IT'S NOT EASY BEING GREEN

-- unknown, 1988

He's the ultimate designer pop star, from the people he knows and the clothes he wears down to the vodka he drinks. And if you haven't noticed, he'll tell you. On the eve of Scritti Politti's new single, Adam Sweeting talks to Green, the singer who drops names like lesser mortals drop their H's.

Name-dropping comes easily to Green, whose broad vocabulary and conscious air of intellectual superiority allow him to rise above your run-of-the-mill pop star. He's read books you've never heard of, and the names of favourite fashion-designers trip off his lips, starting with the FujiWara jacket he's wearing and moving on through names like Gaultier and Yamamoto, Comme des Garçons and Katharine Hamnett, Duffer of St George and Richmond Cornejo. He's abandoned the Yo-Boy garb of track-suits and Filas he once toyed with. "I'm sure I looked thoroughly silly in it, but it was a gesture," he observes.

Beanpole-thin and tall as a lamppost, Green is greeting visitors at London's Portobello Hotel to talk carefully about himself, his and Scritti Politti's new music. It's been nearly three years since Scritti released Cupid & Psyche 85, and Green's sense of timing is still vague. There's a new single, Oh Patti (don't Feel Sorry For Loverboy), but there's lingering doubt about when the accompanying LP might materialise.

"Other groups have careers that come and go in the time it takes us to make a record," he says. "Whole lumps of pop history happen while we're holed up in a claustrophobic little studio somewhere. I hope it gives us some kind of immunity."

So where has Green been? Mostly in New York, recording with the help of his right-hand man David Gamson. Miles Davis, the living legend of the jazz trumpet, dropped by to play on Oh Patti. He's been a Scritti fan since he heard Perfect Way and proceeded to record it on his album Tutu.

"He's keen for us to work with him, which is very flattering and very nice," says Green. "We were round at his apartment at Christmas and he was going through his paintings and drawings with us. When Miles recorded The Birth Of The Cool in 1949, it was a sort of reaction against a rather frenetic way of performing jazz. Perhaps very generously, Miles could see something of that in the way I sing, because I'm involved in a reaction against a frenetic kind of pop."

Socially, he'll tell you, Green likes to mix with private, charismatic people. "In New York, we do a fair bit of hanging with people like Kraftwerk. We'd go out with them and go to see Tito Puente, or we'd hang with Miles in Los Angeles, we'd meet Jack Nicholson."

Not that Green would want the likes of you or I to know about it, of course. "I've done a lot of rather extraordinary things that one never tells the press about, because there's no point," he continues airily. "You'd have to be a ghastly sort of self-publicist to want to mythologise your own life to that extent. Having said that, I'm quite sure that one could mythologise my little odyssey from where I was to where I am now and what I've done into quite an interesting story."

No doubt. So what, exactly, did he do with Jack Nicholson? Here, the artiste becomes coy. "It strikes one just how much in real life he's like the Jack Nicholson that you see in films. We went to a club which he co-owns with somebody I know in LA. But what exactly went on I really couldn't tell you. I'm sure he wouldn't be happy if I did."

Remarkable discretion. Yet, like the rest of us, the remarkable Green has to eat and drink. He has obviously dedicated a considerable amount of study to the subject of food. When in London (which is his home when work doesn't take him around the world), he tends to favour food with more than a tincture of the Far East.

"I like a restaurant called Kaya, which is Korean and is in Dean Street. And a Chinese restaurant called Ho Ho on Maddox Street. Those are both spectacularly good places."

He also likes Indonesian, Thai, Malaysian, Chinese, Italian, Japanese. And, if you find yourself in New York in search of a meal, he'd recommend the Santa Fe Mexican restaurant off Columbus Avenue, or the Cafe Luxembourg on the Upper West Side if you fancy something French.

Drinking is also dear to Green's heart. "I like pepper vodka, which is vodka with chili peppers in it. I remember Mondino, the video director, taking me round the Russian restaurants in Paris. At three the afternoon, they're full of Russian emigre princesses in their 80s with lap-dogs running around, eating blintzes and drinking pepper vodka and champagne. Lemon-grass vodka's nice, too. I also like Red Stripe Crucial Brew, in the little black cans."

Back home in Islington, Green likes to settle down with a tin of Red Stripe, while battling with a little Jacques Derrida (his favourite French deconstructivist writer) or contemplating his artworks. "I have a large framed picture of Aretha Franklin on the wall, and not much else," he reflects. "I like in a Georgian house that was built in 1780-something. In a Georgian square, and there used to be a river there. I've got this little print of an etching from the 1780s which shows my house with someone sitting on the doorstep, fishing in the river."

And, after all this, Green still holds out hopes for the power of pop? "I remember my mother singing Rolling Stones songs to me, and I remember subscribing to the NME when I was eight years old," he reminisces dreamily. "Hopefully, pop music will still undo and unsettle little children in the way that it undid and unsettled me."