GREEN GARTSIDE-- Melody Maker, October 5, 1991 Words: Andrew Smith.
The striking thing about the man's performance on "I Don't Know" is the passion in his voice. For Britain's most astute purveyor of carefully-constructed, pristine pop, this is a departure. Unlike others on the album (most notably Associate Billy McKenzie on the Denise Williams classic, "Free"), Green didn't choose the song himself. "I couldn't remember the original, actually, so I went out and found a copy. I was horrified. It's a brave man who tries to step into Stevie Wonder's shoes: the song doesn't even follow the usual verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure. He just starts off quietly and gets progressively more hysterical over three minutes. That's not the type of thing I normally do." No indeed. Ware, for his part, says that the Green track took three times longer to record than anything else on "Music Of Quality". This is still, apparently, five times less than the singer is accustomed to. "I'm a big fan of Scritti. Their music is something that I aspire to, but Green's got two faults. One is a tendency to over-arrange. Two, he's so self-conscious about his voice that he usually mixes it far too low. He loves the stylisation of pop music, and in reality that's a mask for not believing he can perform." Green doesn't disagree: "I am always uncomfortable listening to myself, whatever it is. I never play my records, and if one comes on the radio, I leave the room. It worries me. I'm too much of a perfectionist, I know. Im trying to unlearn it, but it's wheedled its way into me over the years. "As a matter of fact, I've never liked white singers trying to affect soul mannerisms. As a reaction, I used this almost self-consciously 'white' tone on 'I Don't Know Why I Love YOu'. It is more 'out, though, and Martyn and Ian are to a large extent responsible for that performance." Typically, Gartside is suspicious of my assertion that updates of soul classics tend to be short on the "soul" that made them special in the first place. "I'm not sure I trust people who can discern 'soul' in a record. It's a genre like any other, with its own rules and formal structures. What we think of as the great expressivity of soul has its origins in gospel, where people did feel intensely what they were singing. It's transferred from the sacred to the ridiculous. I'm far more concerned with losing the groove and the funk. It's an interesting issue..."
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BEF (the part-time
preoccupation of former HEAVEN 17 bods Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh)
have just released a second "Music Of Quality And Distinction"
LP, and the most convincing justification for its existence is Scritti
Politti singer Green Gartside's remarkable version of the old Stevie
Wonder torch song, "I Don't KNow Why I Love You". conveniently,
it's released as a single this week.