something I continue to battle." Ironically given his rural seclusion, it was the most urban music of all, hip-hop, that brought him back to musical life.
"It was the beats of hip-hop that made me love it," he says. "There was no jaunty teleological drive from A to Z over three minutes. There was a lack of tonal melody, of the hyperbolic pop excitement that had been my undoing." Hip-hop imports proved surprisingly easy to obtain in Usk, energising him to make the 1999 album Anomie & Bonhomie, the title of which bigs up Emile Durkheim's theory of societal normlessness.
Towards the end of Absolute there's an annexe of what Gartside calls "juvenilia and pre-history" including the pre-pop anti-music of Skank Bloc Bologna from 1978. The early Scritti divided its audience savagely. Chris Cutler, drummer with one of Gartside's favourite bands Henry Cow, mailed his copy of Skank Bloc back to Scritti at their squat with a message that they should leave the music business to the professionals. ("At least he sent it back in one piece. Most people smashed it first.") The song alluded to political upheaval in Italy and specifically Gramsci's theory of the historical bloc of the underclass. In the 21st century civil unrest is back on the agenda, not just in old Europe but the previously repressed Middle East, and Scritti Politti are back on Rough Trade Records. Has Gartside's world gone full circle?
There's nowhere near enough rioting or dissent in the UK, he thinks, but then again Gramsci did say that civil society could absorb incredible economic or political shocks and people would carry on as normal. Gartside still thinks of himself as a man of the left, primarily because the alternative doesn't bear thinking about. "But it's a question of, which left do you want to be part of? I'm a political apostate, really. I just drifted away, as many people do."
Flirting with Pseud's Corner
A few streets away in Hackney, the area Gartside credits with reviving him a second time after another few lost years, there are hundreds of new Scritti Politti songs in unfinished digital form. Gartside admits he suffers from completion anxiety. "But I'm convinced that I have to keep making music," he says, "and that I haven't come close to making the best music that I can. Though I've had a very low opinion of myself, the fact that the best work I've yet done is sitting unfinished on a hard drive back home must be good."
Then he falls back to talking about hip-hop, the musical love that still sustains him. Gartside can rhapsodise about DJs and MCs as few others can. Where can the 50-plus chap go to nod his head to a DJ Premier beat, he wonders? There should be a club for guys like him. He can still be transported by the crunch and grit of a snare sample or the smack and clang of a bass drum. "Or a chopped piece of guitar that was chucked in there as some kind of Duchampian objet trouv�."
You're flirting with Pseud's Corner now, Gartside. "Fuck it, I've never been afraid of that," he replies with a smile. And then we have another couple of pints of Dionysus.
Absolute, a collection of words and music by Scritti Politti, is out on Monday.
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