International Musician and Recording World magazine - July 1984 
Interview by Tony Horkins 
Supplied by Jim Davies

"In the early days there was a premium placed on a kind of public anguish in various forms; lost hopes and atonal croonings. The aesthetic then that I quite liked was not to have song structures as such but just make a bleeding racket... well, an anguished racket."

This anguish was made all the more intense by the fact that the early Scritti didn't bother to rehearse, or even write a lot of the set before performing it.

"Really it was a very draining thing to do because I would be nervous enough about playing live anyway. To do that and to foolishly set yourself the task of making songs up as you went along was pretty unnerving, and it took its toll."

Adding to the stress was the fact that no member of the band could actually play their instrument properly; three weeks before recording their first single bass player Nial bought his first bass and used those three weeks to learn how to play it. The resultant 'Skank Bloc Bologna' was miraculously well received, which created a whole new set of problems: playing the invited John Peel sessions amongst them. Scritti Politti had to learn how to play.

"In retrospect we were terribly, terribly slow. Not only did we not really have any particular interest in making a convincing or authentic Rock sound, we had no idea of how to go about it. I genuinely didn't know until I went on tour with The Gang Of Four some 18 months later. It was only then that I found out how you got a guitar to distort."

The combination of the coming of the new Rock band in the 80s - Echo And The Bunnymen et al - his disillusionment with Scritti products and a lengthy illness made Green rethink the Scritti ideal, and the transformation began to take place.

"I started to listen to black music, which I didn't grow up liking, and a lot of 60's British Pop, and I liked it a lot better than the undisciplined caterwauling that we'd gotten into the habit of doing. I decided that I would rather write songs with some structure and some form that would possibly mean more to people. I was living on my own then in Wales after living in this squat in Camden with the others, and that was the biggest thing - having the quiet and space to just sit down for a couple of hours and put some chords together."

Still augmenting Scritti with a regular bass player and drummer, Green didn't bother to surround himself with the latest in home recording technology but worked with his band members to complete material.

"There wasn't really any need - the music really was terribly simple. It's only more recently that I liked working with those things. We did use some then though - we had bought the first Roland Compu-Rhythm because I had liked the idea of working with machines, though I don't think anyone else was really keen on the idea at the time. Not that any of us had the resources to get hold of any of this stuff and work on it."

The LP to come out of this time was the very well received 'Songs To Remember' released on Rough Trade. The album produced a couple of hit singles in the form of 'Asylums In Jerusalem' and 'The Sweetest Girl' and it looked like Scritti and Rough Trade were a partnership never to be broken.

"Rough Trade were going through a very bad time just after the LP came out. I did use to spend a lot of time there and I was close to some of the people there, and no secret was made at the time of the fact that they were having a hard time and they were laying people off. I was quite concerned that they would go under and I would be left as a casualty. At that time I thought it was a good idea to do as they have subsequently done and make arrangements with other record companies. But at the time they didn't want to do any of that and they still had a principled objection to doing it, but I thought it was a sensible thing to do, so those were the main two factors in my leaving Rough Trade."

Nowadays he has very strong opinions on what he actually expects from a record company.

"I must have talked to every record company on the planet at least twice. When you meet the people that matter - the A&R people and the managing directors - I like to see some kind of wit and guile there. I like to hear them talk sense and have sufficient company to prove the point. I ended up signing to Virgin in this country, which I never dreamed I'd do because I didn't like them at all for such a long time. Maybe it's me that's changed rather than them. They've certainly become a more successful company and they've got a few more people on the label now that I actually like."

With the clout of a successful album and new management in the shape of Rob Warr and Bob Last, respectively responsible for Human League and ABC, a deal was struck with Virgin after a lengthy stay in the US. It was while staying in the States that he started working with his most recent Scritti partner, keyboardist David Gamson, who had a 'wholly commendable' version of 'Sugar Sugar' out on Rough Trade, which Green remembers as being 'spectacularly unsuccessful'. Green and David soon found a drummer in the shape of Fred Maher, who drummed with Lou Reed, Richard Hell and, when he was 14, Gong, though they're not too keen to play upon this. So yet again Scritti Politti are based on a three piece nucleus.

"I would never like the idea of being a solo person, and I certainly both need and enjoy other people to work with. What's more I wanted to make the guitar less prominent so it made sense to work with someone who could play keyboards which I can't do at all."

The three of them were soon in the studio working with Aretha Franklin producer Arif Mardin to produce three songs, including 'Wood Beez' and 'Absolute'.

"I wanted to work with Arif because of his work with Aretha, and more recently with Chaka Khan. With 'Wood Beez' he liked them the way they were and just changed tiny little things. In fact 'Absolute' has his major contribution on it - eight bars of this Fairlight figure which he came up with."

The Fairlight plays a big role in the recordings of Scritti Politti these days, which widens the gap between old and new Scritti even further.

We don't operate it, we can't yet, though Fred is taking a course on Fairlight operation in New York. I think it just makes perfect sense to work with someone who's got a Fairlight and can operate it."

Green himself isn't too sure what's going on technically with the recording process, so David explained some of the recording methods employed while recording 'Wood Beez'.

"The bass was sequenced with the DSX triggering the Mini-Moog, and then we used the same programmed trigger with the Fairlight through the analogue interface, so we had sampled bass in with the Moog bass. Actually, that was another of Arif's contributions - the sampled Vienna Boys Choir over 'each time I go to bed'."

"He had a record of the Vienna Boys Choir," Green added, "singing in some cathedral in Vienna. And he sampled some of that into the Fairlight. Even the backing vocals were sampled in just to thicken them up."

"As for drums it's mainly real drums playing to a click, but there is DMX bass drum - the fast bit - and a couple of toms. We were really into using real drums back then - the Power Station at $300 an hour. But we're less into it now, partly because $300 an hour in the Power Station is a bit much, and partly because that whole 'ambient kits in the Power Station sound' doesn't sound very exciting to me any more."

Although big sounding, the drums on 'Wood Beez' sound very tight - especially the hihat.

"That was an overdub, and it was a Simmons hihat. The drums themselves were very heavily gated, and it is Simmons and real drums mixed."

From now on it looks as if real drummers are less likely to play a major role in future Scritti Politti recordings.

"In fact on 'Wood Beez' we did try to get a real drummer to play with the feel of a drum machine, but real drums get to be unwieldy. If you want them to have power they kind of somehow eat a lot of space up."

Unlike drum machines...

"Nowadays you can get into trigger heaven anyway. What we're looking at now is something that Dave's been looking at in Syco Systems which is the re-chipped Linn. And I think we'll use one of the new Simmons 7s in tandem."

They're not worried about losing the spontaneity of a real drummer either, as they've sometimes found that machines can make happy mistakes too.

"I must tell you how we got the fast bass drum bit on 'Wood Beez'. Fred had borrowed (Brian) Eno's 808 [drum machine], and it had something wrong with it. But somehow we got the basic thing into it while working at David's house, and somewhere in the figure one of Eno's programmes popped out - the fast bass drum thing - which sounded great."

Which is the sort of thing Eno himself gets up to anyway. It's not unknown for him to go into the studio and keep the desk exactly as it was from the session before to mix his own material. But getting to 'Wood Beez', I wondered how the vocals had such an unreal quality to them. More clever gadgetry?

"It's not true. No tricks, no tricks. I did this singing with Elvis Costello a couple of weeks ago for his forthcoming album and Langer and Winstanley, his producers, thought they'd have to do something peculiar to my voice to make it sound like it does. But they can testify that I can make it sound varispeed, which is something you can do. I can tell you what it feels like to do it - it's just that you move the centre of where you feel the singing from as high up the neck as it can go. So you're really only singing from your head, which makes it quite quiet as you don't resonate anywhere you should. It's very exhausting singing like that."

"I certainly don't sing as loud as Elvis Costello. We were doing some singing together around the microphone and I was standing really close to it while he was standing on the other side of the room whispering! But then he's got a voice like a foghorn."

Although Green and Scritti have opened up to some of the technology currently available - he now has a Fostex eight track machine for demoing material - the writing process still remains conceptual.

"I don't know how exactly you could use the stuff to lend any assistance to writing. 'Wood Beez' started life as a song that I could play on acoustic guitar. That's how they all start. There are very few songs around that are both good grooves and great songs. You sometimes have to sacrifice one for the other, and if you can make it work, that's brilliant."

Which to my mind they do. Trevor Horn recently expressed an interest in taking their music a little further, but immediate plans take them back to New York to record tracks for an album without a producer, and this time using fewer humans. Expect new shades of Green later this year...