NME magazine - September 1982 
Interview by Chris Bohn

We never did see what he was going to wear. The single slipped, and, with it, the group's hopes of that elusive first hit. The discrepancies of the chart return system - so punishing to the independents - aside, there was really no reason for 'Asylums...' to slide.

It was subjected to an uncharacteristically intense Rough Trade marketing campaign that went so far as releasing picture disc, seven and 12" versions, the last including specially signed limited edition posters! The record wasn't starved of exposure either.

It received adequate airplay, Scritti Politti made the front pages of the music papers and got into the gutter press. They even got to do - belatedly - a Radio One Peter Powell session. During its recording Powell popped in and assured them they had a hit on their hands.

So what went wrong? Maybe it was simply that people didn't want it. I think I know what they mean. For all the undeniable sweetness of Green's voice - really, the loveliest, tenderest, if limited soul instrument this side of Gregory Isaacs and Art Garfunkel - and the varied textures of Scritti Politti's pop/AOR approximations, their songs lack the very contemporary resonance to which Green pays so much lip service.

I mean, those words you're singing, Green, just whose life story are you telling? Not that they should be so obvious, but the wonder of the greatest popular music is its ability to unwittingly provide a soundtrack to daily life - whether underpinning someone's romance or counterpointing newsreels as they unfold.

Songs about Jacques Derrida and seeking asylum in Jerusalem naturally have a limited sounding - unless everything else about them is so perfect the words become superfluous. Anyway, there's too many of them and they're worked over and around and back again to further compound the cluttered effect. Their looped motion, sustained by Green's honeypumping voice, leaves no space in Scritti Politti records. Though the group have narrowed their sights on their ideas of popular music, their singles are still paradoxically poorly focused.

Maybe if Green realises his ambition of working with Aretha Franklin and Randy Crawford - "if Rod Temperton can do it with Michael Jackson, then why not?" - or his long shot of bringing together Gregory Isaacs and Kraftwerk - "Kraftwerk are a very big influence in terms of economy of style, as opposed to an excess of signature" - then the discipline of writing for others might sharpen and simplify his songs.

For the moment, though, for all their fussiness they don't go anywhere. If they're not intended to, that's fine - the daring, immaculate 'Faithless', the cool, displaced warp of 'The "Sweetest Girl"' tune make it on any scale - but as Scritti Politti have placed great store in big sales, they fail on a very basic level. Unlike ABC who, trashy though they may be, have proven their combined manufacturing/marketing pop aesthetic to work. It sounds good. It sells. It even resonates.


WHICH IS ROUGHLY where our first confrontation with Scritti Politti begins. Having just read my review of 'Asylums in Jerusalem' Green's at great pains to discover why I described him as brilliant and totally useless.

"Totally useless? I can't believe anybody's totally useless! How can you say I'm totally useless?" he badgers.

I explain I only used the term in its specific context as part of an analogy with a S.F. type disembodied brain, capable of thoughts upon which he's unable to act, but he's not having any of it.

His worrying continues through a trying picture session - "Why do you want me to move? I'm totally useless!" - which the group treat as part of their own marketing campaign. They resist Anton Corbijn's directions in an attempt to impose their own arrangement.

Despite Green's denials of a group hierarchy, he visibly bristles and dreadlock drum programmer Tom grows nervous when Anton asks the latter to move in close. "Er, Green should be in the front," Tom murmurs. Green seems to agree. Anton points out that in the final picture no one will be in the front. Green wants them all pictured full length so everyone can see what an odd mixture they are (and they are: tall, gangly Green, Tom, laddy bassist Joe Cang, three non-aligned back-up singers Lorenza, Mae and Jackie, all from a West End show background.

"Hire a photographer then," snaps Anton. And so on. When it's over, Anton says it's the most difficult session he's ever undertaken.

Green and I meet twice more over the following weeks. At once egoistic and extraordinarily sensitive, he just can't understand why anyone should be suspicious of Scritti Politti. Well, how's this for a jaundiced, revisionist view of the group's shift from the margins to the mainstream.

The sort of switch Scritti Politti made would have been described once as selling out. Today, it is seen as good business sense and, supported by Green's fluency, a sound aesthetic decision. There is nothing inherently wrong in recognising the complete and utter pointlessness of inhabiting the extreme intellectual ghetto squat Scritti Politti once consigned themselves to. Especially as, in those days, the stuffing was argued out of the music before it was even played.

But to sacrifice so completely the power, the deliriousness of living at a critical edge that went into their early experiments for a music that is basically bland and anonymous, might be viewed as a capitulation of sorts. it is all the sadder because there is precious little documentation of first generation Scritti Politti.

Two scrappy EPs survive that period, containing bare, stripped melodies and brute rhythms only carried by Green's already sweet voice - even if it then laughably flaunted a Canterbury-classless accent. For all their retrospective charm, they lack the reputed passionate ferocity and noisy invention of their early live performances.

Whatever, the intensity, the mindfucking incestuousness of it all, finally made Green ill. He went home to the Welsh mountains to recuperate where he wrote, by his own definition, a massive tome to extricate himself from the ideological web that had brought Scritti Politti to a halt. It also presented a platform for Scritti Politti's future direction. Having to go to such absurd lengths to convince fellow members of a change in policy seems absurd to outsiders. Just what were the ties that bound them so closely, necessitating such a step?

"I don't know," puzzles Green. "It is bizarre isn't it? I look back on those times and wonder how it was so incredibly close, yet so formal. Theory and analysis was treasured not for their own sake but because we realised the alternative was a kind of indulgent lawlessness. it comes from having to understand your own history and the conditions of your own production and not to consider yourself a free agent. You have to understand the forces operating on you and take stock of them and wonder how things might be read - how they might be heard."

"The alternative to that seemed to mean confining oneself to irrelevance, if you didn't acknowledge a political dimension. And if that dimension was to go beyond common sense or a refined bigotry then you have to have some analytical tools to deal with it. That was why at one and the same time we were very close but treasured that discursiveness. We probably felt it was fairly slobby to do anything else. But I should have seen it coming, I suppose, it just blew itself out of all proportions."

I warm to Green far more than I do to his explanations, excuses or theories. Accurate his observations might be, but they do seem to take Scritti Politti even farther away from realising the pop music they purport to make. I mean, who else would describe the childish act of miming with a tennis racket to The Beatles and the Rolling Stones as his "Lacanian mirror phase"? Anyway, I've had my say. Now it's Green's turn.


Once Scritti Politti's intellectual phase was over, how did you go about rediscovering intuition?
It's a question of allowing it in yourself really. Along with the glamour and guilt of the theory heydays went the obverse side, which is a self-denial. A self-denial of the things beyond the rationale, which was succinct in terms of political theory we'd grown up with. Which is basically a post-marxist one. Oh no, here I am talking like this again. I wish to God...It's only when I meet the NME I talk like this...

The point I was trying to make in my review of 'Asylums...' was that the very nature of your approach immediately removes people from the direct experience popular music is supposed to be.
No, I don't think so, because I don't talk like this and increasingly rarely do I think like this about the music the group makes. Seriously! I've let myself be horribly, irresolutely passionate about it! In the making of it, all aspects of it.

Since coming back from the mountains, so to speak?
I'm not sure I want to describe it like that - since I've come back from the hospital I've let myself dribble and act like a... hmm. When I was in hospital I was torn between giving it all up and coming back to have another go. I discovered I had a real compulsion to do it, because I'm driven by a real love for it. Maybe the fact that to all intents and purposes Scritti had failed in their previous carnation to achieve anything other than a peculiar mythical status had something to do with it. That no longer seemed to be honest to me.

All the things I genuinely did find attractive about punk, when I got involved, were subjugated discursively in favour of talking about the politics of it. It seemed to be more significant to the other people involved, like the bass player Nial, who has subsequently left. But the emphasis has changed since I've came back. I said: "This is the last bit of theory you get out of me! What comes next is songs. If you want to play them, go and do them, if not I'll find someone else to do it!"

I gave myself an ill-formed trial period: If this gets enjoyable or begins to work within six months then I'll stick at it. It did! The release of 'The "Sweetest Girl"', working with Robert Wyatt and meeting other people. It got very enjoyable. The challenge of it was quite interesting...

Putting 'The "Sweetest Girl"' in quotes seemed to be deliberately ambiguous, sitting on a fence - I'm not really writing this love song...
I wouldn't describe it as sitting on the fence - more an expression of heterogeneity - something that has different and contradictory elements in it certainly. It came out of a number of different readings of the world and it was open to a number of different readings in itself. I wasn't hedging my bets with that song, or anything else. I suppose at the very least the inverted commas that went around sweetest girl were attempts to condition the dodgy reading and the dodgy history of pop lyricism, you know, it's a small way of trying to approach pop lyricism, I think... There, I'm talking about it as if it were drawing board stuff, which it wasn't.

The subsequent selling of 'The "Sweetest Girl"' seemed like a boardroom campaign, what with the use of fine art sleeves. (In case you haven't seen them, Scritti's three recent singles have all parodied the packaging of "the good things in life" - cigarettes, perfume and brandy.)
They weren't fine art. They had a cheap classiness, not a tacky classiness, but they're kind of stylish things that are available as consumer disposables...

Aren't they just clever quotations of somebody else's style?
No. I don't think so. No, that's ridiculous. Without being presumptuous, it would be like saying to Duchamp: "That's not your urinal!" It's crazy! It's all bricollage. It has to be bricollage! Things around you, you pick them up and use them. Very often I prefer the economy of certain things that are already in currency. It's more a question of articulating elements that are already there. You realise that you don't have to write your inscription, your signature, your ego, your idiosyncrasy so heavily into everything. Well, our use of that packaging fulfilled all these functions. They were pirated because they look quite stylish and eye catching. Also they did set up a certain number of resonances, which you could ponder if you wanted. Or you can just see them as wry, attractive sleeves.

To get to your songs - the bricollage approach of using familiar lines most notably opening 'Gettin' Havin' Holdin'' with "When a man loves a woman..." - aren't you afraid of losing your signature altogether?
No, no, no. That would amount to self-erasure! It's just a question of understanding that the idiosyncratic element of things can be left to find its own form of expression. You don't have to sit there and think: "Is this really me?" Well, of course you do that, but to labour over it to the extent we previously did, and other people still do, is absolutely useless and a priori commits you to an irrelevance because you set up your own reading and your own history and your own reference and that's just dull.

There were very definite reasons for using all that lover's rock and soul language. The fact that through the years it has worn meaningless, like MOR pop - you've heard it all before, but those words are largely vehicles for notes, if you like, and an expressivity. On the other hand they become a lot more significant because around them has accrued such a history. That language is an index of black popular music and its crucial functions at various points in history. And it seemed apposite at the moment to use it as a cipher for talking about things in a way that all the willful expressivity of us (circa 78/79) and PiL - all that scratching blades along bass strings, feedback and reverberating drums - was horribly dysfunctional, to be honest.

In soul language you found an economy of strength and style and power. Like when you hit The Staple Singers for the first time, it's really something else. All these anonymous effectives in their music drawing so much out of you! The sexuality, the rhythm, the language, everything was so powerful and popular! It seemed much more effective to use that than carry on going down to The Electric Ballroom, putting four tons of reverb on the tom toms and jabbering through an echoplex!

But didn't you consider falling back on soul language, rather than working out your own, as some kind of defeat?
Falling back? That's a very pejorative way of putting it! I don't think of it that way. What we really need most at the moment is a re-reading - what Jacques Derrida called the violence of re-opening tomes. You actually do need to dig things up and fuck them over. You actually to have to say "Hold on, you've read this all wrong!" All writing is just re-reading. And that the ten songs (nine actually - at least on the advance tape of the Scritti LP 'Songs To Remember') in part revisited soul music had nothing to do with being at a loose end and thinking "What can I dig up now?"

There are a lot of people nowadays who are thinking what the fuck can they do that is novel. Which isn't to say what we do is not novel. For instance there's no way you can imagine Ben E. King singing those songs. It's just that I made a point by using some of the style, of the genre. I'd disagree very much with the idea of us falling back on soul language!

As your songs are rarely narrative are they just constructed as a series of images - triggers to elicit certain responses?
No, they're not narratives in most instances, but I don't set out with a blueprint or a plan how they should effect or affect the change of people. I suppose it works a log more intuitively than that. Some of the songs are quite clever, but they're not clever-clever. They're not clever dicky songs in that awful way that people like... er, sometimes Squeeze, or B. A. Robertson or 10cc are. Just dumb clever dicky songwriters. It's not like that at all. Neither is it self-conscious word-play or po-faced polemic. It's just that the way I write them naturally gives rise to reference to some of our history in terms of language. There's nothing precious in them though.

Someone yesterday asked me if I thought there were more to our songs than to a Haircut 100 single. Well, one of the big answers to that is I'd probably find more in a Haircut 100 single than Haircut 100 put into it. In terms of readings or writings then a song is as closed or as exploded as you or I wish to make them, which isn't to reduce it to some horrible, anarchic, endless relativism...

Okay, so how would you describe your 'Sex Sex Sex' for instance? What's it all about?
I dunno. Most of the songs are really funny songs to me. I shouldn't imagine anybody takes a line like "I'm in love with Jacques Derrida / Read a page and I know what I need ta / Take apart / My baby's heart..." (from 'Jacques Derrida') seriously, you know. It's funny! 'Sex Sex Sex', er, "Don't bush around the beat / This is the soul of indiscretion / So let's get indiscreet" - You know, it's gentle parody of me and my relationship with pop music and the genre itself. But that's not the main focus. It's just to make good records...

That's a bit glib.
No, no. I dunno. There's some funny... I just find it quite funny, I'm sure. It's no self congratulatory thing. It works! Well, it did work when I wrote it.

You once said you hoped Scritti Politti songs would have the power to change people's lives.
Only in the same way that the best music I have come across has affected me quite powerfully. I hope my music would have the power that I find in the music I like best... an effective power and that's a very difficult thing to talk about. I mean you can cobble together a map and talk about it in terms of ideology, psyche, rhythm and sexuality. Or you can talk about music like The Face does in terms of style and cultural reverberations. But the truth of the matter is that the phenomenon of popular music is a lot more complicated than that. It is all of those things. For me, it's actively wanting to be part of all those things, signifying on all those levels. But you can't plan or legislate for that. It is an intuitive thing, you can only provisionally understand its potential effectiveness.

In the pursuit of perfection...
No, no, no, that's not fair! I don't know why you should think what we're doing is in pursuit of perfection.

How about the LP's session feel, the anonymous nature of the music...
Maybe that's because nobody knows yet who or what Scritti is, maybe if the LP had come from a group we were a little more familiar with... I'm just trying to account for the fact you think it's sessiony. No, the recording of it was nothing like that at all. It was a very passionate record for me.

Anyway, combine that impression I have with the lines you pull from the past and where does one look for the Scritti signature?
It comes from the intention and the conditions of its making. It is of the people who write it and play it. Because I think it is good... the basic untheorizable, unrhetorical level of just being very good music and very good songs. Its individuality is marked by how good it is and the style of all the individuals involved. I have to give a commonsensical answer to that, because that's the way it is...

On that commonsensical level, it seems that Green is coming out of the closet, showing his public face.
I didn't want to do it, but it is fairly important I do come out and make the ground clear. As I've said before, it's no good paying lip service to popular music unless you're prepared to have your music be popular. If it means doing Pop Pix, giving lyrics to Smash Hits, doing this or that, then I'm happy to do it. And it's not at the expense of anything. I don't like people to think it's an impoverished thing to have to do when it isn't. For the time being it is the most interesting or most salient thing to be doing, compared to almost anything.

Aren't you a bit wary of talking about pop during this current phase in which everybody is talking about it?
It has become horribly overblown by now. The myth of the burgeoning new pop is now spent. When we first took it up it seemed like the no-bullshit option, a time to take a grip on this thing or fall by the wayside. But now with this whole pop thing I don't like to use the phrase anymore, whereas I was very anxious to use it two years ago.

At the same time the packaging and selling of Scritti makes clear their interest in the marketing processes of pop.
I'd be a damn fool if I didn't keep abreast of what's happening in market terms! Again we're looking at things synchronically and diachronically. You do get interested in the whole idea of marketing and the fact that leisure time consumption is a fairly interesting thing.

On a value of money thing, six songs (out of nine) on the Scritti LP have already come out on singles.
It's about par for the course as far as I'm concerned. I've fretted too long about other people's pockets in the past. Today the significance lies elsewhere. If you want to nitpick, I don't moan about Michael Jackson releasing every single from 'Off The Wall'. If people think it's a raw deal they don't have to buy the record. That really isn't worthy of losing sleep over.

(In marketing terms) What's the significance of the real signatures on the 2000 posters given away with 'Asylums...'?
Oh, that was a high art joke! They were great fun! I just thought of them as signed, limited edition prints. (Laughs.) People asked for the previous posters, so we thought we'd just give some away and hope that some people seeing the signatures would think, Ooh that's nice. As a marketing strategy I don't think it's very effective.

Do you see any comparison between Scritti and ABC, in terms of ABC's elaborate marketing aesthetic?
I think they did it fairly trashily actually... they're a bit hack.

But at the same time theirs succeeds...
It does work.

Whereas yours...
Well, Jesus Christ, I could have gone into the studio with Trevor Horn and given him five notes and five words... if it weren't for a stick of Erace Plus and Trevor Horn, I don't know where old Martin Fry might be! To say his is successfully functioning when mine isn't is rubbish. I've neither been in the position to afford Trevor Horn, nor do I want him. If ABC is evidence of a total usefulness perhaps we're talking at cross-purposes. I'm trying to make records on my own terms, not Trevor Horn's or Phonogram's. I'm not being pious about it. It's a different thing.

Do you have some definition of quality you stick by?
No. It's not a precious thing, nor is it particularly proscribed by political fervour. It's not a question of retaining standards, it's just a question of what suits you.

In terms of marginality and the mainstream, where do you think Scritti fall now?
It's a very indistinct area. The conditions of marginality change all the time, depending on the state in the market, depending on so many facts. It's very hard to tell from week to week whether you are marginal or not, unless so decreed by your wilfulness or the critical response to you.

Some so-called marginal groups enter the mainstream on their own terms, DAF, for instance - nobody could've predicted the commercial potential of their minimal electronics until after it started selling. In Germany, that is.
I don't know how peculiar DAF are to Germany, but are you implying you don't think I operate on my own terms?

Only that, in your case, there are more obvious references to pop.
You think that's true? But I mean, nine tenths of it has to be rhythm; that's what I follow - the great law of rhythm. You have to be kind of revisiting history as long as you continue to play four/four or six/eight. That is the history of Western music, and unless you make a radical departure from that, then your departures are all to do with the indices of style.

It's interesting to ponder why the assertion of rhythmicality became so significant and such an essential thing to pop. The early Scritti were essentially a marginal group, by which I mean they were the sort of people who shied away from four/four. And if you weren't inclined to play in some complicated time signature, or didn't think it was a very smart thing to do, the thing to do was make a racket, which is what we used to do. DAF don't make a racket; they actually do have structure and rhythm - they are using the code!

Do you have any curiosity anymore for odd sounds?
Certainly I do! Before punk, Anthony Braxton was my... I used to go out and buy stuff by him and all those New York lofty people, anything that made a racket! I started with the Beatles, but I suppose I hit them a bit later. The first album I got was 'Sergeant Pepper' and I mean there's a lot of noise mixed in with that. From then on, you acquire that mixed taste for popular stuff and noise and maybe you prefer the challenge of noise. I've headed for marginal things all my life - except now. It's to do with the political climate, my history, everything else. But sure, I love racket, I love din, I always make sure there's a little bit in us...

There's an American called Z'ev who's divided himself into six different personalities - at the last count - so that he can pursue assorted forms of music.
That's heterogeneity isn't it? That's what I've been writing and singing about for the past couple of years. The horrible thing of being in possession of one opinion at the expense of the other. It doesn't mean you should dissolve into an endless relativism - on the one hand this, urgh - that kind of wet liberalism. But if you understand your heterogeneity, that in itself gives you a firm direction, in a funny sort of way, that isn't towards a wet liberalism or relativism...

At the point of which nothing gets done.
Yeah. Shall we stop there?