Sunday Times magazine - September 1985 
Interview by Stephen Fay

This description of a pop group named Scritti Politti making a record comes from a trade paper called International Musician: "The base was sequenced with the DSX triggering the Mini-Moog, and then we used some programmed trigger with the Fairlight through the analogue interface, so we had sampled bass with Moog base".

To make some sense of this exotic vocabulary I asked Scritti Politti's singer, a 29-year-old Welshman called Green Gartside, to take me into the recording studio and act as my interpreter. We began by having a drink in a pub across from the studio, and Gartside suddenly stopped in mid-sentence, his attention caught by the background music. "That's my song", he said.

It was a hit single titled The Word Girl. "It's a good pop song", he said. "I caught my first postman whistling it the other day, in Whitechapel. That's all you're trying to achieve really, a meter rhythm and a melodic phrase that pleases you, and is popular".

Green said we would be joined in Virgin Record's Townhouse Studios in Goldhawk Road by his two colleagues in Scritti Politti, David Gamson and Fred Maher. The three of them wanted to remix the drum sounds on a track called Lover to Fall. It had appeared on their LP released in the summer, and was to be re-released as a single. (In the end a different track, Perfect Way, was chosen.)

The recording studio is like a cave decorated by an electronic wizard. The conjuring is done entirely with sound by a record producer who sits in front of a control panel on which he manipulates sound on 48 separate channels by "synchronising" or "synthesizing" it, and then "compelling" and "compressing" it before finally "aurally exciting" it.

After each function had been described and illustrated, it transpired that International Musician had been writing about the synthesis of drum beats made by both a real drummer and electronically on a machine, and transferring these on to a computer-controlled tape that played the sound of the drums with metronomic regularity. It's part of the percussive backing, that's all.

But speaking the bizarre language of complex electronics is part of the experience of popular music that Green shares with Gamson, who plays the keyboard, and Maher, the drummer. They had all come along for the remix of Lover To Fall, which, Fred explained, was worthwhile because of some recent improvements in technology. (This is now so advanced that, said Fred, "you can blow your own chip for the Lin".)

This is their secret garden, and playing in it is not cheap. The Power Station Studio the group uses in New York City costs $350 an hour (Goldhawk Road comes a bit cheaper). But the cost does not appear to create any sense of urgency. A great deal of time in recording studios seems to be spent hanging around while technicians check sound levels on all 48 channels, rewind miles of two-inch tape, and make sure the fuses still work.

While they waited the group told me more about themselves. David Gamson's father is a musician, who, after running his own opera company in Italy, became an assistant to Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic. David was a music student, and he says it was his liking for counterpoint that attracted him to pop music. He is co-author with Green of some of the songs on the LP, and he has a broader musical education than his colleagues; he speaks well of Schoenberg and Webern. Fred is the son of a New York writer, and is as interested in the mechanics as the music. "He's our rhythm consultant; our Dr. Groove", says Green fondly.

Green is quite open about his musicianship. He does not read or write musical notation, and his tunes come first, having been picked out on a guitar. Words come last of all, and are designed to complete the sound picture rather than to rival Cole Porter. The hit single of the summer, The Word Girl, was a product of Green's discovery of the regularity with which he uses the word "girl" in his lyrics. Sample: A name the girl outgrew the girl was never real she stands for your abuse the girl is no ideal (punctuation: Green's).

He explains: "It's a song that takes account of its own making, which is a good thing. It's not something you often think about. It's like an experiment by Robert Rauschenberg, of a wooden box containing a looped tape on which he recorded the sound of the box being made". Green thought that this might be trite, but it was certainly fun.

Having written a number of songs, the trio goes to the Power Station Studio to work with a record producer called Arif Mardin, and with musicians Green admires, like the West Coast guitar player Paul Jackson Jr, and a bassist called Marcus Miller. I'd imagined that they would work in the studios for a few days, and produce a record distilled from the tapes of the studio performance. Such innocence.

Recording the music is only the first stage in the manipulation of the sound, and Scritti Politti are notoriously slow to produce records. Last summer's LP, called Cupid and Psyche '85, had been 18 months in the making. Since it is such an expensive business - and in their case such a protracted one - I wondered how it was financed. Green explained that his company pays for the studio time, but that is only the beginning. He pays for everything else, too - the producers, the session musicians, and his managers, Partisan Management Ltd. He pays for all this from an advance on royalties from Virgin Records. His first advance, to cover the singles that culminated in the LP, was no mean sum: half a million dollars. Evidently, he is a pop singer who ought not to be taken lightly.

Green Gartside is unusually pretty. Last year he appeared in full-page pictures in pop magazines such as Smash Hits wearing lipstick, earrings and a turquoise brooch at his neck. This year the blond hair is shorter, the jewelry has gone. He wears blue jeans now, and recently informed the readers of Smash Hits: "Anyone with long hair in 1985 is a mega-prat."

Fashion has changed but Green is still very pretty. The image is cultivated, of course. Before having his picture taken for this article a fee had to be negotiated with Virgin Records for his make-up artist. While I waited for him I feared that we might be talking about Narcissus, rather than Cupid or Psyche. He was instantly recognisable when he came into the pub. He is well over six feet, and he wore a blue button-down shirt and striped tie under a long brown overcoat in a broad check. I detected no sign of make-up, though this might be because I get so little practice. Green told me later that he was wearing mascara. He always had, he said.

Further inquiries revealed that he started wearing mascara when he was a boy in the town of Cwmbran in South Wales. He took to it at about the same time as he and a friend formed a branch of the Young Communist League. The juxtaposition of values here is unusual. There is no reason why members of the YCL should not be pop singers, but the use of mascara is not designed to win a boy important patrons in the CPGB.

His names were originally neither Green nor Gartside. In his salad days, when he was only green in judgment, his surname was Strohmeyer. He was beaten up by little Welsh boys in the school playground because they found his father's German name an intolerable provocation, and it was a relief when his parents separated and he was able to adopt his step-father's surname. Green was just a name he awarded himself because he did not like the one he'd been given (and which he does not reveal).

I wondered if his interest in music began with the Welsh choral tradition, and he found that funny: there were no traditions of any kind in Cwmbran, which was a new town notable for the absence of any cultural roots. The only music that permeated the Strohmeyer-Gartside household was The Beatles, and he was still an adolescent when he concluded that it was no place to linger in. Despite disappointing A-levels (he says he was hungover; maybe so, but before all of them?) he was awarded a place in Leeds Art School, where he showed a lofty Marxist contempt for the frivolous behaviour of the teachers and decided that 20th-century art had been reduced to absurdity with the work of Marcel Duchamp.

A generation late, Green Gartside in Leeds was an angry young man, though the Communist Party was unable to harness his energy. It was released instead by the noise and anarchic vulgarity of punk-rock bands. The revolutionaries he followed over the barricades were the Sex Pistols. The musical influences were more catholic than that, however. Besides The Beatles, he admired Elvis and Little Richard. But as a pop singer, compared to them he is, he says, no match.