The Nitty Gritti On Scritti Politti

-- Sounds, January 1979

Words: Dave McCullough.

"THE TROUBLE with interviews is that they're never proper discussions. The interviewer never questions what he's doing."

The name. The band. The idea. The comment. The interview (the phrase is employed tentatively like many of the words and phrases in the following piece, 'cos I'm chicken) and that closing remark.

What am I doing? What is the point of me hitting my trusty type-machine in this particular instance? Is it a job or is it a bird? A bird with a wounded wing floundering pathetically in an empty sky?

I first listened to Scritti Politti's debut single a long time ago 'cos they sent it through the post to me. I didn't like it at first 'cos it required effort and I'm only human and I hadn't the time and I'm a star and I couldn't be bothered. Decadent cat.

I heard it again in Rough Trade the other week, and I stood in a daze listening to it churning, moving music on a biting grey day in a cold, shifting ugly city. 'Skank Bloc Bologna' was the side of the record that the Rough Traders were loosening the foundations of their shop to. It wasn't a single, it wasn't an oldie fartie LP track either. It was, ah, different. I plummet. I flounder. I grab the band.

SCRITTI POLITTI live in a squat in Carol Street in London's Camden Town. That was the information. I spurted through the wet streets from the tube station and was pointed Carol Street-wards by a traffic warden in a penguin suit.

Only three days to Christmas, the shops shout at me, and there's no Christmas for junkies and there's only a paltry electric fire for heat in the Scritti Politti place.

A chat before the inevitable but heartily welcome pub call. The room is dark and Dickensian. Chairs and plates and shapeless things are scattered around the tightly packed area.

Scritti Politti do not have the ego-rounded group line-up definition. The record was the sound of, on an immediate level, the music of three people, Green, Tom and Nial by name, but, on a much more relevant level, was the cold black plastic evidence of a period of fruitful communication and meaningful endeavour among friends. But it's far removed from joss-sticked communes and hippy-hippy-wakes, man, so you needn't worry in that respect.

Scritti Politti are dangerous. Scritti Politti are on the attack and must therefore in my mind (not in yours, please!) be categorised alongside current bands such as The Fall, The Gang Of Four and The Mekons. It's attitude that's my criterion. A bold subversive growl at the music scene.

"Hi, I'm Green. I play guitar and sing. That's Tom the drummer and that's Nial who plays the bass. Simon's not here. He does the tapes and things."

Immediate response: so you use tapes then?

"We didn't on the record..."

It's Green that does most of the talking. He's tall and skinny and eloquent. Nial is hunched and small. Tom is nervous and shy. The others in the room are attentive.

I ask about their past and the inception of the band.

"We got together a very short time ago," Green begins, "we've been together just three months."

They met at Art College in Leeds...fluupp! That's it. Turn the page over and kick Scritti Politti from the perimeters of your mind, see if I care. You're all spoilt any way. The backcloth is interesting but it's not terminal.

Nial talks: "We got very fed up with college."

Tom adds: "It was largely just fucking about at college."

Green explains: "It was very safe and trendy and outrageous. Leeds in particular was toted as being a very trendy place to go, as you had lecturers there that made names for themselves in the Sixties. We used to go around having lots of arguments with people and that's the most fruitful thing we could do really. We caused some sort of friction."

Friction. Punk has moved underground whether you like it or not. The message is coming from the cellars and dark avenues and they don't know yet 'cos Johnny Rotten's in a cage in their living room and they think all's well. It's not.

AFTER THE Leeds academic blackout (why do people go to university or college?) two-thirds of Scritti Politti came south in search of...what exactly?

"Well, Leeds seemed stagnant and London seemed the place to be. I mean, the plan for the band was quite firm when we came down but it wasn't in any big career way. We didn't think about the repercussion of what we were doing."

Ah, the Journey to the capital, following the big star and stepping into the black hole! No, not this time. True grit in Camden Town saw them through to their present flourishing status. Ask your dad about 'hard work' sometimes, and then speak to the Desperate Bicycle about initiative, it'll help I'm sure.

Green crouched down in front of the fire and reflects on those past months. "When we came down we listened to a lot of different things, like Pere Ubu and a lot of dub in my case, stuff like Joe Gibbs, Culture and The Abyssinians. A lot of interesting things seemed to be going down. What The Fall were doing for instance."

We ramble on about assorted Fall memories for some time and it's only then I grasp something real in connection with Scritti Politti. I mean, interviews are laced with all sorts of limitations and drawbacks. You glean bits of character and truth while ceremoniously ploughing through the same old bread and butter routine.

Yeah, Scritti Politti have dignity and righteous pride among their armoury, weapons that shine brightly in the sunlight of new discovery. Their music is a case of growing and nurturing to them and, oh, it holds its head high with such freshness and honesty that it's simply exhilerating.

Green stares at me. "The most important things are getting away from listening to the standard Clash and reggae stuff."

Yeah, but how come you avoided falling into the standard crash, bang, thud conveyor belt?

"We were like that at the beginning," Tom coaxes. "We had a phase of ramalama punk. After a couple of weeks like that and we left Leeds in a hurry."

Green and Nial went to school together in South Wales. Nial got a job in a laundry while Green left for college and confusion. Then came the band. They formed, or rather had the idea of getting together around the time that The Mekons and The Gang Of Four (also of the Leeds academic kitchen) were beginning to, uh, happen.

The roots of this startlingly original band are indeed very obvious: "We heard the Clash album and saw the Anarchy Tour and they're what really put the notion of 'doing it' into our head."

It was what followed, however, that proved significant...

IT'S BANDS like Scritti Politti that at the moment make the term 'New Wave' a meaningful and a generic one. I can (again, tentatively) see a skein of shared feeling and shared outlook and shared determination amidst this lower stratum of bands I've already referred to. They are in many ways one.

Now that punk (the phrase does mean something, in retrospect) is lost, the territory is flattened and the only logical future is for bands like Scritti Politti to flee to the furthest rims and edges they can find, while still following the sage tenets of what was going down a few years ago. Attack from the outside while accruing kowledge of the inside and its sickness, Scritti Politti is what John Forgotten would like to think his disgraceful crew constitutes.

As Green puts it: "the most important thing for us is finding new ways of going on. It wouldn't make a lot of sense for us to do what The Clash were doing then and go and play rock and roll based stuff."

And so they head out into the snow and search for new homes. I mean, is there anything else that's worth doing nowadays when there's nothing new at home that's worthwhile? Hey, but wait a minute, you're getting just like bleedin' Soft Machine, hitting dustbin lids and expecting us to lap it up! Huh!

"Yeah, that's it!" Nial is exhilerated at the thought of us hitting upon the crux of the Scritti Politti inner debate.

"It wouldn't make a lot of sense for us to be doing 12 bar things 'cos that wouldn't communicate the ideas and thoughts we're trying to convey...that's sealed, that's not dynamic."

We talk about the idea of a, uh, rock band having to 'entertain' to a degree, whatever their thematic depth might suggest. The reason that there's a large audience for their music at the moment, they insist, is 'cos they've sold between 400 and 500 singles per week for the past two months. I agree. 'Skank Bloc Bologna' is commercial (I hate that word) in a weirdo Royal Dragoon Guards meet Acker Bilk and have a hit way, but their newer material is apparently becoming much more inaccesible and Mr. Negative here thinks in all his pessimistic pulchritude that The Future could make it hard for Scritti Politti to scrape a living. They mightn't, ah, 'sell'. But that is being very down on them. The single is quite superb, but how did the band managed to get together at all? I mean, not just any old person can make a record, even in these enlightened times.

"It was The Desperate Bicycles that gave us the incentive. 'If you're thinking of making a tape why not go the whole way and make a record?' they said. Even when you've only been together a few months and have only written a couple of songs, a good way to make the public aware of you is to put out a record. That's how you get feed-back. I mean, already we've been offered gigs with ATV and The Red Crayola and things."

The band astonished me in my ignorance by insisting that you 'can't fail' when you 'cut' (see! I know all the right words!) a disc: "You borrow £500 as we did off Nial's brother. You get a cheap studio, you're bound to sell at least 500 singles and really your economics are just right and you pay the money back."

The band are also full of praise for the small label jobs like Rabid and Rough Trade who provided help and guidance. But now they've taken the initiative into their own capable hands.

"We're doing our own information pamphlet on DIY. I mean, it seems natural somehow to stamp your own records in your living-room! We've had letters from as far away as Tayside in Scotland. I mean there is no precise documented set of facts on DIY, 'cept for something that was in Sounds a while ago."

Yes, but is it rock and roll? I hear you scream again. Ah, lemme see, we'll ask Green: "We don't like rock and roll the way it stands at the moment. It militates against anybody controlling what they're doing. I mean, the idea of a select few controlling the culture of today's kids! And the horrible competitive aspect..."

Somebody across the room swoops in upon the moot point. "Yeah, at the end of the great punk rock boom, a lot of bands that had been supporting each other at the beginning started slagging each other off. It became horribly competitive."

Again we come back to the idea of The Business scooping all the young punks away from teenage rebellion and sucking out their respective stings, and it's only now that bands like Subway Sect and The Fall are slowly but steadily bubbling beneath the The Business' sagging consciousness. And Scritti Politti are there and waiting. Beware.

'TIME' IS called in the sweaty pub. We ingratiate ourselves with the bar-person one more time and leave. The bar-person thinks we're mad, homosexual, dirty, dishonest and far too young for comfort, I just think we're pathetic.

All right Scritti Politti, I have questioned what I'm doing. I've written about you 'cos you're worthwhile. I want people reading Sounds to perhaps share that feeling. OK? So now I'll make my way through the rain and home. Rod Stewart is on TV and the rain is still sweeping over London town. All I can do is hope. Nothing else.