NME magazine - March 1984 
Interview by Richard Cook

"Paranoid?" says Green, eyes expanding, "What makes you say that?"

Your reputation goes before you, sir. But Green denies it mildly enough. After a long period out of attention - 18 months or so since the release of 'Songs To Remember', something soon forgotten - the lanky scholar of language, music and all crossing points between has prepared some more new pop for our attention. Scritti Politti's 'Wood Beez' single is the first picking; an LP may emerge later in the year.

He's an odd fellow: emused, English, warily suspicious bobbing between an abrupt intellectual's doubt. I sense a chap whose pragmatic approach to music-making is laced with an idealism about pop that's either naive or bull-headed. Does he really think Politti is genuinely 'political', above mere consumerism?

First we must update to now. Where have you been?

"I lived in America for a while," he says, stretching his limbs inside incongruously summery clothes on a cold afternoon. "I met up with David Gamson ('No Turn On Red') and Fred Maher in New York and we did some work with Nile Rodgers and Marcus Miller and lots of interesting people, the fruits of which have yet to be released. I seemed to get put in touch with anybody I wanted to met and they were all very enthusiastic."

"Yes, it's been a long time since 'Songs To Remember'. What took the most time was leaving Rough Trade and sorting out management, which took an incredibly long time. But I've been quite busy, nevertheless."

"The difference between working in America and collaborating with other people. Once you take your stuff to America where they think about making music quite differently to here... the essential difference is a political one. Or the politics of style. It's difficult to convey to Americans why it should be interesting to, say, have a '60s Rickenbacker guitar sound to be mixed in with an R&B record. They say - why? It's a good question. Style there doesn't have the same accrued resonances that it has here."

Isn't there a basic aesthetic difference - the American need to please the ear, the lack of any dissonance?

"I don't think that's wholly true... Bob Last told me how he'd met some young Russians who didn't have any problem linking Whitesnake, because all those trappings don't resonate in their culture. It's a similar thing in America, in a different way."

Green enjoys prodding at the theoretical undertow of his activity as much as ever. It might be interesting to tread water in these areas but it doesn't pay the rent. How much pressure is there on him to DO WORK?

"At Rough Trade there was none, really. Without a contract I worked when I wanted to. With Virgin (his current company) I've been working anyway so they've been quite happy. I've surprised myself but I've enjoyed working hard."

And that work has included three songs with veteran soul expert Arif Mardin, who helmed the slight but insinuating and enjoyably playful 'Wood Beez' - a fluffy piece of post-Atlantic dance, a buff might call it.

"He was the producer I most wanted to work with. We sent him some demos and he liked them very much and wanted to do it."


AN EASY TAUNT comes up here, surely. Green the experimental soulboy with his Aretha and Ben E. King records, getting his stab at the hard stuff with an accredited pro at the board - the very man who oversaw all those classics.

"Oh, well, I really don't think I've done white soul. I might have said things about black popular music which is still the thing that interests me most, but I don't think anyone in this country can make white soul music. I really can't think of it as a crack at the real thing."

"It was his work with people like Chaka Khan over the past few years that made me want to work with Arif. Her version of 'We Can Work It Out' - incredible! He's a very kind man, the most gentlemanly man I've met. In some ways we were a little tto polite to each other and he certainly didn't exert any pressure on me. All the arrangements for the songs were worked out in advance."

If 'Wood Beez' scarcely suggests the grand slam sound which is Mardin's speciality, it balances between the fluted whimsey of 'Songs To Remember' and a firmer, more declamatory music. The time may be ripe for Green's elevation, after all. If Scritti's LP never made too many waves in the marketplace it still pre-empted many of the delicate moves which have won Culture Club so much success.

"Yes," Green says affably, probably a little flattered at the suggestion of prophecy. "From what I know of what George has said he'd probably admit to that, for what it's worth. If some of those singles had been released in the prevailing conditions... no, I don't feel miffed because I'm happy with my lot at the moment. I assure you!"

"One history of now would be a reaction against the direction in which Public Image were taking things. The burgeoning new pop thing, which now only has a very few idiosyncratic groups, like Eurythmics and Culture Club. At the other end of it there are groups like The Bunnymen and Simple Minds who now get a lot of evening airtime - old style pop groups - and the success of people like The Smiths you could see as a bit worrying, perhaps the establishment of a new orthodoxy."

"We could do a little map here. Icicle Works, Fiction Factory, Reflex... you can only ever come up with conditional maps of who comes where. I could get a little angry about it. It depends on how much I had to drink."

Is Scritti's music devalued by its comparative failure to arrest a pop audience? Can it be 'pop' without being popular?

"That's interesting, yes. Being devalued proceeds on a basis that it has a value before it goes out... I don't think the number of hours put into a record should determine its deserving of merit in the world, and nor should the motive for making it.

"I think the most sophisticated popular music - in terms of rhythms and arrangements - have been black, and the other things that attracted me to it are its history and politics and its relation to things like the church. At the moment I'm very taken with hip hop and electro-boogie which I think is the most interesting and salient thing of today, as interesting as punk was."

We circle around the enigma of passion in recorded music: Green posits the power coursing through every level of the process, I take my traditional line on the nearness of the human touch being evaded by the massive distances made on the production line of pop/soul. But Scritti's new American tracks were done "remarkably quickly. It scared me how fast it was done. The people you're working with don't need telling. They get it right."


WHAT HAPPENED, then, to Scritti Politti? Where is Green's crew of compadres and players?

"I don't really know," he says, a trifle evasively. "I signed to these companies as an individual. I'm not quite sure what I'll do with it. The flexibility's nice."

Writing, then. How has Green's songwriting changed, if at all?

"Not very much, actually. I think my concerns are the same. It's as easy to come up with tunes and as difficult to think about what to say with them. I'm still steeped in language. I grew up with an obsession for it. At art college all the problems with art led me to philosophy and the philosophy of language. I still see it as important, but I don't see it as sitting down and playing with words the way Ian Dury does."

He is hurt when I suggest, in a spirit of idle mischief, that it might be a bit too clever for pop music. What he does, he says, can be enjoyed without any knowledge of what he informs the music with: it isn't, in fact, Wittgenstein in 4/4.

"It doesn't really bother me that there's so much nonsence in pop," he continues, trying to diagnose my illness of opinion. "Very little is likeable, subjectively, but as a phenomenon it's extraordinarily interesting. That there is a Top Ten - that's interesting! We take it for granted, like language. As the materiality and power of language is unnoticed so is a lot of music. Music's the most peculiar everyday thing I can think of. I'm very interested and excited by hip hop but a lot of it I can't bear to listen to - it's a lot of shit."

I think Green thrives on contradictions, as should we all. I'm not too persuaded that his present output manifests the supposed turmoil of ideas and passions that go into its making. That externalisation, most naked in the early Politti records that are always dragged up in Green's writing, is hard to pick out in the dazzling surfaces and facile, fluid shapes of his later music. When I suggest that Einsturzuende Neubauten might be carrying a more radical torch than the hip hop he grandstands as today's revolution, he dismisses them as "a very poor poor and pale second to Run DMC and the Beastie Boys."

Maybe, though, he'll amplify his firing range. He considers pop writing still boarded up in "retarded music criticism" and intends to make his own contribution to a new language by revising the now legendary tome on music/language he prepared some time ago. And there's fresh Scritti music on hold.

Green coughs, and looks quizzical.

"Do you like any of the work I've done? Ever?"

Aw, gee.