Talking with a German part2

-- [not published], July 1999

This is not for publication.

Jochen kindly send the precious script

to the AoF. It's his interesting long talk

with Green Gartside. Special thanks to Jochen!!

Words: Jochen Bonz. PART 2 of 3. Article continues from...| Part 1 | To| Part 3 |

Jochen:

 Ah ja, okay. Fine. So, how did you feel when you, when you got...when you stood in the studio and started recording the new album...

Green:

 The new one?

Jochen:

 Which is really a very beautiful album.

Green:

 You think so, blablablabla.

Jochen:

 [Laughter]

Green:

 [Knocks on the table non-stop since the last question.] What did I think? Okay: this was a blast. I'd gone from this living in isolation in Wales, and I came back to London, and I was finding life very hard to adjust to. People around again. Suddenly there was a lot of. And, but I kind of, you know, with some help I got used to sort of being socialised again. I learned how to walk up right again and come - why, not! I speak silly.

Jochen:

 No, no, I believe you! I take you at your words.

Green:

 I - ja. I became re-socialized and then I decided I want to make this record. And I can remember getting off the plane - we stopped at New York for a bit, well I only - I hooked up with David Gamson, my old friend

Jochen:

 Yes.

Green:

 And that was okay, cause he came to London to meet me first and we re-established our friendship

Jochen:

 And this was possible?

Green:

 Ja-a.

Jochen:

 Fine.

Green:

 Thank god. I think if this record achieves nothing else I'll be grateful for it reuniting me with David and re-establishing that friendship and some of the other friendships. It'll be worth it for that alone. But anyway

Jochen:

 That's fine. It's a great thing.

Green:

 Ja, it IS a great thing. And now I value his friendship very greatly and I'm pleased with that purpose and nothing else. But when I finally got off the plane we had to meet the musicians. They were - like David said: 'Well Me'Shell [Me'Shell Ndeg三cello]...you know, she's a great bass player.' And I might: 'Well I know her work, but she is strictly - she comes from a very discrete tradition and she's not gonna wanna play on some of this stuff.' He said: 'Yeah, yeah, she will, yeah, she will!' So we went out the first night - you know, LA is like a weird place anyway, you been to LA?

Jochen:

 No, no, I've never been to the United States.

Green:

 All right, LA is just like bugged, totally bugged place. And we went out, you know, somewhere like this: there were palm trees and the sea. And we had dinner with Me' Shell and Me' Shell's girlfriend. Who incidentally is the daughter of Alice Walker who wrote 'The Colour Purple'. And her other friend who's some other

Jochen:

 It's true, yes?

Green:

 Ja, ja, and some woman called Bell Hooks who's a writer

Jochen:

 Bell Hooks, oh, I know her of course.

Green:

 You know her writing?

Jochen:

 I know her name as a writer, as a feminist philosopher.

Green:

 Okay, so and she was there with

Jochen:

 Black feminist philosopher.

Green:

 Wendy and Lisa [Girl Bros., Prince and the Revolution], cause Wendy Melvoin plays on my record, too. So we sat around the table with all these people and I did have a sense of: 'Oh shit, just get me on a plane back to Wales.

Jochen:

 [Laughter]

Green:

 Please, get me out of this. This is wild, this is...I'm not ready for this!' So that was the initial thing. And then we started rehearsing the album. And Me'Shell and I - to begin with we fought quite a bit.

Jochen:

 In what sense?

Green:

 She didn't like being told what to play but I wanted her to play certain things, and she's like, well, you know, I don't know.

Jochen:

 So what kind of instrument did she play?

Green:

 Bass.

Jochen:

 Okay.

Green:

 We were in the rehearsal rooms in the St. Fernando Valley and every 20 minutes she'd be like: she'd storm out. And then she'd come back again and calm down and I'd say:'Can we try it again? Will you please play this part?'

Jochen:

 Oh, oh, oh.

Green:

 And then she'd do something stupid and I'd storm out. But it was so hot outside in the St. Fernando Valley, it was like...

Jochen:

 [Laughter. In fact I laughed quite a lot, so much did I enjoy meeting Green Gartside, so overexcited did I have been and so much did I try to be charming. Enjoyed it.]

Green:

 A hundred and something degrees. You know, you'd go outside: 'Oh shit, it's too hot, I've got to go back inside.' And so we overcame our differences and became good friends. But to be in the studio after we rehearsed for like a month - when we've been back in the studio, you know, with that: 'Right, let's work on a drum sound' and so on: it was great fun, most fun.

Jochen:

 How long did you work?

Green:

 Barney! the whole album would have taken something over a year, just about a year to do. But this is unlike 'Provision' and 'Cupid & Psyche' which easily took at least a year each, maybe longer. I mean then we used to work in the studio like 16, 18 hours a day. We were fucking nuts. I mean, it was obsessive, it was manic and it wasn't - good. This album was like: Let's get in the studio at 10 o'clock, get ready to start rolling at midday, play till 6, go to the beach. Fucking fantastic!

Jochen:

 Fantastic, that's right.

Green:

 Go down to Malibu or, in Manhattan, let's go have

Jochen:

 So you recorded the whole album in LA?

Green:

 Backing tracks. XXX for me it's great studios: where the Beach Boys did some of their greatest work.

Jochen:

 Ah, okay.

Green:

 And the we did the vocals and the rapping in New York.

Jochen:

 Did they try to record 'Smile' there?

Green:

 Ja.

Jochen:

 Okay.

Green:

 Absolutely right.

Jochen:

 With this fire engine.

Green:

 That's right. So, that was a trip.

Jochen:

 Okay, and what about - I've got to say it like this: From a fan's standpoint you surprised the fans with every Scritti Politti album.

Green:

 Really?

Jochen:

 I think so, yes. Every Scritti Politti album was a surprise and I think in this one it's not this great, this Hip Hop element which is very much following a Scritti Politti logic, of course.

Green:

 Yes, kind of that, you're right

Jochen:

 But it's the guitar.

Green:

 It's the guitar.

Jochen:

 Yes, of course, it's the guitar. And...

Green:

 Which was my - well no, finish your question.

Jochen:

 No, you may.

Green:

 I may start?

Jochen:

 Yes, you may

Green:

 I may respond

Jochen:

 You may explain it to me.

Green:

 The guitar. You know, the much loved object. I mean it was my - really the only instrument that I ever have kind of mastered. But it had no great PART to play in - I associated it with all that I left behind when I first went to America.

Jochen:

 Okay.

Green:

 As the main, you know, the fetishized object of Rock'n'Roll.

Jochen:

 And of the early Scritti Politti.

Green:

 Yeah, it was all to do with guitars, and it was all to do with, very subconsciously, you know, the whole - really to the extent that there is one aspect of Punkrock, Post-Punk, Pre-Punk, the rest of it, which is a rather conservative legacy: which is the primacy of the guitar, in a way. And Indie music is like...Whereas in R'n'B music the guitar has a kind of - it's a rhythm instrument, you know, and it gets reduced to that role. And harmonic support, which is what is interesting in R'n'B music, harmonic support, it was like completely...

Jochen:

 Keyboards, or what do you mean?

Green:

 Yes, it's keyboards. Always being a mixture of strings, horns, keyboards. There wasn't like the guitar chord. There isn't a bar of this and a bar of that.

Jochen:

 Yes...the guitar never told the story.

Green:

 Yea, you're quite right, you're quite right, that's a nice thing for it: didn't tell the story. But...back in the world of Rock'n'Roll became something I didn't like. And I would look back to those exponents of it throughout the late Eighties and Nineties with some despair. I didn't like guitar music, you know, with few exceptions. I thought it was pretty dire.

Jochen:

 Dire?

Green:

 Terrible. Poor, poor.

Jochen:

 Okay.

Green:

 And: I think it was only somewhere - so when I gave up music altogether I certainly gave up playing the guitar. I didn't really...I had a music room - you know, I went out to Wales and had this cottage and there would always be a music room in which there was like my Macintosh and my samplers, sequencers, guitars, keyboards. But for a long time I didn't want to go into that room. You know, that was like:'buhh, the scary room in the house! The room of bad memories. The room of...'I don't know. The unhappy room.

Jochen:

 And how many rooms did you have?

Green:

 Did I have altogether? Are you serious? [laughs]

Jochen:

 Yes.

Green:

 Well, I had a bed room, a music room, a living room, a kind of little room that was maybe like you could have put a dining table in and a kitchen

Jochen:

 Ah, okay.

Green:

 And a garden.

Jochen:

 Aha, three.

Green:

 And the music room I didn't want to go in, it was...Sometimes I'd open the door and look at these equipments, I'd see these guitars and I'd stand and think: 'it's too scary to go in there, it's too depressing'. But eventually I did go. I mean, you know, I stayed listening to music and it was exclusively Hip Hop for a long time, or dancehall music.

Jochen:

 Yes, Dancehall music as well. I mean: still?

Green:

 No, I don't listen to Dancehall music anymore, but I did for a while. It was pretty much exclusively Hip Hop. And I think what happened - I had friends that had a skateboard shop in London. They ran a shop called Slam City Skates. And had some other friends that's like make skateboarding clothes. So I'd always known people to do with skateboarding, and although I didn't see much after - one thing I would do is pop in the scene when I went to London. I would pick up the skate videos. You know, from like the different skateboard companies, the people who make dags and things

Jochen:

 They play an important role, these kind of videos.

Green:

 Totally, to me they were vital. They would have been like from the skateboard companies, you know, Chocolate or Girl or

Jochen:

 It's the same with snowboarding.

Green:

 Ja, is it?

Jochen:

 Yes, I think so.

Green:

 And I would watch these videos, which would basically like - you know, half an hour or an hour long videos of people, you know, in their home towns, if it was a Zoo York video it would be at the East Coast. I will be skating and, ah - But the soundtrack to these was always an interesting mix of Hip Hop and then there would be guitar stuff. And I didn't even know what guitar stuff it was to begin with. It was like...people like NoFX, Rancid, Pennywise, all this kind of trashy, punky - But occasionally there'd be some guitar stuff on the earlier skateboard videos that was really quite nice, and that would've been Pavement or

Jochen:

 Really, Pavement?

Green:

 And I kind of, I guess - You know this maybe: when you sit at home alone and you're watching TV and - well, I guess, I must have taken the guitar out of the music room at some point. And you're watching skate videos and, ah

Jochen:

 So you really enjoyed them?

Green:

 Well, I skated myself. Not very well, in fact terribly badly. But I did use to skate - And so I would pick up the guitar, you know, and it's like: playing along to these rock things that were on the - there'd be like the Wu-Tang Clan and then it'll be some rock thing I didn't know, or whatever. And I think that's how I got back into playing the guitar. And then I kind of thought: 'Yeah, this is pleasureable'. You know. And then there would be the odd...The only ones I can specifically remember being of interest in the wilderness years by name, and I did buy lots of stuff, would have been the Veruca Salt - I don't know, have you ever heard the Veruca Salt?

Jochen:

 I'm not sure, what's that?

Green:

 That's an American guitar thing. Pavement. Laterly the Foo Fighters. But anyway, lots of people along the way. They've just got me playing the guitar again. And that sort of gave me the two aspects of....

Jochen:

 And are you happy now with this kind of blending of styles?

Green:

 No, I'm not. You know, I've never. It's not my job to be happy with it. That's somebody else's job. But it was interesting to do.

Jochen:

 But it works, it really works.

article continues in...| Part 3 |