SCRITTI POLITTI:

How Rough Trade revolutionaries discovered
pop and learned to (almost) stop worrying

- The Face, 1982

From post-Marxist experimentation to sweet soul balladry in two years flat, the music of Scritti Politti has carved out a new genre all of its own; lover's rock lamenting not departed romance but the loss of political conviction. Fortunately for Scritti's Green Gartside, pop was there to save him.
Words: Anthony Denselow. 

Scritti Politti is a curious phenomenon, a sweet and soulful pop band with grandiose intellectual pretensions, a nebulous collection of individuals caught in mid metamorphosis on their way from the ranting peripheries of punk to the warped safety and glamour of mainstream acceptance.

From a backroom conception in a terraced house in Leeds to Camden Town squats and rented accommodation in North London, Scritti's material position has hardly changed. But while much of their organisation and motivation still smacks of their early ineptness (along with the bona fide punk credentials of frustration and anger) their music has moved forward with unerring conviction.

Scritti Politti, a superbly scratchy and tumbly name that well reflects the music and underlying ideology of the band (the name is a bastardisation of the Italian for 'political writing') is founded upon the endeavours of Green Gartside, a singer/songwriter/guitarist with an extraordinary love of music. It poses as a three man collective, with drummer Tom Morley and organiser Matthew Kay, but in reality consists of a variety of musicians including the crucial sax of Jamie Talbot and the boundless background oohing and aahing of singers Lorenza, Jackie and Mae.

Scritti's current reputation -- awkwardly fashionable innovators hovering on the brink of success and a new breed of music -- rests on a troubled past and on just two recent singles and their twelve inch shadows. "Sweetest Girl", hopefully to be re-released soon, was one of the finest singles of last year, a haunting and outrageously sensual and twisted soul ballad dominated by the high meanderings of Green's characteristic voice.

Twelve months later "Faithless" is garnering a bunch of critical accolades -- Martin Fry's Single of the Week in Smash Hits, no less. It's a tighter, more textural song of similar mould that finds Scritti Politti striving after slicker production and greater commercial response. Green has invaded the domain of pleasurable listening from an oblique angle, mixing elements of soul, funk, jazz, lovers' rock and pop into an intriguing and subtle melange.

Now the album "Songs To Remember", infuriatingly promised and delayed for months, presents Scritti's case in full. Written over the past two years, it's a varied and generally fresh-sounding collection of songs, dance music dressed in mellow tones and displaying a confusing bundle of influences. A couple of songs suggest that Marc Bolan has visited Green's intense musical reveries.

Listening to Scritti's music and Green's cleverly ambiguous lyrics, you get the impression of a twilight distorted world of soulful indulgence. Listen to green talking about his music and the impressions are of a cathartic exercise of all-consuming proportions.

For Green and his eloquent understanding, pop is the outward release of a myriad of inner tensions and a vehicle of quite mind boggling political significance.

"Since the Fifties the seven inch, in its aberrations of language and assertions of rhythms, has been a revolutionary text," he says. "My music is heterogeneous, it doesn't come at you with pronouncements of evaluations of big P politics. But it is a wholly political music and the little time spent listening to it will be rewarded in terms of thinking about some of the new politics. I couldn't write a song that in some way, even in its poppiest moments, didn't corrupt, subvert, twist or reveal. And what the lyrics don't achieve the rhythms themselves can."

Many of Scritti's earliest rhythms certainly did twist the clichéd notions of punk's subversive role, initially setting the band at loggerheads with their audience and press. Disillusioned with aRt College in Leeds and deeply impressed by the first Anarchy tour of the Sex Pistols, with The Damned and The Clash in tow, Green had originally formed a punk band. Tom blew his grant on a drum kit and bassist Neil, who's since left for the usual "political" reasons, came up from Green's home area of South Wales to join the fun. "Atonal yelping" and "din with detuned guitars: backed densely clever-clever lyrical attacks. Green developed a terminology which then seemed alien to pop culture: the band was dubbed 'intellectual'.

In 1979 Green fell badly ill. He retreated back to Wales and underwent his well-documented conversion to pop music: "It wasn't really the cataclysmic revelation that has been made out," he decently reports, "in fact I even thought that our first single 'Skank Bloc Bologna' was quite poppy."

Green spent a year in the wilderness writing new material. His singing voice changed from stylised English ("a heavy London voice like Robert Wyatt") to something much sweeter. He began to craft two or three minute pop songs and he started tightening up the sound. From finding solace in music that was a departure from pop ?Green then discovered that a move back to pop was more significant that distorting on the margins.

"Why should atonal music be considered more political than pop?" he asks, citing the well-worn example of The Clash, a band whose laurels Scritti feel confident of inheriting.

"Post punk pop has had a massive influence on such issues as racialism and the bomb. It's interesting that some intellectuals of the new politics who usually set their subject around such things as Renaissance art in Italy, can have a kind word to say for the likes of Patti Smith and her revolutionary potential. But they haven't yet understood the lessons in a micro-political or psycho-political way. They must get an inkling of what it's about when they hear something like the Staple Singers at their best."

Green's own political involvement currently resides on a decidedly esoteric plane. At the age of 15 he had tried to start a young communist branch in Wales with Neil, whose father came from a CP background. Neil was badly beaten up for his efforts. More recently in London he has worked full time with the Young Communist League. Now his politics are introverted, more abstract, and he didn't even bother to vote in the recent local government elections.

Many of Scritti Politti's songs, including "Sweetest Girl" and "Faithless", are apparently about the effect of political faith upon a person and what happens when that faith is lost or destroyed.

"Sweetest Girl"?

"Entropy," says Green flatly, "the tendency for things to fall apart in the light of political awareness. The sweetest girl has gone sour but the song retains its sweetness all the way."

Green's gleeful and often witty games with language find inspiration from the writings of politicians and philosophers -- he finds little time for fiction. "Asylums (In Jerusalem)", the gently rocking opening track on the album, was -- would you believe it after hearing it? -- inspired by the writings of Nietzche and tells of the vast madhouses built around ancient Jerusalem to house a multitude of locust-eating religious fanatics.

The atmosphere of the album is mellow and any feelings of loss are the bitter/sweet twangs of lost love. Green sees the language and style of lovers' rock as a cipher for more substantial expression: "My loss has been political conviction, the idea of a correct understanding of the past, present and future (Marxism). I've always been obsessively concerned that my understanding of political truth should be scientifically grounded. Many songs are about what happens when the anchor points of political, moral or religious understanding fall away."

Such mild intellectualising about relatively straightforward pop has led to accusations of hype and the curious tag of "intellectual" for Green, which he insists is unfair as he doesn't even possess any A Levels.

This tall, soft spoken and immensely likeable 24-year-old with a headful of such intense activity is the grandson of a German sailor who dropped into Cardiff port and for some strange reason liked it there. His father was a travelling salesman who he never saw much of and the family frequently moved to unpronounceably-named places around South Wales.

Green grew up with pop.

He remembers being given Revolver on his eighth birthday and miming in front of the mirror to The Beatles, Rod Stewart and Bowie. He subscribed to the NME at junior school, still has a cassette of himself singing "Get Back" in a thick Welsh accent and at one time wandered the folk clubs sporting a Bowie hairdo.

Wales is recalled as a "brutal and ugly place". He has memories of being beaten up for having a German surname and of his mother ripping down posters and destroying records when he wasn't doing well at school. Green moved to Leeds and art college to grapple with the philosophical implications of Art and to discover his hero Wittgenstein.

Scritti Politti began life as a communal endeavour; its aim was to be a collective in keeping with the politics of the late Seventies. Although it's increasingly becoming a one-man show Scritti still shows off as a three-man entity with Tom supplying the drum noises and excellent art work and Matthew in charge of "organization".

This increasingly cumbersome and unrealistic format (a throwback to the idealism of the old days and a suitable shield for the success-shy Green?) has led to problems with magazines and art editors -- and even their record company? -- as the band demand complete control over output and art work. The DIY ethos dies hard. But the band has inspired a suitably distanced image with which to launch their euphonious attack on pop, utilising some elegantly subversive art work; both singles have been housed in witty symbols of human luxury, "Sweetest Girl" �Ela Dunhill, "Faithless" as Eau Sauvage.

The band's relationship with their record company, rough Trade, has been stormy. Despite Rough Trade's deserved success with Pigbag, Green still worries about the company's status with radio DJs: "While I was discovering pop, Rough Trade were putting out din," he says with surprising indignation, "and I'm still worried, looking through this Spring's releases, by the number of silly groups with silly music," a description that would have once aptly fitted struggling Scritti.

The band are currently paying themselves a small wage from past royalties and have no firm future commitments to Rough Trade. While Green no longer has such principled objections to the major record companies who now buzz hungrily around Scritti the band might as easily remain with the well intentioned Rough Trade and help spearhead the company's more commercial recent stance.

Scritti's success will depend largely on whether Green can withstand the rigours that he has set himself. He lives and breathes pop, saying that without it he would not have developed mentally or politically, and he wants to make music that will be as important to others as the songs he grew up with. He worries desperately about his work and his extreme reactions to allowing strangers to hear it. This worry has already left a heavy mark on his career.

Green's dramatic recuperation in Wales was brought on by a collapse in a van while the band were on their way to support the Gang Of Four. Green was completely paralysed and couldn't speak for four hours. Acute anxiety led to depression and the collapse of bodily functions (in this case a heart complaint). Green is prone to anxiety inspired illness and is trying to find a solution through analysis, his concern masked by the slippery ease of Scritti's music.

"Pop music is like being born again, it's like the first social utterance with all the scoldings and approval it may bring," he says quite happily. "You invest so much of yourself in your music and voice and yet its meaning, significance and worth isn't decided by you. Your first records, like your first cries, are judged by others and I think that's likely to reawaken a number of deep-seated problems."

Scritti Politti have not played live in this country for over two years. they find touring unnecessary and recall live gigs ("that beautiful racket") as being both terrifying and chaotic. They will concentrate on recording the mass of material Green has been writing.

They will, one hopes, not let the next album take another two years to hit the streets.

Scritti's music, combining radical purpose and joyously sweet content, cries out for more urgent treatment.