THE SWEETEST GROOVE

-- Melody Maker, May 29, 1982

Everything's gone GREEN, the voice of SCRITTI POLITTI tells Lynden Barber. Photos: Tom Sheehan

WHO are Scritti Politti? If most of the pranksters gaining spoonfuls of praise from a hyperbole-fixated music press turn out on close inspection to be so much stagnant pondweed, then Scritti are the lilies floating serenely over the scum.

If the current demand for a bright, gleaming pop in our pubs and clubs means that built-in-obsolescence is the rule, the music of Scritti is an exception, an irresistibly attractive brand of song infused with sumptuous depth and keen intelligence.

But who are the purveyors of this seductive blend of sublime new textures, velvet soul and heart-moving pop? Who takes the credit for the mellifluous flood of melody, uplifting rhythm and bounce and fibres of funk-and-think being poured into honeyed moulds under a collective Scritti Politti banner?

Once Scritti were tiny in fame, an almost archetypal Rough Trade recording group -- politics up-front image intellectual, music like chicken wire.

Now Politti are bulging with reputation and drenched with promise, collecting wildly enthusiastic accolades from press and a rapidly growing band of cognoscenti by the cart-load.

Last year's "The 'Sweetest Girl'" single announced the transformation. The current single "Faithless", a sponge of gospel-flavoured liquid, is the confirmation; the long-awaited album "Songs To Remember" (due for release any moment now on Rough Trade) is the blossoming of the style.

When interviewed for the MM just after the release of "The 'Sweetest Girl'" several months ago, the name Scritti Politti referred official to singer and songwriter Green Strohmeyer-Gartside, rhythm person Tom Morley and organiser Matthew Kay, though the ever-valuable Green completely dominated the conversation. This time, though, everything's gone Green; his is the sole face for the photo session, his is the chosen voice for the interview -- though Matthew turns up to keep a generally silent watch on the proceedings.

"It just came about quite naturally as a result of the fact that Tom never actually said anything in interviews," explains Green as first pints sink to stomachs in the opulent surroundings of a Mayfair public house.

"It just became increasingly apparent that it was sort of a one-man show, if you like. There's me who writes, arranges and makes all the decisions about everything, and Matt who puts them into practice. Tom didn't play on 'The Sweetest Girl' or 'Faithless'. I haven't seen hardly anything of him since.

"I mean, he really doesn't do anything at all. It's very nice for him, considering he gets a wage, but a bit ridiculous" (a phone call to Tom later establishes that he did, in fact, programme all the drum machines and computers).

Hold on -- aren't we heading for a sticky, blubbery me-situation here? Aren't journalists the ones who are supposed to throw around first-person singulars like confetti and indulge in the practised art of the stag-off without a second thought? More clarification.

"All the old claims to this pseudo-collectivism that went on, that were enormous back in the very early days -- I remember we posed for a photograph, 40 people standing in a kitchen making tea -- in retrospect a lot of it was a lot of hot air. All that has gone and this is where we are now, just down to me. which it always was."

But. Who are Scritti Politti? Matthew stumbles when asked -- it refers to a "collective to a degree" -- and Green sounds vague.

"We exist nominally as a group, and there are a pool of people who make the records -- they might change, depending on what sort of records I would like to make."

A conclusion: Scritti is a "kind of production company".

"SONGS To Remember" may be unfortunately titled in view of new albums from Vic Godard and the Gand Of Four (respectively, called "Songs For Sale" and "Songs Of The Free"), but it's a name that is at least apt.

Green has turned his musical concerns away from the scratchy experimentalism of post-punk independence -- he doesn't deny those days were a necessary part of his musical learning process, incidentally -- and has focused on pop.

But this is not the pop that snaps, cracks and fizzles brightly and then dies. Scritti pop is multi-layered immediate and accessible enough for instant consumption and superficial listening, and constructed with enough care, intuitive feeling and lyrical interest to ensure a wider and longer-lasting set of responses.

Scritti music is fresh and airy, mixing black influences like Lovers rock (also the title of one of the album tracks), soul, funk, gospel and jazz with the kind of natural melodic sensibility inherent in the best pop.

Though there are no immediately obvious musical parallels, "Songs To Remember" could turn out to occupy a similar position at the helm of the Eighties as Stevie Wonder's "Music Of My Mind" did in the Seventies -- an inspirational injection of vision into the pop and soul mainstream, turning traditional virtues into sharply contemporary style.

Musing agreeably on the Wonder analogy, Green says he did listen to the man's work at the time, though it's not a comparison he's really thought about. He takes it as a huge compliment, nevertheless, and confesses that he can easily forsee Scritti Politti selling vast quantities of records. Green not only possesses heaps of talent, but knows it.

"I think the LP is something like a bit of a milestone in British pop, quite honestly," he opines unselfconsciously. "I do think that. I'm pretty proud of it, I do think it's quite a remarkable record, and I will be extraordinarily angry if it doesn't get the exposure and the sale it deserves. You learn as you carry on that things in this industry aren't always earnt by merit.

"I'm glad to see 'Faithless' is starting to pick up the kind of reviews it deserves. Did you see Martin fry's thing in Smash Hits? He'd made it his single-of-the-month or something, he raved over it, which was nice. Things like that means a lot to me, particularly other musicians really respecting it.

"It's very important that the machinery of the industry locks in behind you -- that is why Matt's important. No way am I prepared to end up another lost cause in British pop, one of those greats about whom people end up saying 'Why didn't it happen?' I don't think that's very likely now because we're wise to it."

When asked if he thinks it likely that within a year he will be "a star", Green replies in the affirmative without a moment's hesitation. And does he look forward to that situation?

"I guess so. I shouldn't imagine it'll be awfully different from the way things are at the moment. I'm just very confident, I've got 40 songs stockpiled that I think are wonderful and I'm just waiting to record them, and record them well. We, at least, are an unstoppable machine, it's just a question of dealing with it all concertedly and sensitively."

Considering the contemporary ambiguity of the concept of "pop" it may seem as if Scritti Politti simply know a good bandwagon when they see it. Not so.

Recorded with bass player Nial Jinks (who's since departed), keyboard player Mike McAvory, backing singers May, Jackie and Lorenza, Robert Wyatt adding keyboards on "Sweetest Girl", "Asylums (In Jerusalem)" and "Lovers Rock", the album dates back to 1980, preceding the current pop boom by a considerable period of time -- "It's a shame the album didn't come out when it was made, in the spring of '81 it would have been quite remarkable," comments Green.

The decision to opt for pop fame came about during a long illness (psychosomatic -- not hepatitis, as reported in last week's paper) when Green indulged in large amounts of reading, bringing pop to the centre of the intellectual stage. The resultant change was dramatic: not only had there been a conscious decision to shift musical emphasis, the results reeked of an unmistakable maturity. Had the switch been difficult?

"No, it's a question of simply making the decision that there are now standards that you want to attain and just simply do whatever's necessary to get them," says Green. "I have a fairly good idea of the elements I want in something; I talk it over with Adam Kidron (Scritti's producer), get the necessary hardware and individuals and go and do it. I think it's the writing and arranging that really matters; I tend to have fairly firm ideas about how those might go and they come to me quite easily."

Was there any point where he realised he had the capacity to write strong melodies and arrangements that held the possibility of commercial success?

"Yes, well, I think I always knew it, but fought against it very often for the first however many years because it didn't seem the proper thing to do. At the time I was fairly anti-pop and I was interested in all sorts of post-punk de-constructuralist twanging and banging, whereas I used to sit down and write a lot of the songs that then weren't recorded, that were nice, very simple, very lovely tunes."

SCRITTI interviews, at their worst, can degenerate into unwieldy, impenetrable language as Green lights the blue touchpaper under the didactic fireworks spilling out of his brain.

An illustration: after interviewing them several months ago I rang Green to ask for a translation of one of the more oblique passages in his structuralist theory of pop. He was out, so I left a message.

Late on a Sunday night, the article written and typed up, I received a phone call from Green from what sounded like a crowed pub. He'd received the message and had "taken some notes", he said, before launching into a stream of theoretical consciousness lasting two or three minutes and expressed in weighty academic jargon. It ended with five classic words: "does that make things clearer?"

Any attempt to make theoretical sense out of the jungle-world of music must be of interest; Green's seemed especially pertinent -- he celebrated the primacy of pop in terms of its position as a channel of mass communication -- but seemed unnecessarily dogmatic. He was for example, prepared to dismiss less popular forms of music -- jazz, in particular -- as "marginal", and therefore not really of great importance. He now admits to a change in attitude since that earlier interview, mentioning an interest in doing "jazz-based things" in the future.

"I've eased up a bit on all the broadsides I was firing at every faction other than burgeoning pop," he comments. "I think you can relax a bit. It comes with gaining confidence as well, you don't feel it necessary to carve up history in quite as rigid a way. At the time I was quite scared by the trap of marginality and just how stultifying the discourse around it is. Listening back to the LP there are definitely some jazz influences in it."

He waxes lyrical about Jamie, the sax player heard to particularly good effect on the 12-inch version of "Faithless".

"It takes my breath away to hear him play," he enthuses, adding that he used to listen to "black loft import jazz" at about the same time as he was buying records by Sparks, Rod Stewart and traditional English folk singers.

Tough current songs are lyrically less "Big-P Political" than those of yore, Green still sees Scritti Politti as "a profoundly political undertaking".

"On almost any political map you'd have to acknowledge that pop music, in its history, in its entirety, was a significant political phenomenon -- and that's looking at things in a very traditional political way."

A former left-wing activist, Green now rejects the theoretical approach of the organised Left as being "reductionist" (ie. oversimplifying complex phenomena).

The political influence of pop "would have to be subversive," he says, citing the fact that in some places it's banned as evidence. "In Vietnam and China they're hysterically afraid of it."

Green doesn't see Scritti's music as being in any way 'propaganda' in the crudest sense of the terms. "The stuff I'm putting out at the moment is a lot more intuitive after years of fairly heavily theorised stuff; it's more likely to be appreciated a bit more intuitively, do you know what I mean?

"But I could quite easily be polemical again and use it to those ends, or a lot more literal again. Songs like 'Sweetest Girl' and 'Faithless' were in a way about not having any belief in a cast-iron guarantee to your own beliefs. It's about base-less, shifting ideology, with no anchors of an immutable truth."

FAITH-LESS, Green seems to have such a strong belief in his own ability that it can border on arrogance, but there's a frail side to his nature too -- he refers to some of his past experiences of live performance as "nightmarish", which partly accounts for Scritti's current reluctance to undertake any gigs.

Possible alternatives include singing to backing tapes �Ela Heaven 17 and concentrating on video promotion.

But first things first. "Songs To Remember" are songs you will remember.