'From the Pressing Plants to the Concert Halls
We Want Some Control'

-- After Hours, June or July, 1979 (?)

Words: Jon and Charles

Jon::	What then is Scritti Politti?
Green::	It bears a lot of resemblance to a beat group, a rock group, more than anything else in the world. What differentiates it from other beat groups is how it decides what it does, and then how it does it.
Ian::	In that sense it doesn't resemble many other groups.
Green::	No, it doesn't resemble many other groups.
Jon::	Does it consist strictly of musicians?
Green::	No, the idea is that substantial decisions about what the group is doing are made by a large number of people than actually pick up instruments at present, and play and call themselves Scritti Politti. The group of people that are involved in the decision-making, some of them are involved in different projects, some are 'musical' and some aren't. It's an odd conglomerate of people.
Jon::	What does the name mean?
Green::	The name was onomatopaeic, which means that it was chosen after we'd started rehearsing because it sounded like the noise we wanted to make. It was also chosen because it wasn't the Vips, the Nips, the Buzzes, the Vipers, the Spics, the Dickies or anything else like that. And the clincher was that we got it from a book of writings by a bloke called Gramsci, who was Italian--political writings done while he was in prison. He was a hunch-back dwarf cripple who died in prison in the 1930's. Scritti Politti isn't the title of the book it's a bastardization of it. Politti is an English word, which is any group of individuals who get together for the purpose of working towards a set of aims.
Jon::	You have a set of aims?
Green::	Yes
Matt::	Not defined as a written down set of aims.
Nial::	Not a grand plan.
Jon::	Are there certain things that you are working towards?
Green::	We do have aims and one of the inbuilt elements of that set of aims is the sort of valve which says goals are never fixed.
Jon::	By aims you don't mean releasing 14 albums in the next three years, or whatever.
Green::	No, the aims are not product-orientated in the historical or usual sense of rock groups' 'product', I don't think.
Nial::	They're very much couched in terms of the situation that we find ourselves in and the problems we find ourselves with...and a lot of those problems we have in common with anyone else who is involved with production.
Green::	So a lot of these problems aren't actually encountered at the stage of writing or performing a song per se, they're encountered elsewhere...by trying to...other aspects when you try and get together to make music, problems are chucked up all over the place...problems of where the interface between making music and the rest of your life comes, for instance. Problems of just the status...musician...beat group...
Jon::	Are there any things that you'd like to effect with your music?
Green::	Yes, effected with our general practice, not just the music.
Nial::	Our music is part of that but in a lot of ways it is a very unquantifiable part...a very wispy grey part...because I think it is impossible to pin down how a piece of music works or what it means...because that is not constructed through our intentions as musicians, but is constructed socially through the people that we come into contact with.
Green::	You can't decide that our music will mean this or that at all in the way that people think they can because as with everything else meaning is only established contextually.
Jon::	So do you want to try to influence the context.
Green::	Yeah, that's the whole point, one of the most important things is trying to control the context better, so you almost begin to control the meaning of those aspects of music making that, up to the present, are uncontrollable and unquantifiable.
Jon::	So here you're going against the attitude of 'O.K. I've done the music, now it's up to everyone else'. You reject that?
Green::	Yeah, I reject that because it's dumb and it leaves you...there's nothing you can say about your music that's any more the case than what anyone else should say about it.
Jon::	Even though you ...yourself?
Green::	The problem is that you can have visions and play tunes and think that they're all hunky dory and someone or lots of people can reject it and say 'I don't like the tunes'. If that's all you are putting out, then the public an accept it or reject it according to taste, which leaves you with really not much effectiveness or control at all.
Matt::	Your intentions don't come out of the vinyl as the music plays.
Jon::	So what are you trying to do about that?
Green::	To deal with some fo the...
Nial::	...more easily identifiable...
Green::	...more easily understood concrete problems that people have when they try to make or control their own culture, which is why we are interested in the whole thing of trying to keep out of the sweaty palms of the record companies, interested in D.I.Y. records, co-operation with other groups, seeing how far that can be taken, how large an alternative can be built, a positional alternative rather than a run-away-and-hide alternative.
Jon::	How do you see that alternative being better than what you've already got? Well, it's not going to affect the fact that music is made...why do you see that it's better that music should be completely made by oneself...pressed by you, with the sleeve you drew yourself etc. etc. why is that better than that it should be perfectly pressed, with a flash sleeve all through W.E.A.
Green::	Because it provides something to work on, I mean you are really challenging nothing and creating nothing if you just walk into a record company office and hand it all over to them and let them call all the stops.
Jon::	Creating nothing?
Green::	You're making no new moves...you are not providing yourself with any problems, it would be very dull. Apart from that you have essential, I should imagine, objections to the likes of Warner Brothers controlling fucking great lumps of your culture and your life and that's thoroughly permeating and offensive in beat music.
Jon::	Yeah, I see that of course, but I don't quite see why the fact that there are more problems involved in doing it oneself is necessarily valuable.
Nial::	It's not a question of there being more problems, but the problems being different.
Green::	It's a lot more difficult to survive.
Nial::	There are a lot of problems that you come up against when you are doing it yourself which you can build a control over or have a possibility of building a control over.
Green::	And gain knowledge from.
Nial::	If you are signed to a big record company there is far less potential for coming to terms with those problems.
Green::	You are talking about problems in a pragmatic way, I was saying that you are problematizing new areas, you are starting to talk about new areas, and they will chuck up new problems and new limits to be tested and tried, and that to me is of some worth as some basic thought plan of a project that is going to be interesting as opposed to complacent. It's going to disturb some thought, disturb some language, disturb some relationships and that's in keeping with the basic desire that we have to disturb complacency.
Jon::	Is that an aim, then, to disturb complacency?
Green::	I think so.
Nial::	An aim as opposed to the aim.
Green::	It's a large part of it, I can, I wouldn't talk about it just as disturbing complacency.
Jon::	Are there any specific areas of complacency?
Green::	Obviously the complacency that there is, at the moment, about what people like to call youth culture, and beat music. That is particularly annoying because those areas are always thought to be very, very lively and very liberating.
Ian::	And very radical. Ha! Ha!
Green::	And very radical, and in fact they are very conservative, very dumb, very safe, very boring and they pose no problems to anyone.
Matt::	Which runs right through the music business, the papers, a lot of the audience, people don't try things.
Jon::	Do you see your music existing within a political framework?
Green::	No, I'm not happy to be talked of as a political group in any way.
Jon::	But do you see what you are doing as having political implications?
Green::	Everything anyone does has political implications...it's being aware of the social effect of what you are doing, or trying to think about it. You are thinking about what you are doing in terms of other beat groups, for instance, there are a lot of the problems that we tend to address ourselves to--the problems that other people trying to form groups come up against, because we think it's very important that people should be in groups and it's the kind of area that we are beginning to gain some knowledge of, so we want to talk about it.
Jon::	Would you like to say something about the words on the single, as I don't think most people can make them out let alone work out what's going on?
Green::	It's a mistake...a big problem, I think, is the idea that anything you say, any utterance in any song is necessarily about something. It has some sort of reference point--you know...there is the language, there is the reference in the real world...and it's about that. I was thinking of certain things when I wrote it...the issues that are behind something like Skank Bloc Bologna won't immediately become obvious...not to everybody. Things like sexism, things like the messes that young people are in, especially in inner city areas, like the bad bits of London...some of the difference between that and what is happening in a city like Bologna...I wasn't trying to analyse that much...the way that answers aren't posed for young people in terms of anything that they are likely to encounter in their lives...also when I wrote it the Clash had a big interview in the NME and they said they felt like the Magnificent 7--a bunch of outlaws that would come into town to put everything to rights, and the last bit was something to do with that overestimation, the ability of a beat group to ride into town and put everything right, the idea of a beat group as macho gunslingers, the Robin Hoods of today, or some such silly over-romanticised notion of that, and it was a bit to do with our own overestimations as well. Obviously that doesn't come across in any kind of literal way, but there's an attempt to make more reference points in one song that the old-fashioned way of treating song layout which is like treating songs like having conversations--like you've got three minutes in which you want to stick a lot of references in, and then try to create a kind of feeling...and that feeling becomes amplified through repetition--the rest of what you do...you don't try...We are trying...recognising that songs aren't conversations or political tracts, and a new way of writing, of using language is necessary to maximise the potential...new rules of syntax if you like......what do you think is wrong with what has been said so far, Bob?
Bob::	One of the major problems is that we have all got to know each other and it's all a bit comfortable...we're all sitting in the pub...I think what one of our problems is that...a lot of what we talk about...is that there are no blueprints for anything...and people often take that as a blueprint in itself...people often say 'oh they're just hedging in their answers, they're just hedging about political bands, about the lyrics' all the things you have talked about you've not given any real answers to.
Green::	It's sounded a bit hacky so far, which is not something of our choosing. Something that's struck me...trying to think out very carefully what you say...people try and label you as an intellectual or as an intellectual group, which stinks. The idea of people making music, quickly without much fuss--with lots of energy, is still very important. One of the results of that is you see lots of groups that are usually quite shambolic...very scratchy-collapsy, we actively like things like that--things that crop up as mistakes in people's music...like the Desperate Bicycles and the Raincoats, we enjoy very much the enthusiastic, stop-start mistakes, falling over sound they have. It isn't fetishising mistakes. I wouldn't enthuse over somebody getting up and playing Hendrixy guitar over a bad version of White Riot, just because it was easy, it was cheap. I'd tell them to fuck off. Because it doesn't have the substantial backing of new ideas delivered with any kind of commitment.
Charles::	You said that you were interested in trying to test new areas that haven't been tried before. What are they?
Green::	I suppose they generally come under the heading of self determination in beat music and that throws up all sorts of areas, that haven't been attempted before. I don't mean self-determination in any silly hippy or anarchist way. Ideas of broadening out...the record wasn't such an enormously fixed part of what we do, i.e. it would be quite interesting if we made a release...like a piece of writing--like Skank Bloc was Scrit 1 and a piece of writing would be Scrit 2, and I don't mean in any kind of Bob Last crony way, and we'd send it to the singles page to be reviewed. And then there'll be all sorts of different stages of production, different types of production, that could be mailed in, and the conversation could be broadened in that way. The problem with that is you get the feeling that a lot of people would send in wanky videos and arty-facts, you know, and all sorts of shite--bags with orange peel in them.

Meeting Scritti Politti has led to a reconsideration of many things. I was vacant, I didn't think about things that I thought I was really interested in. Talk is essential because it provokes thought which provokes talk which...I have talked to Scritti Politti and through them others. It has made me feel inadequate but made me want to change that. Thought and conversation sometimes provide solutions/aims/ideas, but more often (for me) frustration and confusion. But better to know of a collection of viewpoints than of just one. Awareness better than naivete. Scritti Politti are aware, interesting, provocative, and a group with a desire to change those parts of the music world which make it the scummy, dirty, sad world that it appears when looked at with a critical eye. Scritti Politti are concerned about rock'n'roll/beat music.

If you get the chance, don't hesitate to talk to them. On tour with the Red Crayola around late March/early April. See them.