Second-to-last article from the archives: Green Gartside, 1988, promoting Provision. After this Green dropped off the map for over a decade before reemerging with a flinty hip-hop album of varying quality, Anomie and Bonhomie in 1999 and then, finally, in 2006, White Bread, Black Beer, a digital bedsit Carl Wilson-tinged collection that at last reconciled the distance he had travelled from North London to New York and back again. It was the second stage of this musical journey which I inexpertly quizzed him about here. OCR'd from the original RIU interview with a lot of my dumb chatter cut out.
"I was disposed not to like pop songs for a while. When I first started out, nine years ago now, I was concerned, in a silly and juvenile way, to be different. I would have hated the kind of songs I play now if you'd played them to me then. I was concerned not to have things that sounded slick, not to have things in 4/4, not to have verse-chorus-bridge. I was concerned with not doing a lot of things, and that all started to look dead-endish to me. When I wrote
Songs To Remember I was just coming out of that and had started writing songs; that album sort of has one foot in the camp of Amateurishness As Virtue and one foot on the camp of Trying To Get It Together."
Green Gartside reconciled with pop in 198l with 'The Sweetest Girl'. The bass and drums were milk and honey, and the lyrics struck a balance between sentimentalism and intellectualising. The B-side, 'Lions After Slumber', showed Green getting into a funky frame of mind. After the
Songs To Remember LP he split with the other members and took the band name to New York to recruit two new musicians, pianist David Gamson and drummer Fred Maher. Their first single, 'Wood Beez; (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)', was a pumping piece of groovy and a dancefloor hit. Suddenly Scritti Politti had A Sound: focused, simplified, vodka-clear.
So what made Green get it together -- was it the work of Gamson and Maher?
"A lot of it was to do with the decisions made on my part, the aesthetic moves I'd made that pre-existed my meeting David and Fred. But one of the reasons that we worked so well on these last two albums is that we do have a lot in common. They came from the same sort of histories that I'd come from -- listening initially to pop, then to a lot more marginal rock musics and then R'n'B.
"I think that the Scritti Politti sound which people will be familiar with at the moment is a group sound. If I went off now and made a record with someone else, I don't know how much of it would go with me, or how much I'd want to take with me."
ln New York, the hip-hop scene was advancing hand in hand with new technology.
Cupid + Psyche '85 used cut-up techniques and sampling, and Green admits a boyish fascination with the gadgets of dance.
"Musical technology, the advances that have been made in the last six years, that's been completely transformatory, what that's enabled me to do. You can get involved with the possibilities and present yourself with far choices than it's healthy to have. If that's a sin, then we're guilty of it! Once you realise that things can be manipulated in all these myriad ways by tiny increments, your head and ears quickly get into that.
"If
Cupid + Psyche was an influential record -- and I'm told by a lot of musicians in America that it was -- it wouldn't have been for those reasons. We swiped the whole sampling thing from a lot of other places. It was our approach to arranging the material, on the one hand, which was popular, and we were quite concerned to push the technology we were using to its limits.
"A lot of the arranging ideas come from David Gamson, but we got a lot of it from groups like
The System, and
Solar Records, people like
Shalamar and
Leon Sylvers. I was gonna say it's all been done before (laughs), but that's not quite true; it's all been influenced."
Miles Davis plays trumpet on 'Oh Patti'. Others might regard that as a vindication.
"I hadn't thought of it like that. I was as surprised as anybody when Miles covered 'Perfect Way' and he let it be known through friends we have in common that he'd be interested in meeting up. After I'd written 'Oh Patti' it seemed that it would suit him and it would be nice to get him in.
"Were we interested in getting big names to glamourise our project we could have, for whatever reason -- it and still mystifies me a bit -- we could have got an awful lot of well-established Americans to appear on the record. But Roger Troutman and Miles were the only two people that we wanted.
"Miles is a little bit scary and little bit different, but once we got talking to him and met him on subsequent occasions we found him to be quite charming and very nice to us, and very supportive. He does have a very elliptical and peculiar way of going about things but he's not as crazy as people think by any means. He really is straight these days. He doesn't drink or do drugs or do anything else. He drinks his herbal tea and has his injections of lamb hormones or whatever. He's a regular guy."
Provision is also more of a regular album --
Cupid + Psyche '88 -- but what it lacks in innovation it makes up for in maturity. The most it has in common with the days of the
Confidence EP and
Songs To Remember are the puns and references. Green is the only lyricist cheeky enough to rhyme "Gaultier pants" with "Immanuelle Kant" but po-faced journalists fail to get the joke. I mean it is a joke, no?
"Oh, of course. I think the lyrics are always tongue-in-cheek. They're meant to be funny. It's not side-splitting humour but there's a lot put in there in the hope that it' ll be appreciated with a wry smile. Not enough people get the joke and realise that Scritti has to send itself up, having arrived at this faintly preposterous position. To be fair, I can get into all that after a few pints. If people want to lead me that way I'll be a bar room theorist with the best of them. But that's certainly not the whole story. I don't read interviews anymore. They're so painful -- they never get right or I never get it right. It never, ever comes out right.
Would Scritti ever leave the dance floor, especially now it's become so crowded?
"British pop has always been indebted to whatever version of R'n'B is current, from the Beatles to the Stones to the Bowies, and it will continue to be so. But you're right; there is a lot more black music in the charts at the moment. Hip-hop is very healthy; it looked a bit jaded about three years ago, for a short while, but it's coming back strong. That's the sort of thing we think about. We thought, should we make a hip-hop album and fairly promptly decided no, even though we all listen to a lot of it. Many hip-hop records are made fairly quickly, cheaply and nastily, and I like a lot of that.
"Having said that, I don't know what's next, and I could well imagine being lured elsewhere."
As well as Miles and
Roger Troutman, you've worked with Chaka Khan and
Arif Mardin.
"I don't feel proud. I don't ever feel particularly confident about myself or about what I do, and in a way working with people, moving up or across a couple of rungs doesn't exactly impart confidence to you. In a way it makes you a little more worried about your own worth.
"As much as one would be fairly frightened of failing, there's a certain kind of fear attached to the threat of success as well; being able to live up to it, or feel that it's honest or you're worth it. So it hasn't had that effect on me; perhaps if it did I'd be able to work a bit faster, or be a bit bolder."
Provision comes after a break of three years. Green says only two were spent in the studio ("on and off -- more on than off"). In the interim he gave away one song, 'Best Thing Ever', for Madonna to include on the
Who's That Girl soundtrack.
"'Best Thing Ever' was recorded between albums, and everybody at Warner Brothers had a copy and Madonna heard it and we were asked if we would mind it being included and I didn't mind at all. I didn't go and see the movie and I've no idea what they did with it. I didn't feel proprietarily interested in its fate; it was just something that I'd done and it was gone and out of my hands.
"As soon as l've finished something I don't want to hear it again. All that I'm concerned with is that the album gets a fair hearing and I know that's an impossible wish but that's the most I could hope for. I'm thrilled with it now. That's all I can say. And I'm through with it now -- make of it what you will."
(1988)