director's cut, Uncut, 2005
by Simon Reynolds
Winceworthy (wins-wur’the),
adj. 1/ embarrassing, specifically
referring to the cringing sensation felt by a creative person confronted by his
early gauche attempts at poetry, songwriting, record-reviewing, etc.
Actually, “winceworthy” isn't in the dictionary. It’s a
freshly minted coinage, making its debut in Green Gartside’s sleevenote for Early, a collection of Scritti Politti’s
do-it-yourself era music. Wincing appears to be how he genuinely responds to
those EPs, unavailable for nigh-on 25 years, judging by the howl emitted when I
quote some lines from one song: “Please,
no more lyrics!”. Does Green really
find this music--which sounds as weirdly gorgeous to my ears as when I first
heard it in 1979--so excruciating?
“All the music I’ve ever made makes me feel
uncomfortable,” says the singer, speaking by phone from his home in Dalston, East London . “And I would go to some lengths to avoid
having to hear it if I could!” So why, then, allow it to be reissued? Green
deftly sidesteps that question, arguing that the final part of the process of
music-making is “the act of consumption” and it would be presumptuous to
interfere with that.
Personally, I reckon Green’s being a wee bit coy here. I
think he knows that, alongside its
immense historical interest as a window into the postpunk zeitgeist, the early
Scritti music, under-produced and scrawny as it is, has enduring aesthetic
value. Tangled inside its wilful fractures you can hear a latent poppiness that
would later blossom with “The ‘Sweetest Girl’” and “Wood Beez.” Listening to
early Scritsongs such as “Bibbly-O-Tek,” you hear a fascinating struggle
between sheer melodic loveliness and an intellectual suspicion of such beauty
as both "too easy” and somehow "not true" to reality. Early isn’t, then, just a timely
release (chiming with the seemingly unflagging resurgence of interest in
postpunk), it’s a long-overdue recognition of an achievement.
It’s hard for me to be objective about Early’s contents, though.
I’ve been a Scritti fan ever since hearing them for the first time on
John Peel, and subsequently have followed every twist of Green’s journey,
across the records and the interviews, delighting in the voice, the words, the
intellect, and the exquisite difficulty.
Appropriately, this story “starts” with Peel and the pleasures of difficult
music. Growing up in South Wales , the young
Green was starved for stimulus and turned to Peel’s show as a beacon in the
banality. “I would tape record his show on a Saturday, and for want of anything
else to do, I would listen to that tape every day until the following weekend.
And what I discovered was that the music you found most challenging on the
Sunday, by the next weekend had become your favorite.”
For Green, the challenging stuff included Robert Wyatt and
the other Canterbury
bands, English folk minstrel Martin Carthy, and above all the politicized
uber-prog of Henry Cow. “They were astringent, even frightening at times.”
Henry Cow’s ever-so-slightly didactic anti-capitalist lyrics and Carthy’s
explorations of traditional music (folk as the people’s music) also correlated
with Green’s other teenage passion: communism. He and Niall Jinks, future
Scritti bassist, attempted to form a branch of the Young Communist League at
their school. “After our inaugural meeting, Niall was beaten up quite
badly.” The local newspaper even wrote a
story about them. “We were named, which heralded the beginning of a decline in
my relationship with my parents.”
The same rigorous, demanding quality that Green admired in
Henry Cow was what drew him to conceptual art. When he went around checking out
art colleges to apply for, he gravitated to Leeds Polytechnic’s Fine Art
department for its radicalism. “I went up there during the degree show, and it
was quite fantastic. In one room, there was a chap making himself vomit, and in
the next room there was someone shooting budgerigars with an air rifle!” If Leeds
became one of the UK ’s
leading postpunk cities, it was largely due to the density of art students
there, not bands formed by locals. Among Green’s contemporaries at the Poly
were Marc Almond and Frank Tovey (a/k/a Fad Gadget), while most of the future
membership of Gang of Four, the Mekons, and Delta 5 were Fine Art students at
Leeds University.
At the Poly, Green quickly became a troublemaker. He stopped
painting and started producing only writing. This was conceptualism’s next
step--keeping the concepts and ditching the actual artistic practice, the idea
being that before you created anything, you ought to work out what was actually
valid. The very free-for-all spirit that initially attracted Green to Leeds
Poly now struck him as self-indulgent. “You know what art colleges are like,
all these kids are basically left to their own devices, and they haven’t spent
any time really thinking about why it is they are painting in the manner of x,
y or z. I just thought, ‘somebody has to be asking some questions about what it
means to be doing this, what it means to be in this kind of institution’.” Provocatively, he started a kind of counter-curriculum
within the art faculty, a highly popular lecture series that involved talks
from members of Art & Language, a collective who had given up making
artworks and generated instead an intimidating torrent of text, much of it
devoted to tearing apart other artists. “I was encouraging all these people to
come and basically say what was going on in our faculty was a crock of shit and
everybody was wasting their time!” This combative approach--argument fueled by
heavy reading and heavy drinking--would shape Scrittii, both in terms of how
they operated internally as a band and how they dramatized themselves against
the rest of the music scene.
First, though, came the “Damascene moment,” the
life-changing experience of seeing the Anarchy Tour of 1977 arrive in Leeds . Prior to this, Green and Jinks had toyed with
English traditional music. “Niall could play the fiddle and knew some Morris
tunes, I could play a couple of jigs and
reels fairly badly!” After seeing the Sex Pistols, The Clash, et al, though,
Green persuaded Jinks and their friend Tom Morley to blow the rest of their
grants on a bass and a drum kit. After playing one gig as The Against, they
took the name Scritti Politti, derived from a book by Italian Marxist Antonio
Gramsci. Scritti was a highly conceptual and politicized project from the
start. One of the key ideas was “messthetics”. Says Green, “We were anti-rock,
because rock was too solid, too strong, and too sure a sound. We wanted a music
that’s wasn’t strong, solid, and sure, because we weren’t strong, solid or sure.”
Despite his commitment to social justice, Green’s brand of Marxism was
far from dogmatic. The fragmentary sound of early Scritti was meant to express
the anguished precariousness of those for whom “raised consciousness” doesn’t
mean the end of uncertainty but the start of a life dedicated to questioning everything--including your own opinions
and innermost feelings, which might not be your “own” at all, but ideologically
implanted.
By early 1978, Scritti had moved down to London and into a grotty squat in Camden . Soon the initial
trio expanded into a collective numbering as many as twenty. If theorizing was
crucial to the group, there was no reason why people who weren’t directly
involved in making the music couldn’t contribute. Scritti held meetings at
which ideas were feverishly debated, attended by a menagerie of lively minds,
some of who would form their own DIY outfits, such as the Janet and Johns and
Methodishca Tune. Although Green was always Scritti’s songwriter and typically
the most voluble voice in the band’s numerous interviews, he never felt like
the leader. “Being the songwriter, that would never have crossed my mind as
some kind of privileged status. I knew that I wasn’t any cleverer than any of
the people around me.” More important than the formal meetings, though, was the
informal everyday life in the squat. Scritti put their home address on their
first single, “Skank Bloc Bologna,” and as a result people were always turning
up at their door. “Disaffected public schoolboys, French hippies,
Eurocommunists….” recalls Green. “It was open house. We’d be going out to gigs
most nights, and you’d come back and you never knew who would be there. We’d
stay up all hours talking, about whatever books were of interest or maybe
someone had brought round a new dub pre-release record.”
Green remembers these few intense years as big fun:
drinking, speeding, staying up all night, ideas whizzing about, music playing
nonstop. But he also remembers violence as a constant presence. “We were young
communists and punks and there was violence on an almost weekly basis. We traveled in fairly large groups, of five
or six, and we’d walk to, say, Stoke Newington to see a band at the Pegasus,
and then walking back in the early hours you’d be attacked. You’d be attacked
if you were out selling Challenge, the young communist paper.” “Skank Bloc
Bologna,” the extraordinary debut single, captures something of the
vulnerability of that period, the constant seesawing struggle between idealism
and despair. Green observes a supermarket girl, an early school leaver,
drifting through life, seemingly unaware of the forces that buffet and
constrain her, and with absolutely no sense that the world could be any other
way. It could be seen as condescending, perhaps, if Green’s desire to “tell her
what’s possible” wasn’t so plaintively heartfelt. You get an
glimpse of the gloom of the revolutionary
activist with his spurned pamphlets wondering why the passers-by keep… passing
by. The song’s music, a dejected lope of white reggae overlaid with jagged folk
chords, is as remarkable as the lyric.
Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis wanted to put the single out but
had to bow to the reservations of the rest of the label collective, who thought
the song, at nearly six minutes, was too long. So “Skank” came out on Scritti’s
own St. Pancras label. But Rough Trade did release 4 A Sides, the early Scritti’s best EP. Green became a key figure
in the Rough Trade milieu--then the power spot of postpunk culture--alongside likeminded
bands like The Raincoats, This Heat and The Red Crayola.
If one sensibility united these sonically disparate outfits,
it’s the shared conviction that “the unexamined pop life wasn’t worth living”
(as Green puts it). He describes Scritti, but by extension the entire postpunk
culture, as “a massive Romantic project”, in which the political dread of the
time (Thatcherism, fascism on the streets) jostled with an awareness of music’s
“utopian potential.” If music did have this immense transformative power, then
there was a moral imperative to think hard
about the right path to follow.
Partly because of Green’s eloquence and quest(ion)ing
spirit, Scritti became cult figures on
the UK
postpunk scene, emblems of ultimate
non-compromise. This image was strengthened by the group’s combustible live
performances, which increasingly involved making songs up from scratch. “We did
get less interested in chords and structures for a while,” Green recalls. “But
making stuff up onstage was pleasurable, I should stress. Through everything,
from the theory to the music making, there’s a central hedonistic streak.”
If 4 A Sides captures a group in their
prime, the sheer joy of making music together overcoming the anxiety that
riddles the lyrics, then Peel Sessions, the last of the pre-pop
Scritti’s releases, sees that “central hedonistic streak” disappear almost
completely. It’s the sound of a group falling apart on record, compelling to
listen to but you worry for the worried souls making the fractious racket. This,
you suspect, is the stuff that’s most “winceworthy” for Green today. But he
still finds something to praise about the “scratching, collapsing, irritated,
dissatisfied” sound of “Messthetics” and “OPEC-Immac”, contrasting it with
modern British quasi-indie music. “I heard some of these bands on the radio
recently and I was struck by how there was no trepidation in their
music, no sense that these people were playing with anything that they were
slightly frightened of, or were going anywhere where they weren’t sure where
they would end up.”
Talking of the twilight days of the early Scritti, Green
acknowledges the vein of paranoia, but
says “there was even some pleasure in despair,” in fetishising a totally
apocalyptic fascism-on-the-horizon scenario. “The trouble with that,
though, is that it can tip over into making you properly depressed, completely
inert and deeply unwell.” The crisis for Green came with that legendary Brighton gig in early 1980 (Scritti supporting their
friends Gang of Four) after which Green famously had a “heart attack”.
Actually, it was a monstrous panic attack, which convinced him he was
dying. “It was the whole ambulance with
the sirens going to hospital thing,” Green recalls, queasily. He attributes his
physical collapse to the group’s hardcore lifestyle. “We partied very hard, as
they say nowadays. We were always pretty poorly.” There’s also a sense in which questioning
everything actually turned morbid. “Finding minutiae overburdened with
potential significance, this can contaminate your whole life to the point where
you might describe it as mental illness. Not that I was actually bonkers, but…”
When his estranged parents read about Green’s illness in NME, they set him up in a South Wales cottage to recuperate. “I got it back together
in the country, man,” he laughs. Instead of giving up the band, though, Green
embarked on a thorough reconceptualisation of Scritti. Even before the
collapse, he’d been getting weary of
postpunk, feeling that the DIY scene had merely developed its own sonic
messthetic conventions. Green had started listening to black pop. You can hear
a fitful funk element coming into the music on 4 A Sides, especially on the glorious sinuous groove of
“P.A.s”. In Wales ,
he plunged wholeheartedly into funk, soul, and other forms of black music he’d
not grown up on.
Scritti not exactly being your typical band, though, there
was no way Green could simply announce a change of musical direction. Instead,
he “sat down for months and months and wrote screeds of justification. There
was that sense of having to have it understood and approved and thought-through
by the group.” The band came down to the
Welsh cottage and took turns to read the book’s worth of notes. They were
eventually swayed to the new pop vision and set to working up a whole bunch of
Scrit-songs like “Faithless,” informed by Green’s immersion in Aretha Franklin
and The Staple Singers.
Green’s first attempt to “go pop” was only half-successful,
both in chart terms (1982’s Songs To
Remember got to #12, but none of the singles were hits) and aesthetically.
The melodies are beautiful, but the
production was shabby by the standards of the time (set by Lexicon of Love). Above all, Green’s lyrics hadn’t fully made the
transition, combining the old hyper-intellectualism with a new poptimistic
nonchalance, and ending up a bit cute. “Jacques Derrida” was titled
after the French post-structuralist philosopher, while “Getting’ Havin’ and
Holdin” includes both a Percy Sledge citation and the line “it’s as true as the
Tractatus”. Trust me, that’s a real
thigh-slapper if you’re a philosophy
student (Wittgenstein, author of said tome, is all about dismantling truth,
seeing it as a mere figment of language).
But none of this was exactly the stuff of daytime Radio One, which
is where Green wanted to be.
Tensions had also emerged in the band. “Although the shift
to pop was accepted in theory, I think the lived practice of it didn’t sit
well, with Niall particularly,” recalls Green.
One by one, the original members
of Scritti quit, and the group was reinvented as a production company with
Green as CEO. He also quit the indie sector and signed to Virgin, but not
before Geoff Travis had hooked him up David Gamson, a New York based synth-funk prodigy. With
Gamson and drummer Fred Maher as his cohorts, Green started making ultramodern
dance music, all programmed beats and sequenced riffs. Paralleling Scritti’s
mutation into a sleek, streamlined machine-pop, Green developed a style of
lyric writing that secreted its subversive intelligence within words that could
outwardly pass for common-or-garden love songs.
Green was still a bookworm, but for a while he was
preoccupied less with theory than with mastering the technicalities of
studio-based dance pop. The result, Cupid & Psyche 85, “took a long,
long time to make,” says Green. “And an awful lot of money. I was interested in
exploiting all the new technology at the time, as well as with expressing those
really black pop influences. It was a whole new world of sixteenth notes and
syncopation, a language of talking about
music I had never spoken.” As well as enjoying huge UK hits such as
“The Word Girl”, Scritti broke America
with “Perfect Way ”.
And so it came to pass that Green Gartside--communist, squatter, Henry Cow fan
and adolescent strummer of jigs and reels--ended up on MTV and in the Billboard
Top 20.
After that moment of crossover triumph, Green got tangled up
in the music industry machine. Most of his joy in music-making was worn away
during the protracted studio gestation of 1988’s Provision, with what remained obliterated by the global promotional
tour that followed: endless TV appearances and interviews, compensating for the
fact that Scritti refused to tour. ( Indeed Green hasn’t played live since the
infamous Brighton gig in 1980). He withdrew for a second time to Wales , where he
spent almost the entire Nineties. A few years back, he re-emerged to make the
not-wholly successful but under-rated Anomie
and Bonhomie, fusing Scritti slickness with hip hop (his great musical
passion of the last 20 years).
Right now, Green is “very much in love” (not bad for a guy
whose “love songs” have often been about the impossibility of love) and busy
working on material for a new album. And Geoff Travis is managing him, resuming
their relationship and making an attractive historical loop in time. Last year, Green went onstage with Carl from
the Libertines to present a music-biz award to Travis. In fact, says Green,
it’s really down to Travis that the early Scritti stuff has been reissued at
all. “It’s a consequence of just a persistent interest from Geoff. He kept
asking…. and it would have been rude to say ‘No’!”
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