Sounds magazine - May 1982 
Interview by Simon Dwyer

THIS BEAMING face, good looking, slightly gawky, smiled inanely as it approached out of the summer rain. Young, healthy, casual and confident - it was clear it knew me - but I don't know anyone like that.

Swift deduction dismissed school friends, neighbours and relatives and concluded the unbelievable. Was it Green of Scritti Politti?

I still can't believe the transformation. Last time I met him in 1980 the image he cut could not have been further removed from this. A fragile, paranoid figure with the pallor of one anaemic and the wild piercing eyes of a speeding Alex Higgins (Irish snooker player) gazing out from a pasting of eye-liner and a hand-ploughed jungle of jet black locks.

Intellectually intimidating and physically pathetic, Green's saving grace has been his golden vision and golden voice calling out from the musty blues and books world of the Camden squat the group had shared - Monkees style - in their early years.

As towering centrepoint of the ramshackle, seminal Scrits, he became not only the mouthpiece of the hip 'alternative' intelligencia, but - contradictingly - the unintentional leader of the anarchic, commune based culture of disaffected art students who had flocked to punk ridden North London in search of sanctuary and sackcloth.

Manufacturing one single and two EPs on their in-house St Pancras label with Green spouting authoratively on Marxism and musical revolution, this German-Welsh-English orphan (a mixture of holiday home burning, Nietzche and guilt) gained a reputation as the most thoughtful, unfathomable figure around.

The group quickly slipped from obscurity into their niche (no pun intended) playing alonyside Gang Of Four, Joy Division, the Bunnymen and other over-rated combos of the fractured punk fraternity. By this time though, too many hardbacks and sleepless nights had taken their toll.

It was after a typically improvised gig supporting Gang Of Four in 1980 that the group and I succumbed to heavy drink and heavy conversation and slept on a friend's floor. All except for Green, who was still asking for pills of a dubious nature well into the morning. A few hours later, Green lay seriously ill in hospital and the death of the group which had become the world's most articulate pain in the arse had already begun.


DURING HIS nine months of rural recuperation he wrote a massive thesis on the psychology and politics of rhythm (one day to be published), dumped the limitations of language, Communism and post punk aesthetics and exposed himself to a catholic pile of records from Stax to Apple to Japanese Imports. He emerged with an all-engulfing desire to make great music. In the shedding of dogma and restriction, Green became faithless, 'Faithless' became John Peel's single of the year and that's where the story really starts.

Scritti Politti's debut album 'Songs To Remember' is finally due out on Rough Trade at the end of the month. A year in the making, it's been delayed by line-up alterations and an uncharacteristically shrewd tactical wait to optimise its chart impact.

The group is now an amorphous seven piece that play on the beat, no longer fumbling to transgress the conformity of rhythm they once despised, but realising the beat's enormous violent sensual power.

For descriptive purposes, the album is a glorious hybrid of the Vandellas, Scratch and the more melodic moments of the Velvets, which all means it's a remarkable LP which fulfils Green's ambitious desire.

Has your political change of heart led to this great pop upheaval, or would you have gone this way anyway?

"If it was left to go on its manic way I'm sure our work would never have reached this point. It was a result of a number of firm decisions I took to go this way, and I took those decisions because a lot of the very oppositional politics that we'd been involved in lost their appeal and credibility for me."

"I rejected the principles of that, what was monolithical Marxism. I no longer supported the mechanism which held that up, and carried over to the music. Plus I was bored shitless with the noise we were making."

So you think you're more positive now?

"No... well, if you rid yourself of those lynchpins and great fixed principles, y'know, 'I'm a Marxist that understands the science of history'... once that's gone you're free, and that's why the old group that had felt very strongly about those things fell into a state of disarray."

"Robbing yourself of those principles was one of the things which made me physically sick, 'cos you have to rob yourself of a lot. You do become faithless, which is less definite but gives you a freedom, and yes, makes you become more positive. It's post-political politics, which is an ugly term basically meaning you're concerned with all things political when all the baggage of it is dumped."

"It's just very hard to convince people that you're still talking politics once you've dropped the language of it behind. There's a greater strength now but also a greater weakness. That's why there's that line in 'Faithless', 'Tears of sorrow tears of joy'."


YOU THINK people buying that single would know, or need to know, that you are as you are politically?

"'Faithless' has unspecific references, because the politics are less polemical, less evangelical now. But there are other songs that will come and consolidate it, fill the picture out a bit more."

"So you're less likely to get a tirade against the music industry now, in favour of trying to discover what might be politically salient in the phenomenon as given historically. The appreciation of that view will come with time, in the bulk of our work either consciously or subconsciously."

I remember the first time we met in 1979, you said that you wanted to overthrow the major record companies!

"Overthrow! Well, they were robbed of a certain amount of power and business, and a number of people benefitted from that time - we wouldn't have started making records if it were not for that attitude - and we gained in strength by it, but it got onto a boggy ground, a wilderness, and the independent labels started fighting each other just as aggressively as the big companies. So it all settled into its various camps and became static."

So is it still important for bands to be independent and interested in demystification then?

"Still independent, though that needn't be synonomous with independent labels, though at the time we thought it was. Its effectiveness must be in abeyance, if not out the window for good by now, although there were gains made, intrusions at the time."

"Unless you've got a bloody good excuse for doing it I wouldn't think it was a very good thing to be doing now. We never really had an instrumentalist approach ourselves anyway, the music wasn't a tool to get our political ideas across. So songs aren't hammers or scalpels or mirrors or any of those other horrible metaphors that leftists used to bandy about, and no songs ever were."

So, in retrospect, you're cynical about the old Scrits?

"At the moment I'm just happy to be a good distance away from those days, though I suppose one day I'll find a place for them in my heart."

"I think our first single was great. That Peel session EP, though, was mad. That's a genuinely ill record, as some kind of index to my state of mind at the time I find it frightening and I can't understand it now at all."

Tell me about that time, your illness.

"It was a combination, bad health, bad nerves, bad everything. As you remember I was living without bothering to look after myself at all, which seemed an appropriate thing to do at the time, but it creeps up on you without you noticing until you're in a hospital bed with people leaning over asking you questions."

"They ask you what you've eaten recently and you realise that you haven't eaten anything recently, they ask you where you live and you realise it's a shithole and they ask you when you last slept and that you haven't slept for ages, they ask how much you drink a day and you think 'MY GOD!' They asked if I had anything worrying me and EVERYTHING was worrying me."

"It's then that it hits you that you could be dead. I'm in very good health now though, and I'm very happy."


THIS JOURNEY the group's gone through has been charted by your record covers.

"Yeah. The squattage industry is over, now. Diehard fans will still have those 15,000 copies of 'Skank' in their coffee stained Xerox covers growing mould at the bottom of their collections I suppose. Our covers are now made in Turin by robots!"

"We took a lot of trouble to emulate Dunhill and Eau Sauvage covers because I like the packaging. Like Dunhill packets convey a sense of a common, available thing which is classy, like our records now."

"I want our records to sell now, if 'Confidence' or 'Sweetest Girl' had been recorded and marketed properly they would have been very big hits, so it's a kind of testing time for Rough Trade as well at the moment and it'll be very interesting to see if we can become big with them."

"That's why we've put out, and will continue to put out a string of very high quality pop records."

You want fame?

"Yeah! I'm sure we will get it, I think it'll just come. I can't see the point of remaining marginal. For one thing, it doesn't suit my politics or my temperament. I'd rather sell a lot of records than get a lot of letters asking how to make records because I really do think that a lot of my strengths and a lot of political focus lies in that music rather than it would in me sending people information on how to commit their own attrocities to vinyl and sell 150 copies."

"We stopped being crusaders for DIY records 'cos we know how awful it is. My advice to anybody doing it now is please, please don't!"

What would you say the LP was like?

"Diverse, melodic. It's all tunes and heart-rending vocals and beautiful girl singers, and it certainly doesn't hammer a genre to death. It's brilliant. Perfect!"

Where did all this confidence come from?

"From my knowledge that everything has come together so well on this record. We're unstoppable, we did a Peel session on Saturday (to be aired this week) and it was great, this group can play so well it's hard to be anything other than confident. And anyway, I'm fed up with always running myself down."

So will there finally be another tour?

"It's funny you should say that. That Peel session was the first time I've played live for a while, and I really enjoyed it, so maybe a tour is a possibility again."

You're easier to understand now. Whereas you used to come out with a lot of long obscure words in interviews which I thought defeated the object of communicating with people given the media you've chosen to work in. Is that change a conscious decision to become more accessible?

"Well, I don't see why I was that difficult to understand and I didn't speak that way out of some wilful desire for obscurity, but I did have some arrogant things to say about people who couldn't be bothered to understand me I suppose. I just thought like, a lot of people do, though they're not necessarily making records."

"The change was gradual, it wasn't a sudden decision. Through not being so book-minded for so long means you don't have that language around at the front of your head all of the time, whereas in the old group I was constantly reading."

I always thought another drawback of the old group was that it seemed there was too much theory and not nearly enough instinct involved.

"You were right. Yeah. I haven't snuggled up with an obscure French philosopher for a long time now... I'm fuelled but lumpen at the moment!"

Not since Jacques Derrida (a French philosopher who has a bosanova named after him on 'Songs To Remember')...

"Well, that song about him is probably going to be the next single. It's about how powerful and contradictory the politics of desire are."

"About being torn between all things glamorous and reactionary and all things glamorous and leftist. Then in the rap it dispenses with both in favour of desire!"

'I want better than you can give
but then I'll take whatever you've got
Desire is so avaricious
I wanna eat your nation state...'

Pretty sharp move, putting that in the rap.