“But I don’t remember any sense that we had subverted anything. The abiding feeling was disgust” (Scritti Politti), 2011
“Oh God. Do I really want to see this?” In an otherwise empty North London pub, Green Gartside looks on in trepidation as he registers the item I’m pulling out of my bag. On Page 27 of the 1985 Smash Hits sticker album, his younger self gazes back at him. Just above Billy Bragg and to the right of Bronski Beat, the entry for him reads, “He’s been through it all: angst-ridden independent politico-punk, purveyor of serious pop, right through to black music and current status of hippest of hip-hop crop. Charming, eloquent, stylish and just a little bit pretentious, he wears his hair long and likes his chocolate white.”
You suspect that the Green sticker staring back at his older self would be horrified by the idea that he could be summed up so thoroughly in 45 words. But the ensuing decades have clearly humbled the well-preserved 54 year-old. “That’s spot-on,” he laughs. “I’ve got nothing to add to that really!” Reconciled with his past if not altogether delighted by it, Green has finally come around to the idea of having his best-known songs gathered onto a single CD. Incredibly, prior to the release of next month’s Absolute — The Best Of Scritti Politti, the group formed by Green whilst at Leeds University in 1978 has yet to receive a career-spanning anthology. Even now, whilst Absolute comes frontloaded with all the hits from Scritti’s mid-80s imperial phase — Wood Beez, The Word Girl, Absolute — it lacks any material from 2007’s Mercury-nominated return to action White Bread Black Beer. Green intimates that his manager Geoff Travis — whose Rough Trade imprint released that last album — failed to reach an agreement with EMI over the use of those songs. Travis merely says that “White Bread Black Beer deserves to be seen as the beginning of a whole new period of Scritti music — not as a full-stop on what Green has already achieved.”
One thing that becomes clear within minutes of meeting Green is just how ambivalent he feels about poring over his past. “I’ve a tendency to see everything I’ve done as pretty worthless,” he says. His body language, at times, is painfully apologetic. “I also hear [in those songs] the hubris and arrogance of someone who really has no place doing this stuff at all.”
He isn’t the first musician to emerge from fame’s carousel ride and find himself beset with more insecurities than he had when he went in. But when Green talks about how quickly the whole thing plunged him into misery, it’s hard not to be startled. “I suppose there would be those people who would suddenly find themselves on American Bandstand, stood next to Dick Clark, and think, ‘Yeah, I’ve finally got here. This is great…’” He pauses momentarily, and sips his Guinness. “…as opposed to to sitting there thinking, ‘What the fuck? But I don’t remember any real vindication or sense that we had subverted anything. The abiding feeling was just a sense of disgust with the insincerity of it all. And a sense that I wasn’t entitled to any of this.”
It’s startling because, to anyone who had charted Scritti’s ascent from the very beginning, it seemed like nothing less than a spectacular coup de grace. Of all the groups competing for airspace in London’s fragmented post-punk scene, Scritti Politti seemed the least likely contenders to cross the gulf which separated independent music from pop. Their music was dense with theory. The debut single alone, Skank Bloc Bologna, managed to crowbar allusions to neo-Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, a group of Italian radicals who had sparked riots in Bologna and — just for good measure — a sarcastic allusion to The Clash, for what Green saw as their corny “macho gunslingers” image. Despite decamping from South Wales to Leeds, where he studied fine art, Green had kept in touch with schoolfriend Niall Jinks — with whom he had once tried to form a branch of the Young Communist League. When Green completed his degree, it was together with Jinks on bass and dreadlocked drummer Tom Morley that Green hit London, empowered to make music by after seeing Sex Pistols take their Anarchy In The UK tour to Leeds. Unlike Sex Pistols, however, independence was central to Scritti’s worldview. The wrap-around sleeve of Skank Bloc Bologna featured detailed information for anyone seeking to self-release their own music.
If Green was intrigued by the process of pop stardom, there was no evidence of it discernible in what Green called their “scratchy-collapsy” assimilation of staccato punk and dub-reggae dynamics. Hegemony was an all-out renunciation of all thinking that might be termed “establishment”. Scritti’s sense of shared purpose was compounded by their living arrangements at the time: a Camden squat immortalized on the sleeve of the 4 A Sides EP in 1979. Books, stray sheets of paper and empty beer bottles cover the walls and floor. Framed proudly on the wall is a Soviet flag. Green’s communism was no passing phase. At the height of his teenage recalcitrance, Green’s mother and stepfather suggested that if he thought life was so much better in a Socialist republic, perhaps he should go there.“Things degenerated terribly between me and my parents. They had always been bad, but with my stepfather, they got particularly bad. I can remember them asking if I would go and see the school counsellor or a shrink. Finally, it got to this idea of having a holiday in the Soviet Union. They got back from the travel agents in Newport and said, ‘Well, we couldn’t get you to Russia, but we can get you into Yugoslavia. So, off I went. I stayed in a remote Communist Party hotel on a huge frozen lake in Yugoslavia. It was like a castle, and I was the only guest there. The main thing I remember is walking across this lake towards a party of beautiful local schoolgirls and thinking, ‘I mustn’t fall over in front of them.’ And of course, I fell over in front of them.”
In the post-punk microclimate, Green carried himself with the air of a man who had all the answers. The Camden squat was an amphetamine-fuelled exchange of ideas which attracted musicians and journalists in equal measure. Green’s endorsement seemed to carry major currency. He cringes ever so slightly as he recalls telling one regular visitor, NME writer Ian Penman, that he ought to feature folk revival godfather Martin Carthy in the pages of the music paper. Green had been a devotee of Carthy in his teens — Carthy had even gone out of his way, on occasion, to drive his teenage fan home. Penman duly obliged Green with a glowing Carthy testimonial.
In fact, like so many people who build scenes around them, Green was looking for a sense of belonging. His childhood had been unhappy. Prior to his parents’ separation, he remembers his mother and father moving to a new town in an attempt to make a fresh start. His father, a sales rep for Bachelors, would be away from home for two weeks at a time. “He would swap his sample of Cup-A-Soup with other food reps. When he realised that I had a taste for Tudor Hamburger-flavoured crisps, he would return with a box of them for me. I’d sit in front of The Man From UNCLE with a pack of those and The Beatles playing in the background.” His father’s absence was something that Green touched on in the more confessional seam of songs that comprised White Bread Black Beer. The arrogant energy of youth, however, is wired differently. “Marxist analysis gave shape to whatever dissatisfactions I had at the time, be it industrial South Wales, my family or everything else.”
No-one ever said it would be easy, being a Wittgenstein-quoting Commie punk on speed. Add to that, the pressures of being the principal songwriter in a band that sought to render the existing vernacular of pop behind obsolete, and some sort of crisis was inevitable. “Every weekend, I was out selling the communist paper Young Challenge and getting beaten up. I always carried a knife. It felt like you had to, because you could be bottled or whatever. People would just see you and get out of their cars with whatever weapons they had to hand.” A vivid sense of that prevailing atmosphere is evoked on one early song 28/8/78. Possibly improvised, but none the worse for that, it unfolds around a sample of Radio 4’s The World Tonight, featuring reports of unrest between rioters and police in Portobello, replete with “scores of loudspeakers pounding out non-stop reggae and rock music.”
As a way of life it was unsustainable. That much, at least, must have occurred to Green as he was being rushed to hospital the morning after Scritti supported Gang Of Four in Brighton. What was reported at the time as a “heart attack” turned out to be a severe anxiety attack, which briefly left him incapable of speech. Quoted in Simon Reynolds’ definitive post-punk history Rip It Up And Start Again, Green recalled the moment the penny dropped. “You’re in a hospital bed with people leaning over you asking you what you’ve eaten recently and you realise that you haven’t eaten anything recently. They ask you where you live and you realise it’s a shithole and they ask you when you last slept and you haven’t slept for ages. They asked if I had anything worrying me and EVERYTHING was worrying me.”
At the behest of his worried parents, Green fled to Wales and reconfigured Scritti Politti. Reading Jacques Derrida had given him the tools with which to expose what he saw as the internal contradictions that littered the pop vernacular. He decided that Scritti Politti stood a far better chance of subverting pop if they worked within its strictures. Conveniently, he had written a song so irresistibly catchy that it necessitated that shift. In the canon of early 80s indie music, Rough Trade supremo Geoff Travis describes The “Sweetest Girl” as a “game-changer”. Whatever ironic detachment the titular scare-quotes conferred upon the song — at the time, Green called it “a perversion and extension of lovers-rock” — it was clear that he was no longer in denial of his skills as a natural popsmith. In the studio where Scritti Politti recorded the single, their first for Rough Trade, Robert Wyatt came in to play keyboards, bringing Julie Christie with him. Robert and [his wife] Alfreda thought that she and I might make a match. But I was too frightened to talk to her!”
On the finished recording, Green’s voice seemed to have climbed a register, perfectly complementing the honeyed keyboard oscillations of a guesting Robert Wyatt and Jinks’ swampy dub bass. “The strongest words in each belief/Find out what’s behind it,” sang Green on the song. This was as near as he would get to telling us that he still hadn’t found what he was looking for. “It was meant to be a duet between Kraftwerk and Gregory Isaacs,” recalls Green. “We got a positive response from Gregory Isaacs’ management, but nothing from Kraftwerk. A few years later, I met Kraftwerk. I went to see Tito Puente with Ralf [Hutter] and Florian [Schneider]. I think I brought it up, and I remember them saying that they hated reggae.” On Scritti’s 1982 Rough Trade debut album Songs To Remember, the tectonic shift in Green’s musical outlook was made manifest on Asylums In Jerusalem, Jacques Derrida and, in particular, Rock-A-Boy Blue. On the latter, he sang, “Don’t they rock like lonely lovers/Don’t they want to make the money/Don’t they want to be The Beatles?” Green nods in recognition. “It was both a finger pointing at myself and elsewhere.”
As far back as his final days in the Carol St squat, Green’s problem was that, increasingly, the music exciting him wasn’t beset by the sort of conflicts to which he subjected himself. “PiL’s Metal Box had just come out, but the radio was playing It’s A Love Thing by Whispers and…” For a second or two, words fail him. “I can’t tell you how great that record sounded to me. It blew my mind. God, just fantastic, liberating music. There was definitely a point at which, for me, Pere Ubu fell out of the top slot and suddenly Shalamar had replaced them. That was a sort of epiphany for me, in a way. As an unhappy child, growing up in Wales, I loved pop, but I couldn’t hear Motown. It was a sort of… noise to me. But suddenly, I was able to hear black American pop music in a new way.”
“I couldn’t really justify keeping him on the label,” remembers Geoff Travis. “It was pretty clear that if we were going to do him justice, we would need expensive videos and production values that would have bankrupted Rough Trade. Having been a catalyst in The Human League’s transition from electronic conceptualists to chart-conquering pop stars, Bob Last was enlisted to do the same for Scritti Politti. As he did with The Human League, he secured them a deal with Virgin; and as with The Human League, it was a shift that incurred the departure of two members. Jinks and Morley were out of the picture. Replacing them were New Yorkers: drummer Fred Maher and Green’s longest-serving associate, keyboard player David Gamson.
The history of independent music has been littered with bands who talked a great pop song in interviews only to sign to a major and find themselves lacking when it most mattered. Now, with the seemingly fathomless resources of Virgin at his disposal, it was time for Green to action those theories. Gamson remembered the sessions for what became Cupid & Psyche 85. “We suddenly had a budget and were working with all the best musicians, in the best studios with the best engineers. It was amazing. Green was pretty great about allowing experimentation in the studio, and since he was the one with the chequebook, he was running the sessions.”
For Green, the reality was altogether more daunting. Having studied the credits on the soul and R&B music that was now consuming him: David Frank of digi-funk pace-setters The System; Marcus Miller (Miles Davis, Luther Vandross) and wouldn’t it be great it R&B deity Arif Mardin produced the whole thing? When Green shudders at the hubris of his younger self, this might be the sort of thing he has in mind. And yet, when Mardin heard Green and Gamson’s demos for Wood Beez and Absolute, he heard hit singles. Whether Mardin was overly concerned with their deconstructionist lyrical approach is altogether less clear.
All these years later, it’s sobering to think that, even as a generation of pop fans saw a pyjama-attired Green cross-legged atop satin sheets miming angelically in the video to Wood Beez, the irreversible slide into a state of permanent fear had begun. “Well, it really began when we recorded the album,” he recalls, “I simply didn’t know that was how you put together these sorts of records, with such a heightened level of sophistication. You’d have a respected session player like Paul Jackson Jr suddenly saying, ‘Do you think I should lean back on the sixteenth after I play that note?’ And you’re thinking, ‘What the fuck? I freaked — and it was only with the help of Arif that I sort of…” His voice trails off.
“I mean, it was such a massively expensive record to make — partly because of how slow I was. We were using up all that Manhattan studio time. And I would go to Arif’s place on Central Park West and we’d drive out to White Plains, just me and him, and listen to music and talk about music and do the vocals there. At that point, I was basically reduced to being terrified every time I opened my mouth. It suddenly dawned on me that I was way out of my league.”
Wasn’t there anything that could help him through in the short term? “Well, there was cocaine, but that always made me sing out of tune. I drank a lot.” But Green had pulled off his coup de grace: a record that simultaneously celebrated and critique the music it sought to emulate. On each of its four big hits — Wood Beez, Absolute, The Word Girl and Perfect Way — Green sounded like he had unlocked a secret portal to the Platonic plane of pop song love. Surely, that, if nothing else was a comfort?
“It actually leaves you feeling uncomfortable,” says Green. “There’s a flicker of elation. Stevie Wonder said he liked the album. Then you start to doubt how much of it you could really claim credit for. Because, you had Arif Mardin and all these brilliant players, and you tend to put yourself at the bottom of the list.” All these years later, it’s not altogether clear that Green places himself any higher on that list. As an aside I mention a 1991 song by The Lilac Time called A Taste of Honey. In it, Stephen Duffy sings, “Back in 1985/Cupid saw me take a dive” — a reference to the suddenness with which Duffy — also a Virgin act — found himself deprioritised when the Scritti album came out. “Is that true? I honestly had no idea,” says Green, as if suddenly impelled to go back and apologise to Duffy.
For Green, a lack of entitlement seems to permeate almost every memory of this period. Years later, Paul McCartney would recall being in the studio at the same time as Scritti Politti and boggling at the amount of time it took Green to lay down a vocal. At the time though, he declared himself a fan. “He and Linda invited me to go and see Buddy — The Musical with them, but I was too frightened to get back in touch.” Over in America, where Perfect Way was becoming a hit, Miles Davis recorded a cover of the song for his Tutu album. “I ended up at his apartment one day,” recalls the singer, “He spread out a selection of his paintings and said, ‘Which one would you like?’ I couldn’t take one. It felt like a test. Like, ‘what if I pick up the wrong painting?’”
Nevertheless, Green and Davis’s friendship lasted long enough to see the latter play and achingly lovely solo on Oh Patti (Don’t Feel Sorry For Loverboy). The first single from 1988’s Provision was a hit, but in truth, there wasn’t too much else on the album that was equipped to follow it into the charts. Not that Green seemed overly bothered. The Patti he sings about in that song is a friend of the girlfriend he has since gone on to marry. And the Loverboy, who “wants the world to love him/Then he goes and spoils it all”? “That’s pretty easy to work out, I think.”
With hindsight, it’s glaringly apparent that the three year break between albums wasn’t nearly long enough for preserve Green’s state of well-being. The promotional whirlwind that swept up Scritti Politti in the wake of Cupid & Psyche 85 had left its mark. “I relied on David (Gamson) and Fred (Maher) enormously. I took them around the world with me — on couches in God knows what city in America, first thing in the morning, talking to people who don’t know who you are, about some record they don’t care about. Every time you do something like that, it eats away, perhaps irretrievably, at your sense of worth. Whatever high-minded ideas you had about doing this count for nothing.”
Faced with the prospect of doing it all over again, Green skidded to a halt almost at the first hurdle. Scoot to YouTube and there’s an interview with him and Paula Yates, which makes for painful viewing. Biting his lower lip, he curtly explains to Yates that being co-opted into the world of pop stardom “has been a lot of fun… but once you’ve seen that happen, you’ve seen it, so you have to look for your rewards elsewhere.”
Green’s last days in London seem no less surreal in the telling, all these years later. “I would go to Browns and hang out with George Michael a lot of the time,” he recalls. “Did he seem happy by comparison? No, I have to say, he didn’t. We’d have dinners there. Adam Faith would be around too, always offering business advice. There were American managers too, interested in getting involved with me. Peter Asher was nice. He flew me over to California and lent me Joni Mitchell’s guitar at my hotel on Sunset Strip. But I was fucked. And, of course, acid house was just beginning to happen, so Provision made absolutely no sense in that climate. I came back here from having lived in America, and it was like, ‘What the fuck is happening?’ I remember going to a warehouse party with Leigh Bowery, and thinking, ‘I’m sorry. I’ve no idea what you people are doing.’”
The moment he “bailed” came very soon afterwards. Filming “in some theatre in Brixton” for Provision’s second single Boom! There She Was, Green has only “blurred” recollections of “a complete kind of breakdown starting to happen. There were some doctors called in and I ended up in a hospital in Chelsea.” He left. Not just the hospital, but the entire machinery of his life. “I split up with the missus, split up with the management and went to live on my own in Wales.
Usk, to be precise. Surrounded by the Brecon Beacons, “in striking distance” of old schoolfriends, Green “drank the months, if not the years away, playing darts.” In his exile, the only music to which Green listened was hip-hop. In retrospect, he thinks that there was probably a reason for that — “maybe that [in hip-hop] there was no song.”
Lured out of hiding by Martyn Ware’s revived B.E.F. project, he recorded a couple of singles with nascent ragga stars. The more successful, a version of The Beatles’ She’s A Woman, featured Shabba Ranks, who Green remembers rolling into the studio mob-deep, with guns, everything. “His manager Clifton ‘The Specialist’ Dillon would physically get a hold of Shabba while Shabba was on the mic and sort of thump him so he could feel the rhythm.”
Britpop came and went. Did he miss being a part of it? “No. I didn’t like it. [Damon] Albarn annoyed the fuck out of me at the time, although, in retrospect, all I can say is that Blur are much better than I thought they were.” Throughout the whole period though, Green never stopped writing — which meant that when Virgin approached him about delivering a successor, he had an entire album written and arranged. After Provision, Green and Gamson had, in the latter’s words, come to “hate each other’s guts”, but a decade apart and a clearer demarcation of roles made the recording of this record a more harmonious affair. Recorded in L.A., Anomie & Bonhomie stands partly as Green’s love letter to the music to which he defaulted in the heart of bucolic Wales. One of two scintillating funk excursions on the record, the Mos Def-abetted Tinseltown To The Boogiedown had radiated a carpe diem vitality that had hitherto eluded anything bearing the Scritti imprint. Other songs — First Goodbye; Brushed With Oil, Dusted With Powder — finally saw Green able to relax his self-imposed songwriting rules and draw upon the adversities that had made him.
Did Anomie’s commercial failure bother Green? “Not at all,” he says. “I’ve always felt far more comfortable with failure than success.” For one of his oldest associates though, Green’s disappearance from the cultural radar was an injustice he felt compelled to overturn. Geoff Travis: “Green has amassed over 200 songs that no-one has heard. He has never stopped writing. Getting him to play them to you though is another matter.”
If Green’s 1990s were about dismantling the framework that had made him so unhappy, his 2000s have been about building a new one in which Scritti Politti can exist without exerting an unacceptable toll on their creator. His return to London saw him finally marry Alys, the designer who had stayed by his side throughout the 80s. Her influence on the homespun intimacy of 2006’s White Bread Black Beer is palpable — not least in the eye-mistingly beautiful confidences of Snow In Sun and Locked. It would be lovely to say that Green has found peace, but other songs on the album — in particular Road To No Regret — suggest that he isn’t quite there yet. When I ask him if he has been in touch with early Scritti cohorts Jinks and Morley, he says, “They always feature in my nightmares. I don’t know why. I don’t think we parted acrimoniously.” For all of that, recent years have seen him manage to slay some long-standing demons. Ahead of the album’s release, an unadvertised gig in Brixton marked Scritti Politti’s first show since the night which precipitated that full bodily anxiety attack in Brighton.
“The way he’s done it,” says Scritti Politti’s current keyboard player Rhodri Marsden, “…is by surrounding himself with musicians who were just as terrified by the prospect as he was.” Marsden himself got the call after he happened upon Green by chance in his local East London pub. “It’s important to him that Scritti exists as much as a social unit as a group. Going to the pub has always been as important as rehearsing.”
On receiving a Mercury nomination, he remembers “getting an early morning call from Geoff Travis and being chuffed to little mint balls. Elvis Costello also sent me a very nice email.” Travis feels that, his job is “to restore Green to his rightful place in the pantheon of maverick British songwriters.” His point is well made, not least in the light of an emerging tranche of indie bands — These New Puritans, Liars, Foals — whose year-zero seems to be the “scratchy-collapsy” climate of indie creativity that incubated the young Scritti. No point in asking Green to appraise their worth. It’s hard enough for him to appraise his own work, although he ponders that “there are quite a few currently celebrated bands that sound like going back in time and sitting through an afternoon of demos at Rough Trade.”
On Absolute, two new songs — A Place We Both Belong and A Day Late & A Dollar Short — see Green reunite with Gamson. On both songs, the whip-smart pop science of Cupid & Psyche-era Scritti receives a 21st century update that doesn’t quite extend to lyrics that find succour in love’s little intimacies. What would the young Green have made of their sentiments? “He would have found them mawkish,” says his older self. “But that’s fine. I understand why he felt that way. As long as he stays in 1980 and I have no wish to go back there, we can happily coexist.”
This is a much longer version of a feature that first appeared in Mojo Magazine.
