Love Smartly-- Melody Maker, 20 August 1988 While others claim there never was and never can be perfect pop, Scritti Politti are quietly creating it. Steve Sutherland meets Green Gartside and declares undying love for his vision of romance.
But the more I met her, the more I lost sight of Green, the more her personality impressed itself upon me. I began to respond to hidden charms, I began to sense strength beneath her veneer of fraility. I began to divine strong will and strong character, I began to fall in love.
"At least half the time, probably a little more in the last five or six years, we spent in New York. I don't own a home anywhere. I sublet apartments in Manhattan or I rent places in London. "It must agree with me to some extent, partly because, when I was growing up, my parents had the habit of moving house at least once a year -- they still do actually. They recently moved back to Wales and decided they'd finally settle down, this was it. Three months they stuck it and now they're moving again so I guess I'm pretty used to that. "It's difficult for me to make a decision like 'Alright, this will be home'. I don't own any furniture, I don't own any...It's funny, I've recently been trying to clear out some junk fromt eh place I rent in London and there is a lot of stuff but it's mainly records and clothes and books and magazines. That's about all -- the same as everybody else, I imagine. "Where do we fit in? From the point of view of how we're preceived, how we're placed in the Axminster, I don't know. I think we would most likely be put into categories alongside people that I wouldn't terribly much enjoy. I don't like all the sort of techno-soul crap but then I suppose none of us do. It makes me very weary and it seems an incredibly inapposite and unimaginative way of talking about us. "Then I remember there used to be the move to pop, with The Human League, ABC and whoever else it was, which had its brief moment and longer exists. And then we were put in with the Roddy Frames and paddy maccallons in which, I suppose, of all the current options available, in terms of lesser of evils, I would rest a little more easily. Perhaps we don't belong there but those things have ceased to concern me. I'd lie if I said they never did because I used to take the press terribly seriously from a very early age but I don't read music papers anymore. I'll go anmd buy Blues And Soul but not much else really because they bug me and because, when they don't bug me, they bore me. I'm happier not...participating." I'm sure you read about Patti in the papers? "No, I didn't. This is absolutely true -- I've no idea what Melody Maker had to say about it. I didn't ask anybody and nobody proferred to tell me. Similarily the NME or anybody else. I haven't read any reviews and were anybody to begin to tell me, I'd probably say 'Let's talk about something else'."
And I know that Green is subversive and that Patti must be free because Green chose to distance himself from her by disguising himself as Scritti Politti and, anyway, he's possessed of such a rich and rare and, yes, revolutionary honesty that it function as a critique and yet, in exposing a clichE reveals itself as a real, true bid to convey emotion. When I think of Patti, I tell Green I laugh because of the joyful mockery but I cry a little inside because I'm really very touched. "Yes, on the one level I refer to these cetain genres and styles of production while not being at all happy to accept the conventional story or history of what that production's all about. Principally, all the myths about black music and all the critical philosothemes that go around it about expressivity and earnestness and truthfulness and spontaneity is abject crap in my opinion. And that leads to a certain kind of tension, a certain kind of humour that I enjoy."
So I conjure up an image of a sweating soul man down on his knees suffering for us all just to see how that would affect Patti and, in much of the same way the mouth pop star didnt' correspond to Green, so Patti seemed untainted. And I accused that soul man of fraud, of emotional blackmail, of faking it. And I waltzed patti around in my head and embraced the honesty of her syntheticness and modernity like I've embraced nothing since the Human League's "Human". And Green is genuinely pleased and says: "A lot of what gets read as this pure emotive force that somehow comes untainted, untrammelled from Wilson Pickett's heart or stomach or whatever, these are mannerisms, these are devices, the argot of a certain way of going about things. Now, whatever there is beyond and behind that, this distruptive, this...a recent word I've found...anasemic, meaning that which is not semantic, that which doesn't reside with ideas of meaning or meaningfulness is, for me, to be found as readily in a Kraftwerk album as I'll find it in a Sam &l Dave record and, once you're in that position, then you're half way towards making the kind of records that we do." And I find myself saying something quite extraordinary, something not like me at all. I say: The mechanisms of emotion are taken as a shorthand for honesty. And Green says: "Yes, that's a way of understanding it and I go some way along with that. Having just, off the top of my head, thought about it, a lot of the most powerful black music I've enjoyed recently is hip hop which definitely has its debt, tips its hat to Kraftwerk and to a kind of aridity, to technology, to machinery. And I think hip hop was definiely, in part, a reaction against what had happened to a lot of black artists in America." I think of Patti on her world tour with Green, growing accustomed, assembling impressions, absorbing influences... "Scritti are still popular on black radio in America so I go and talk to black DJs and black journalists and, for them, it's Whitney Houston -- she's no longer part of their music. Although she's a soul diva, she doesn't mean shit to them. And you can trace that emerging arc of people whose soul mannerisms became very removed from a black urban experience. It's complicated shit and this thing is refracted endlessly -- and there aren't layers through which you can cut to find a bedrock and secondary and tertiary layers on which this was built. You can't say this is responsible for that." Hip hop is emblematic, it stands for something. On the other hand, there's Scritti -- a free spirit. Yet, when you arrived in the charts, I felt a sense of victory, of a battle won even though the war was long over. "Yes, there are no adversarial aspects from our point of view, there are none of those intentions behind it but, nevertheless, we are out there as part of an increasing catalogue of options for the consumer to take with which he or she in their adolescence -- and I suppose increasingly beyond -- choose to constitute themselves as individuals. And there will be a lot of white and black kids in secondary schools and London and elsewhere at the moment for whom actively liking hip hop and all that goes with it is part of making up their characters and I suppose there will be those for whom choosing to like what we do over something else is a decision that is almost as conscious as it is unconscious. Y'know 'I wnat to be like this'."
"Neither would be true. I find myself out on something of a limb largely by default. Of couse much of it's intentional and has a lot to do with deciding that this over-investment in idiosyncracies and ego is just not to my linking anymore. More often than not, I don't enjoy it aesthetically and don't have much sympathy for it theoretically. "The idea that the musical signature is everything and that the individual's difference from his peers is the most significant thing musically is shit that I'm all too happy to be rid of. The important thing I've found is that, whatever will mark off what I do from anybody else is best left to its own devices and trying to nurse along my differences, if you like, would be barking up the wrong tree. I'd fail if I cultivated and pandered to consciously what it was that I could do to mark me off as different, then I'd f*** up. I'm happy to let those things emerge untended." And suddently I see Prince and I see Green and realise these two have given me more aural pleasure this year than most anybody else -- this gorgeous exhibitionist and this elegant critique of exhibitionism both move me -- and they're poles apart. "Yes they are and they aren't. i listen to the Prince album quite a lot but I didn't go and see him which is a lot to do with just not liking to go to gigs very much and also, in terms of Prince's persona, he bugs me. I don't know why. He's just such an irritating little man in a lot of ways and I'm spared some of that if I just listen to his records."
"It's difficult for me to say at the moment because I really haven't had time to sit down and think about what I want to do next. At the back of my mind there are some ideas of going to Jamaica and maybe making a very different kind of record. I'd like to take a Synclavier to Jamaica and work there with different people in a very different way and bring it back through New York...this may or may not happen. It's just a fancy that takes me at the moment." This uncertainty rather diminishes your reputation as a pop strategist doesn't it? "Ha! Yes I suppose it does really." I've always thought people made too much of that side of you anyway. I'd say you were more careful than anything. "Yeah, what I do is careful but I wouldn't confuse that with cautious." Balanced -- that's the word. If the accepted idea of pop is some sensual release, you temper that with a certain conscience, a certain responsibility to your political beliefs. Certainly lyrically your inersion of expectations, your advice to Patti to "Don't feel sorry for Loverboy", simultaneously avoid and criticise, even ridicule, pop's unthinking sexism. But it doesn't sound like a furrowed brow at all. It's great fun. "Yes, I hope so. I thik a lot of it's funny. There aren't many people who think that but it strikes me that way for all sorts of reasons. I mena, I think to be doing it in the first place is kind of funny if I take two steps back."
And then there's the careful aspect to the odious Sting -- the "I'm a millionaire but look, with all the choices in the world, I'm still humanitarian enough to remind you plebs that, yes, the Russians do love their children too". That's not so far from green's political poise and yet...it's in another universe! Why? "You tell me." I'm asking you. "something to do with being hip?" What's that? He spreads his hands in triumphant defeat.
"A crass answer would be yes but the term 'romantic' is a critical term and its historical origins aren't very applicable to pop so it interests me what you think there is about my records that you'd say 'this is more romantic than...'" And I think of Patti and I shiver a little and say it makes me feel romantic. It's idealistic and nostalgic and cynical and... "I'll buy that, yes. You're right. the most enjoyable part of making records are the points at which you sit down to write the music and it becomes an untutored, ungoverned process and, in that, I will search until they have the requiste degree of melancholy and poignancy that htey need to have for me to be happy about them. How I recognise them as melancholic or poignant or have this sense of yearning I don't know -- that's part of the interest. So, even these witty, glittery, uptempo things, there is an unknown. "The whole damn thing resists talking about anyway. ther's no way that we're gonna actually get our intellectual claws into it properly and dig it out and find out what it is and if and what, if anything, it refers to. And God bless it for that. Particularly for me because I have a tendency to do that with regard to all things in my life, to try and endlessly get a handle on it all and yet the thing that's arisen as being the core of my life is this thing that I know there's no way I ever will."
"Oh yes! All the aspects of its production and its distribution and its consumption and what we have to say about it -- none of that even gets close to what happens when the needle hits the vinyl. "It's funny how people keep thinking that they ought to be able to talk more comprehensively about music or understand its meaning more and I think that has something to do with use being misled into thinking that music is somehow close to language. For instance, philosophers -- Rousseau and lots of others -- thought first of all that we all went round singing and then it was corrupted and then there was speech and there was language and this is probably fundamentally wrong. The closeness between them, that spatial metaphor of closeness, is nonsense and they could in fact be as distant as it's possible to get. Phonocentricism -- this whole idea that meaning is really in the voice -- is a myth."
The second is, he says: "I have learnt not to over-value my intentions and, whereas I'm preoccupied with them personally, I'm fully aware that, once the albums are sleeved up and put out to the shops, my intentions count for zilch in a lot of ways. So I really don't feel cocky or even comfortable with my incisiveness or wit or whatever because I know that they're immaterial to a large extent." The last is, he says: "Thank you for being so kind to me," and when I ask him how come, he says: "Well you could have said 'if you weren't in Scritti, you wouldn't like them'." To which I replied: But I'm not in Scritti and I love Patti so how could I say that? And he just smiled.
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WHEN I first met Patti, I didn't really notice her. Oh, she was bright and
beautiful, witty and intelligent with pleasing manners -- just the sort of girl
you'd expect Green to introduce you to. She was polite and petite and perhaps a
little too perfect. It was almost as if, for all her grooming, she didn't have a
lot to say for herself -- as if she were content with her role as Green's
companion, to quitely take his arm and neatly take her place as the latest in a
line of Green's immaculate presentations.