Scritti Politti retrospective interview 2005

Scritti Politti / Green Gartside
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’!”

Chuck Warner compiler of Messthetics / Hyped to Death postpunk and DIY CD-R series

Messthetics: An Interview with Post-Punk Archivist Chuck Warner of Hyped To Death
Blissout website 2001?




Q: So how did you get in this lark---doing CD-R compilations like the U.K. D.I.Y post-punk series Messthetics?

A: You can run through the press-stuff at http://www.hyped2death.com/ for my background as a record-label-owner (16 releases in 4 years at a loss of $100,000), deejay, seminarian, astrologer’s helper, vacuum-cleaner salesman… I'd been selling all this stuff --or trying to sell it--for 20 years, though just by mail-order. I started making cassettes in ’97 as a sort of shopping aid--to encourage my mail-order customers to buy stuff that WASN'T already bootlegged on Killed by Death and Bloodstains (many of whose tracks had been purchased from me in the first place). All the cassettes were called Hyped to Death, though they were themed. The H2D numbers ending in -1 or -2 were North American punk [these are now the HYPED to DEATH CDs]; -3 was UK punk & mods [now BAD TEETH]; -4 was American power-pop [now TEENLINE]; -5 was UK D.I.Y. [now MESSTHETICS]; -6 was world punk [briefly PLANET PUNK]; -7 was New Zealand Flying Nun-style gnarlpop/DIY [WIMPLES] or world D.I.Y [GERÄUSCHVERGNUGEN]; -8 was American D.I.Y./punkwave [HOMEWORK] and -9 & 10 varied.

Messthetics in particular? Well, the style, if there is one, has been a personal favorite, since 1980 or so. I’d been in London (a Baron’s Court bedsit for £4.50 a week) for January and February of 1978, but the better bands were all out on tour and there was this awful "power-pop" revival clogging up the clubs--bands like the Boyfriends and the Pleasers–who were utterly tuneless pubrock leftovers in skinny ties who liked the Rich Kids but couldn’t write a tune to save their lives. The closest thing to D.I.Y I saw was Patrick Fitzgerald busking between sets at the University of London the week before "Safetypin Stuck in My Heart" came out. He was brilliant, but I had no idea the Desperate Bicycles, etc. were out there, too. Mostly I groupied enthusiastically for the Soft Boys, who were busily opening up the Troggs reunion "tour." I learned about DIY rather slowly, and after-the-fact as I came across the records over the years.



Throughout the early 80s my major energies went into buying and selling 1960s and early ’70s garage and psychedelic LPs. Much of the American stuff that now trades for thousands first hit the $100 level on my auctions in Goldmine and Trouser Press. I bought collections and store-stock when some shop went out of business, so there were always older punk and new-wave 45s coming in along with the new stuff. I felt no specific allegiance to any one style. But back then it was actually the first Chocolate Soup for Diabetics bootleg that made the most vivid impression. In 1981 I could probably have recited the entire International Artists catalog from memory, but most of the Chocolate Soup stuff-–I never knew it even existed : I was stunned and delighted beyond description…. SO, in a very long, windy, and round-about way, that’s what I want for my compilations… It’s my hope that Messthetics, Teenline, and Homework might bring that same shock-of-the-[old]-new to a few 20-somethings today.

Q: Messthetics and Homework do indeed remind me a bit of the old Pebbles, Mindrockers, Back From the Grave etc compilations of Sixties garage punk that I used to buy circa 1983-84, at this point when nothing much was going on in contemporary music. But your CD-Rs are effectively bootlegs, right? Although you give the bands royalties if they contact you, right?

A: Hey, wait a minute. Those were ALL bootlegs. Nuggets was legit (and seriously limited by what Lenny Kaye could pry out of the major labels’ vaults). Pebbles was a pure bootleg series that Greg [Shaw] parlayed into the excellent, mostly-legit Highs in the Mid-60s series as bands started turning up. Mindrockers, if memory serves me, was an example of a quasi-legit thing a buncha people did in ’81-83 or so where they sent letters to the addresses on all the old records and parked royalties in escrow accounts. Tim [Warren] compiled the excellent Back from the Grave series from his legendary cross-country journeys: he’d talked to some of the bands (while he was buying the last of their 45s from them). While they were 10-15 years away from the records they were compiling (and Lenny Kaye was as little as 5), I’m putting the H2D CDs out 20-25 years after the fact. It’s a lot harder to track people down by word-of-mouth or by old addresses and phone-numbers.

So it was the combination of affordable CD-R gear and the Internet that gave me a better idea. Unlike vinyl or glass-mastered CDs, where you're limited to a minimum pressing of 500-1000 (you can get fewer, but the cost is no different), you can duplicate CD-Rs to order, so I didn't have to worry about how well power-pop or American or UK D.I.Y. would sell, at least in terms of carrying expensive inventory. And I could start off with a catalog of a dozen titles, instead of just one or two. More importantly, however, the CD-Rs meant I could be in a perpetual state of upgrading and rearranging. Like with the Messthetics series, where I’ve been very slow to get organized. There are half a dozen new tracks and-–at last—liner-notes just within the past six weeks.



The internet lets me maintain the newest versions of all the notes and links where fans and bands can easily get to them, and the Hyped to Death website gives them an easy way to reach me. And the H2D website gives the bands hype and appreciation, a way to turn up on search-engines, a chance to tell their story in the context of the styles and scenes of ’76-82, and plenty of links to anything they want advertised. I’ve talked to well over a hundred bands to date (and installed links to many more) and not one so far has asked to be taken off of the CDs. Although more and more bands are learning about H2D from folks who own the CDs, a majority of those who find us do so because they’ve typed their band-name into Google or Metacrawler or Dogpatch (or is it Dogpile?). There’s usually 3 or 4 a week that come in that way.

I send sample copies of the CD to any and all band-members, update the liner-notes with whatever dirt they’re willing to share with me, and add links to reissues, fan clubs, personal pages, new bands, etc. There’s no money involved, but I do tell them as soon as there’s any real money being made, we’ll figure out a way to share the wealth.



But the "bootleg" approach is important. (1) it’s a completely "above-ground" bootleg –like you say, anyone who wants money can find me and get it, but what’s more important is (2) I get to start off with absolutely the best collection I can put together. That’s what bands hear as their first impression: their song sounds great and everything else sounds great, too (especially if they remember how crummy the original vinyl pressings sounded: I frequently spend hours cleaning and restoring individual tracks with a couple of digital editing programs.

 Q: So is there a collector's market for original postpunk DIY singles? What kind of prices are being asked? And do you sense a resurgence of interest in that era? There seem to be a bunch of bands coming through, from Life Without Buildings to Erase Errata to Liars, who reference that period.

A: Over the years I was occasionally able to sell that stuff for $10 or so, but only rarely. 90% of the market and 99% of the upward pressure on prices these days seems to be spill-over from punk-collectors who’re buying stuff just because it’s rare and it’s been bootlegged on vinyl. I’ve always had a half-dozen collectors who’d dutifully pay $50 for the weirder stuff because I told them to, but I didn’t have the feeling there was a bigger market waiting to happen.

I’m thrilled that interest is building. And it’d be great if the enthusiasm was more musical than principally archival and/or mercenary, the way Killed By Death has been, or Pebbles, etc, at least until the garage-revival thing got rolling in the early 80s. As I’ve been deliberately ignoring my mail-order business since starting the Hyped2Death CD thing, however, I can’t say I’ve had an increase in collectors wanting to buy DIY.



Q: Messthetics is organized alphabetically, but starts more than half-way through the alphabet, and is quite micro-focused -- Messthetics #1 is R-to-Si, Messthetics #3 is Th-to-Va. Seems like you'll have around thirty or forty volumes of Messthetics if you see the project through to its end!

A: Twenty anyway. More if I can rehab some of the cassette-only material before it all self-destructs in people’s basements. (I’d love to hear from people who still own a DIY cassette-releases: NO ONE imported that stuff to the U.S. Better yet, I’d like to hear from the bands who still have the master-cassettes or tapes…)

Q: Although the series title references Scritti Politti--the name is taken from a track on their Peel Sessions EP--most of the stuff you've collated isn't really from that post-punk vanguard sound that one associates Green & Co with: i.e. the funk/disco/dub-influenced, self-deconstructing, anti-rockist, politicized/theorized strand (Gang of Four through This Heat to Lemon Kittens). You also shy away from the proto-Goth sub-Banshees/Killing Joke end of things. Mostly you've gathered up the sort of Swell Maps-y/Desperate Bicycles/TV Personalities scrappy-scratchy D.I.Y stuff and lotsa Buzzcocks/Undertones-wannabe pop-punk. It even gets a bit mod revival in flavour here and there.

A: I wasn’t a fan of the stuff with horns back then, and I’ve always loathed the lesser Goth/bat/death combos. That said, the Pop Group-wannabe subspecies of D.I.Y sounds better all the time: I’m mentally compiling and searching for a title even now. For the moment, though, I am indeed focusing on the punkier end while mixing in what I think of as the most coherent of the other/outer DIY stuff, like Nigel Simpkins or Take It, and my favorites of the honking and ranting variety, like Vital Disorders’ "Let’s Talk About Prams" or the Stolen Power track I just added to Messthetics #2.





I make a distinction between "post-punk" and "DIY" that’s more useful taxonomically than historically. Post-punk-–sorta by definition—looked at punk (and major-label punk, at that)…and decided to be something different. D.I.Y., on the other hand, just did what was easy and cheap: it was a reaction to the expense and corporate control, but it never set out to re-define or improve on what had come before. 90% of the time it was everyone’s first band, and 80% of the time it was their last, as well. Everybody did the best they could even though they knew other people could sing and play a whole lot better…

Q: What do you think are the defining differences between UK D.I.Y and US D.I.Y?

A: Sort of the same as with punk. The UK has the dole (and sometimes even things like the G.L.C): it seems like 70% of the guitars are owned by the unemployed. D.I.Y there (i.e. putting out a DIY record) was incredibly empowering and freeing-–a perfect and really satisfying piss-off to the world of commerce and pop charts. In the US, meanwhile, 90% of the guitars are in the suburbs, and the teenagers among their owners all either have after-school jobs or they don’t need them because mom and dad are generous with their allowance. The ’Stones’ "What can a poor boy do / ’cept for play in a rock’n’roll band?" was apt enough in the U.K., but it’s pure pose here in the states. (The better equivalent would be a poor black kid from Newark hoping to make it as a basketball star. It’s THE way out.)
All kinds of class boundaries DO exist here, but the American promise--and the American problem—is that we’re proudly ignorant of them. Most bands dream of being rich and famous, but it wouldn’t occur to any of them that it’s their only chance to be rich and famous. We vote for Republicans who promise obscene tax-breaks for the rich because we all expect to be rich ourselves, somehow, someday. So showing how cheaply you could put out a record is definitely not part of an American mindset: no matter how crummy certain stateside records sound, those bands spent every penny they could on making them sound that way…



So despite your kind comments below about superior drumming in these parts (suburban Yanks can afford proper drum-kits and nice dry basements to practice in?) I think the main hallmark of American D.I.Y is a realistic appraisal of one’s musical talent. (So it’s the same as the UK thing, just without any sociological import or awareness.) Somewhere around 1978 (it may have been all the howling about "punk is dead"), folks started thinking it could be fun to sing and play and maybe put a record out even though they KNEW they’d never get signed and be stars. The instruments are the same in Cleveland Ohio as in, well, Cleveland County: whatever’s lying around, anything that makes a cool wheezy noise, and-–if you’re feeling really brave—whatever you used to take lessons on when you were 12. It’s about unselfconsciousness. But I think, far fewer bands here put out records (at least in proportion to their overall numbers).




Q: Although New York was very much in line with the UK post-punk vanguard and there were other weirdo outposts like Cleveland/Akron with Pere Ubu and Devo, or the San Francisco scene with Ralph Records, Residents, Tuxedemoon, Chrome, etc., generally speaking the American stuff is a lot more convincingly rockin' and rollin': there's a bottom-line proficiency, especially in the rhythm section. Whereas the UK stuff can seem really amateurish and rhythmically shaky (that's part of its charm, I guess). Generally it seems like US post-punk wasn't so determined to destroy rock as the UK vanguardists were. "Anti-rockist" was a British coinage, after all.

A: The thing about all of the first-generation, pre-1978 US bands you mentioned except maybe for Chrome is that they were part of an ART scene. Whatever their failings as vocalists and musicians were, those failings (which they were, by-and-large, almost pathologically self-conscious about) became part of their artistic statement…. Pere Ubu used their vocals. Suicide used their limited musicianship. Later Homework bands--and the Messthetics crowd--were often arty but they’d gotten over worrying about their limited skill-sets. The breakthrough Ohio bands for "real" D.I.Y were the Mirrors and the Electric Eels (and later, down in Kent, the Human Switchboard).






la lotta continua...

Close to the Noise Floor: Formative UK Electronica 1975-1984

Various

Close To the Noise Floor: Formative UK Electronica 1975-1984

Cherry Red

Pitchfork, 2016

by Simon Reynolds

The evolutionary arc of the synthesizer has a completely different shape to the trajectory of the electric guitar. With a few exceptions, the guitar started out as a crude generator of exciting noise and dance energy: a fundamentally teenage sound. Then it gradually became an ever more subtle expressive implement, with a huge textural range.  Synths, in contrast, started out prog: they cost a fortune and were challenging to operate, and this made them the preserve of established performers generally of  virtuosic and artistically ambitious bent. Either that or synthesisers belonged to institutions like universities and were accessible only to composers with equally lofty purposes in mind.

The primitivist phase of the synthesizer came after the sophisticated start. In the late Seventies, cheaper machines like the Wasp became available; they were also compact, portable, and relatively user-friendly compared with their bulky predecessors. This democratization of electronics happened to coincide with rock’s own self-conscious return to juvenile basics in the form of punk. All of a sudden the synth was competing with the guitar to be the true instrument of do-it-yourself.  For many the synth won that contest handily: you didn’t even need to learn two chords, you could riff out abstract blurts of nasty noise or play one-finger melodies.  Furthermore synths and the rudimentary drum machines that were also newly available encouraged a “non-musical” (at least in rock terms) approach. Rather than jam your way to a song through the intuitive logic of groove and feel, tracks could be built up through addition and subtraction, using a hypnotic but uninflected machine-beat as a grid for the assembly process.  

Compiled by Richard Anderson, Close To the Noise Floor is a four-disc survey of the excitingly messy birth of British electronica during the late Seventies and early Eighties. One of the maps Anderson used is “Wild Planet”, a celebrated three-part feature written by Dave Henderson  for the music weekly Sounds. The 1983 article spawned a regular Sounds column dedicated to the cassette underground of tiny labels like Flowmotion and Third Mind.  Henderson contributes a short but vivid memoir-style introduction to this box set and also features in his musical guise as a member of Worldbackwards, a group whose ambition was to sound like “Throbbing Gristle on Tamla Motown”.

“Minimal synth” works as a shorthand tag for Close To the Noise Floor’s remit, although the scope of the trawl is actually wider and more disparate than what that term tends to signify, taking in electro-punk, industrial, synthpop, dark ambient, and more.  Rather than use generic focus as an organizing principle, the anthology achieves coherence through sticking with a single country – Britain – when it could have easily have swept across the equally active European scene or harvested the scattered but significant American exponents like John Bender and Nervous Gender.

The national focus makes sense historically, in so far as the UK scene was catalysed by half-a-dozen native outfits who released debut singles within a few months of each other in mid-1978: The Normal, Human League, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Thomas Leer, and Robert Rental.  The combined impact of these singles – respectively “T.V.O.D.”, “Being Boiled”, “United”, Extended Play EP, “Private Plane” and “Paralysis” -  was as galvanizing as Buzzcocks’s “Spiral Scratch” had been for scrappy DIY guitar-groups a year earlier.

Noise Floor’s first disc concentrates on the children of Throbbing Gristle and “Warm Leatherette” (the more influential B-side to The Normal’s “T.V.O.D.”).  No spacey ripples or groovy Moogy sensuality here: the synth is used aggressively and obnoxiously. One gem in this vein is Storm Bugs’s “Little Bob Minor”, with its ear-itching drones whose texture resembles a comb-and-paper kazoo.   Vocals, when they appear, are usually screams or creepy spoken-word soundbites, as with the cut-up voices from a radio interview with prostitutes that appear on We Be Echo’s “Sexuality”.

The stand-out track on the first disc, though, is a bit of an anomaly: Thomas Leer’s “Tight as A Drum,” from his fabulous EP 4 Movements. By 1981 Leer had left behind the gratingly foreboding ambiences of The Bridge, his collaborative album with Robert Rental, and absorbed the mutant disco influence of New York’s ZE label.  4 Movements also sounds like he’s letting back in some of the banished musicality of pre-punk rock, figures like Island Records folk-blues minstrel John Martyn. “Tight As Drum” swings because although the percussion is electronic, Leer played it by hand on pads; the intricate weave of synth-melodies over the top sounds vaguely Middle Eastern in its ornamented filigree. The song seems to reach your ears through the heat-haze coming off a sun-baked road. A snapshot of a moment of tension so exquisitely taut it’s a kind of ecstasy, “Tight As A Drum” features the briefest of spoken-not-sung lyrics: a depiction of a young man stretching himself, silhouetted against the morning light streaming through a window.  

Embracing mainstream ideas of melody and musicality doesn’t work so well on the second disc, which mostly features groups who reach towards pop but don’t get even as close as The Human League did on “Being Boiled” (included here). Performance art duo Schlelmer K’s “Broken Vein” suggests Soft Cell sans the soaring voice and heart-swelling tunes; Native Europe’s “The Distance from Köln” is a lo-fi cousin to Berlin’s Eighties radio staple “The Metro”; lyrically if not so much sonically, Cultural Amnesia’s 1981 anti-Thatcherism ditty “Materialistic Man” comes over like  a dry run for Depeche Mode’s  “Everything Counts”.  The better tunes come from those who actually managed to make it as pop stars.  “A New Kind of Man”, an unreleased solo single by ex-Ultravox singer John Foxx, features a vocal that – typical for the emerging synthpop genre – sounds glacial and torrid at the same time, plus lyrics like scraps from an abandoned and torn-up screenplay: “an underwater kind of silence/humming of electric pylons/”don’t forget me” fits of static/another scene began.”  Heard in its superior 1980 album version rather than original incarnation as B-side to their debut single “Electricity,” Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark’s “Almost” sounds like a spindly North-of-England Kraftwerk: graph-paper rhythm, sobbing synth. Possibly the best thing OMD ever did, the song seems to express obliquely the hidden hot tears of a cold fish technocrat who’s outwardly all impassive Dr Spock logic:  “always making statements and moving step by step/always acting theories/I will regret.”

Livening up the second disc – otherwise a bit of slog – are specimens from the post-punk mini-genre of parody.  The late Seventies erupted with cover  versions that swapped reverent reinterpretation for willfully goofy travesty – think Flying Lizards’s deadpan take on “Money”, or The Dickies’s punked-up “Nights in White Satin”. The idea, I think, was to show just how much distance there was now between Old Wave and New Wave – or, if the cover was of a contemporary hit, how far from chartpop convention you could push the song.   That’s the nature of the game with British Standard Unit’s deconstructive molesting of Rod Stewart’s “D’Ya Think I’m Sexy,” which became a John Peel radio show fave in 1979 with its grotesquely sped-up voices and anti-disco jerkiness.  B.S.U. was just one of numerous guises worn by ex-Mott the Hoople keyboard player Morgan Fisher for a covers album project called Hybrid Kids. “Gerry and the Holograms” by the group of the same name isn’t a cover but a lampoon of the emergent synthpop genre itself, wreaked by two members of the cult band Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias (whose output consisted almost entirely of parodies such as their punk-mocking Snuff Rock EP). “Gerry and the Holograms” has been identified as the melodic source for New Order’s “Blue Monday,” but to these ears sounds more like The Stooges’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog” covered by BBC Radiophonic Workshop. In a word, awesome.

That pair of whimsies could equally have been squeezed onto the last disc of Close To the Noise Floor, which corrals an array of unclassifiable oddities. Although electronic in feel, more often than not the sounds here are achieved via conventional instruments subjected to heavy treatments. Here the forebears, if any exist, are The Residents and Cabaret Voltaire (who in their early days used effects-processed flute and guitar more than synths).  Renaldo and the Loaf’s “Dying Inside” sounds ripe for sampling by Kanye West on Pablo II. Unable to afford synths, the duo used effects pedals to render their instruments and voices as inorganic and alien-sounding as possible.  Alien Brains’s “Menial Disorders” has a great back story (the project started in the physics lab at the group’s high school and mainly deployed a “Loopotron,” a self-cobbled tape-echo machine that used the erase head to alter the sound) which is matched by the sound itself : a cloud of mechanical gnats circling around your head, fizzing zig-zags of hi-hat, corrugated crumples of  texture, rhythm like bed springs pinging inside a giant reverberant cistern.  

Most of Noise Floor’s contents are shaped by twin prohibitions. First and foremost, the goal was to sound as un-rock’n’roll and un-American as possible (which is why the vocals, when they appear, are usually absurdly English – stiff-backed, groomed-sounding, somehow short-haired).  But there was a secondary impulse at work too: to break with the conventions of synth-based music established in the first half of the Seventies by groups like Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, who favored long-form compositions (often taking up an entire album side) and an atmosphere of celestial serenity. 

Now you might have noticed that I jumped right past this box’s third disc. That’s because in some ways it’s the most intriguing of the four, precisely because it’s full of postpunk DIY that still took its bearings from the pre-punk electronic cosmonauts.  Maximal Synth, you could call this stuff:  operators like Sea of Wires, MFH, and Mark Shreeve, who, rather than ape “Warm Leatherette” or Cabaret Voltaire’s “Silent Command”, parallel the billowing pulse-scapes being made at that same time by Manuel Gottsching on albums like 1978’s Blackouts. This sound – late period kosmische drifting towards New Age or proto-techno – has in recent years enjoyed a measure of renewed currency thanks to Emeralds and their ilk, but generally it’s been written right out of history.

One of the groups included on Disc 3 are actually a totally pre-punk proposition.  Zorch took their battery of EMS Synthi As and lightshow to free festivals all across England, including the very first Stonehenge Festival in 1974. Hearing their “Adrenalin” made me wish for a time machine so I could experiences its spaceship-landing whooshes panning around the megalithic columns and frazzling the minds of the gathered long-hairs.  In a similar amorphous vein, Ron Berry’s “Sea of Tranquility” is an elegaic homage to the Moon Landing. But “Triptych” by EG Oblique Graph (Bryn Jones, later better known as Muslimgauze) is less beatific, recalling the sensory-deprivation aesthetic of Conrad Schnitzler: insidiously hissing percussion and color-leached tones, like a wintry after-dark walk through a Berlin pedestrian underpass. 

Despite the omission of obvious classics like “Warm Leatherette” or Fad Gadget’s “Ricky’s Hand” (presumably because the Mute label archive was off-limits to the compiler) Close To the Noise Floor provides a fascinating overview of the formative years of British home-studio electronica: groups who were precursors in spirit, if not direct lineage, to the techno and IDM artists of the Nineties.  Still, with the cult for “minimal wave” now a decade old, it almost feels like another task has become urgent: the rediscovery of the groups that did the groundwork for the outfits on Disc 3 of Noise Floor. Time, perhaps, for a box set that does justice to major label synth-rock of the Seventies: figures like Tomita, pre-Chariots of Fire Vangelis, Michael Hoenig, Ralph Lundsten, even Jean Michel-Jarre.  Rather than the underground, which enjoys a healthy complement of dedicated curators and salvage operators, it’s the mainstream of that era that is truly lost, that in a stragne way seems even more exotic and remote in time.