A CAREER IN POLITTI-- unknown, 1988 Green Gartside may be the voice of SCRITTI POLITTI, but those crystalline melodies and restless bass lines owe their existence to programming virtuoso DAVID GAMSON. We found him in New York polishing the new LP, PROVISION. Script: Andrew Smith
It obviously isn't necessary to talk too much about Cupid and Psyche, except to say that it represented one of the most wholesale re-inventions of a band since...well, ever. Drum machines and sequenced bass; clear, chiming guitars and perfectly placed keyboard stabs; breathy, flawless vocals--these combined to make a kind of composite sound that was uniquely clear and precise. Some people asked what perfection had to do with Soul, but plenty of people found it in Scritti's perfect Pop. The new record has taken three years to appear, but then perfection takes time. Provision takes the sound created on Cupid and Psyche and pushes it one stage further. Add the word 'more' to each element of the above description (except for the guitars which have all but disappeared) and you have it. The arrangements are dizzily intricate and the vocals sound like Green was sitting in a hot bath when he recorded them. The effect is not unpleasant, though, and the production is chockfull of musical tricks to stimulate the listener's senses. Provision is the Dallas of disc. Green developed this sound in conjunction with his American partners and fellow Scrittis, drum machine programmer Fred Maher and keyboard player David Gamson. I spoke to Gamson, an amiable New Yorker, about the state of Scritti.
"It's totally programmed. I mean, even when we had players, for the most part it was fixing their playing so that it had the kind of precision that the machines had. There were a few exceptions: the soloists we didn't really do that with." What is it that attracts you to this method of working? "The way the arrangements are constructed, there isn't much room for error. Things really have to fall where they're supposed to fall or else the groove falls apart. It's made of so many different elements that if things aren't running like clockwork, they start to fall apart. That's the way it was intended to be--it was intended to be machine-like. It sounds wrong when you start to put any real human feel into it." An exception to this is the trumpet solo on the first single, Oh Patti (Don't Feel Sorry For Loverboy), which was performed by vintage Jazzman turned feted popstar, Miles Davis. How do you go about recording someone like Miles Davis? "We just took everything he did from the moment he came in. With him, his immediate reaction could be the best thing you're gonna get. As it turned out, it wasn't--it was a take further in that we used. I mean, there's no time to get a sound on him, no eq--nothing. From the minute he walks in, you just take it. We had a separate slave for him and we just did billions of tracks and picked the solo that we like best." How did you get him to do it? "He had done a cover of our song Perfect Way on his album, Tutu, so we had gotten in touch with him because of that. We made slow approaches to him about coming in to play and it seemed that he was perfectly keen to do it."
The brightness of Provision suggest that it was recorded digitally. "Yeah. It wasn't though. We do digital mixes with analogue tape. I would like to do digital recording, but the thing about digital is that a lot of the keyboards that you're using--the sources--are real dirty, and you have to go through a lot of processing just to get them clean onto tape. I mean DXs and analogue synths are all pretty noisy, and the reverbs that you're using are all really noisy. So I'm a little afraid of using digital, because at least analogue masks some of the noise of the source material." What do you use as your sound sources? "Basically, I got a Super Jupiter, a Prophet 2000, a TX rack, a Roland piano module, a Matrix 12: pretty normal. As a sequencer I'm using Performer now, but on the album I was still using the X1--at that point Performer Version 2 hadn't been released yet." As far as recording goes, the music was done in New York--although, as David points out, it could have been anywhere, given the fact that it's all programmed--while the vocals went down in London. Green has a reputation for being somewhat precious in the studio. Talk to any engineer who has worked with him and you're bound to get the same stories of endless takes, miniscule drop-ins and tracks taking weeks to complete. Is this ever a problem? "I think both of us have a problem with perfectionism. With Green, he's just going to be there till he gets a result he can live with. It's not even something that he likes, we're talking about something he can live with." Scritti Politti is now two thirds American, and this clearly has affected the character of the music. How do the different influences and attitudes you must have assimilated from opposite sides of the Atlantic affect your working relationship? "Well, funnily enough, when we were kids we were listening to a lot of the same things, so it isn't actually that different. I think a lot of American do come from a very different place, though. But I do have a different kind of background than he does in music. My father was a musician--he was a conductor--and I was stuck-in studying very early on. I was playing violin from the age of five and everything. Green doesn't really have anything to do with that." What influences did you have in common? "Weeell...The Beatles (laughs). You know, all the Punk thing that happened in England--which never really happened over there--well that's apart of his history that I don't share at all musically." Is this important, do you think? "Yes. I think that, had that not happened, he probably wouldn't be making records now. For him, that meant: 'Oh gee, I can get up and od that', which was the original impulse for him to go and make records in the first place. I think it was really important." How do those original Punk impulses relate to the very expensive, technically sophisticated product that you release now. Would a teenager listening to Scritti Politti in 1988 think, 'I can get up and do that'? "Well, I'm so far gone I just don't know. The technology keeps getting cheaper, though. Pretty soon you'll have digital multitrack machines that you can have at home, so it's going to keep getting easier to make pretty slick-sounding product in your house. It's a time I'm looking forward to." A lot of the reviews of Provision have been saying that Oh Patti is the only good song in its grooves. People seem to resent the time you've taken to produce it. Are you worried by the three year silence? "I'm worried about it to the extent that it's taken a long time to make the record, so there's a lot of pressure. It hasn't been sitting around and then saying, 'Oh hey, let's make an album', you know. Between writing, preproduction, production and all that, it's been a lot of work to get the record done." Perfection takes time,you see. Some people ask what this kind of perfection has to do with Soul, and it will be interesting to see how many find it in Provision.
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Scritti Politti means
'political writing' in Italian. Scritti Politti used to go on stage and
improvise whole sets. They were playing with Joy division the week before
Ian Curtis died. They made a single, The Sweetest Girl, which never
made the charts despite the fact that everyone in the world seemed to own
a copy. They made a very good album, Songs To Remember, which
contained the only song of the year to mention Ludwig Wittgenstein and
Aretha Franklin in the same lyric. Green Gartside cashed in his Punk chips
for Soul, left Rough Trade for Virgin and went off to New York and made an
album with CD-soul producer Arif Mardin. This, of course, was Cupid and
Psyche 85.