That Obscure Object of Desire

-- New Musical Express, 20 August 1988

THE MEPHISTO of sophisto, GREEN GARTSIDE, and his slightly cool vehicle SCRITTI POLITTI have once more pulled into view with their new single 'First Boy In This Town'. STUART MACONIE fills the passenger seat and takes a smooth and sensual glide through the Green screen.

Cast a jaundiced eye back over the last decade of whiel Britpop and what do you see? A thin, gruelly cosmetic circus of nitwits and has beens or a young and healthy art form in luscious bloom? Whichever way you look at it one thing is certain; the best pop music always thrives on exploitation and contrivance. 'The Lexicon Of Love', 'Rattlesnakes', 'Psychocandy', the first Smiths album,. Each of theserecords knows in their hearts that pop music is cock eyed and dumb. But who cares?

The best pop music is in love with its own shortcomings. Frankie Goes To Hollywood were almost the perfect pop group. But not quite. Scritti Politti are.

When you were 17, tell us about it Green.
"Well, that would be in Cwnbran New Town, Sough Wales. It was pretty miserable, I seem to remember. Hanging around bus shelters and off-licences, buying Gram Pson records. Bizarre really"

Were you a precocious youth?
"No not really. I did start subscribing to the NME when I was eight years old but apart from that I showed no peculiarities."

In 1985 Green Gartside (or rather Scritti Politti) made a record which represented the blueprint for a new pop sound. 'Cupid And Psyche '85' existed at the gleaming interface between creativity and technology, between funk and cybernetics. Even if you've never heard it, you have really. In Madonna, in Taylor Dayne, in Detroit Techno. Even, God forbid, in Stock, Aitken & Waterman. (An acquaintance of Green's informs him that Scritti sampls are prominent in the SAW tape library).

Three years on, the new album 'Provision' takes the equation a stage further. Green's perennial obsessions still abound (siotics, superficiality) but now even closer to the high tech dream of the glacial good time.

Are you proud, Green, of having made waht's damn near the perfect pop record?
"I don't feel proud of anyng really. I'm not being perverse, it's just hard for me to place any particular value on the work that I do. these records have taken such a long time to make that by the end I just haven't got a clue basically. As for the perfect pop record I wouldn't know it if it bled to death in my back garden. Fundamentally I doubt if such a beast exists."

Then why make records?
"Thats what my record companies ask me. I don't know, it's a fairly fatal question for me to ask myself, riddlewith self doubt as I am. I suppose I make records because it's one of the few things in my life that I take a profound and untrammelled enjoyment from."

What kind of people buy your records?
"Opportunist record buyers, I imagine. I can see the people who bought 'Oh Patti' (the first, delicious single from 'Provision') also buying Kylie Minogue and Salt'N'Pepa. In America it's more likely to be tortured liberal middle class adolescents, or people who listen to the balck stations where we get a lot of airplay. It's difficult for me to visualise our 'fans' because we don't play live and therefore I don't get to gaze out on a sea of adoring faces."

Would you buy your records?
"Oh, I doubt it. I don't think they're the kind of records that would interest me very much. I would be very suspicious of me. If read about me in a magazine I'd probably see myself as some white bourgeois person playing around with sequencers and motifs borrowed from R'n'B and cequently avoid it like the plague!"

Astonishingly there are those who do avoid it like the plague. Sitting sipping chilled Lowenbrau with the man in a cool hotel bar, Green appears to be the soul of erudition and good taste. Precisely the qualities which some people loathe in the Scritti sound. Missing the point with unerving accuracy they castigate Green for his glossiness whilst championing any number of hackneyed Clash revivalists or would-be booze acid casualties for their 'energy' and 'bottle'. Dinosaurs had lots of bottle but they also had brains the size of peas and look e it got them. As Green is at pains to point out, the very virtue and strength of his music lies in its chromium artificiality, its willful and deliberate manipulation of surface texture. New Order have it. The Pet Shop Boys have it. For want of a better word, call it style.
"The thematic concerns of the last two albums have been a kind of exploration of superficiality; of surface features and sterility. It's quite brazen in its apparent lack of emotion or expressive depth. That's what I like about it."

MORE SONGS ABOUT AGNOSTICISM AND BARTHES

"The Tupamaros, an immutable truth/
I got a razor blade and a beautiful youth/
A Moto Guzzi and a Gaultier pants/
I got a reason, girl it's Immanuel Kant"
--  'Boom, There She Was' Scritti Politti  --

Sooner or later, it seems every Green Gartside interview turns into the kind of thing you expect the Open University to show in the middle of the night. He uses words like 'phenomenological' and 'deconstructivist' in the same way Claire Rayner uses 'lovey'; unflinchingly and without a trace of sef-deprecation. In a business where David Byrne rates as articulate, it's not surprising that Green has found imself tagged as a Walter Softy egghead. This is not enitrely a good thing. For starters it obscures the simple f that Scritti records are pop at it's most accessible and effervescent. You don't need to know your Levi-Strauss from your elbow. You can dance to it, bonk to it, whistle along with it. you can know Foucault about art and still love it.

Green, do you ever stop being terribly urbane and behave like an oaf?
"Yes, quite a lotI enjoy it very much. I frequently go through that feeling of waking up in the morning and thinking 'Shit, did I really say that? Did I really do that?' That is a fairly recurrent motif in my e. I suppose it's the other side of the coin from the other me."

Which is?
"Oh, an anal obsessive who pays ridiculous attention to detail. After you've spent all d being terribly meticulous and sorting out shit it's nice to fool around. By opening time on any given day, life can have got too much for the best of us, so it's down to The Self-Destructive Arms for a few bevvies."

What's your idea of fun? Snooker? Reading Jean Paul Satre?
"I haven't played snooker in ages. i spend a lot of my time in New York and I just wander about and get wasted."

WHAT A LONG STRANGE TRIP IT'S BEEN

For Green Gartside, the last nine years have been, in his own words 'a peculiar little odyssey'. Scritti Politti began life as the archetypal post-punk indie band ideologically sound to the nth degree and dripping with rad chic. Even then, however, Gartside's music was always possessed of a kind of elegant sophistication that set t apart from dull worthies such as The Au Pairs and The Gang Of Four (Whaaat?!! -- ed). Still, some would see it as wryly ironic that the squat dwelling politico who made 'Skank Bolc Bologna' should now create tifacts like 'Provision', the last word in state of the art technology and designer allure.
"Ironic? I don't see it as ironic. I haven't become corrupted or anything. That whoe process of change has been quite consciouly engineered and arrived at. I am rarely, if ever, pleased with anything I do in this life but that is one of them. That shift, that difficult transition. It was the right thing to do."

In those nine years Scritti Politti have produced three LPs. In the spaces between them herpes, The Smiths and the Danish football team came and went. Is this due to bone ieness?
"No, it's simply down to the way that we work. The process is so painstaking and time-consuming. We work oin frames and milliseconds. I sit and think 'Let's drop that snare back ten milliseconds...No, make it five'. Before you know it the afternoon has gone. Actually ave (Gamson, along with Fred Maher, the invisible Scritti men0 and I work the songs out in detail before we get to the studio so in theory it shouldn't take so long. but it does. And after a while of working with machines you forget how sloppy and unfunky real musicians are. Well, some anyway. Of course when you're working with Miles (Davis, briefland to my mind, pointlessly featured on the new LP) or Roger Troutmann or Marcus Miller, you just let them get on with it. But generally you can't just rattle them off. And then it's my turn to sing. That's how oftenI get to sing. Once every three years."

Is it this fastidiousness that precludes Scritti live shows?
"I find the prospect of playing live boring and terrifying in pretty much eqal measure. At the time of the last LP we rehearsed with view to an English tour. Playing totally live and with real musicians. We gave up after ten days and came away fairly stung by the experiene. It occurred to me that eight weeks solid rehearsals wouldn't have been enough."

But what results from this fastidiousness, this microsurgery is well worth the wait. Green's gorgeous dilettantism produces a pop argot heavy with intelletual glamour. Eschewing the tedious jellied eels and Leyton Orient socialism of The Redskins and Billy Brag. Green has always believed that Marxist Dialectics can be well dressed. And sexy. And funny.
"Oh I'm really glad you think it's funny. You're the first person who's noticed that it's supposed to be humourous. I think people don't believe that I could possibly do anything frivlous. I think there's an element of humour discernible in nearly every song that I write. Like 'Boom, There She Was' I thought, can I possibly get away with mentioning all these things, Gaultier...Immanuel Kant...The Tupamaros. I thought it would be laughable. And it'is! That's precisely why I did it!"

And what about sexy. Do you make sexy music?
"No. Someone asked me the other day whether I thought Scritti made good seduction music. Y'know, would you put it on after you'd got that certain person home. And I would have to say definitely not. It's too uptight, too fussy, all that attention to detail. I would want to turn to the stero and say 'Shut the F -- -up'. What the listeners think I really don't know since I make a point of not opening an amil. I don't want people to get too interested or to invest too much in me. I'm sure I would come as such a dreadful disppointment."

You couldn't call it heartfelt music, could you. You can't imagine anyone crying themselves to sleep over it?
"Why not, I could cry myself to sleep over Kraftwerk's 'Neon Lights'. It's terribly poignant just like my music. Just as much as any so-called 'soul' music or music that more readily accorded some emotive depth. Go ahead. Cry yourselves silly."

AND SO TO MENSA

The Lownbrau and Perrier finished, Green Gartside, wunderkind of agnostic pop, that obscure object of desire, puts on his straw hat as the tape machine clicks into silence. Most of my illusions remain intact. The man is charm personified. Ex-stalwart of the Cwmbran Young Communist League (all three of them), hip-hop disciple, he assures me that it will not be another three years before we hear of him again. Ideally he would like to write material for othersfor a while, or take a Synclavier to Jamaica and record with his fave reggae musicians. Whatever happens, he remains one of a handful of good reasons for the continued existence of pop music. If, for some inexplicable reason, you do not already own everything the man has recorded, I suggest you rectify this immediately. Or at least enrich your life immeasurably with the new single 'First Boy In This Town'. Go on, take the phone the hook, fix yourself a large Green Chartreuse and just lie back and wallow in it. You see, being a Yuppie does have its advantages aft all.