| Green : The word boy
Blitz magazine - June 1985 Scritti Politti. A move from agitprop noise on St Pancreas Records to
pop's softly fluttering heart. At all times more than a Duran, if
occasionally less than a Dollar, otten very sexy indeed. A stream of
sticky white pop spurting over several singles and an LP of Songs To
Remember. Trips to America and three more singles scooping up a New
York resurgence. A little healthy disrespect and a new LP... The new Scritti Politti LP, snappily entitled Cupid & Psyche '85,
has nine songs on it including the last three singles, a Scritti remake of
Small Talk (a work they originally recorded with Nile Rodgers), the
latest single, a reggae-tinged jig called The Word Girl, and quite
the most marvellous thing they have done yet, a balladic beauty called A
Little Knowledge. Why the delay? "A mixture of things. It wasn't recorded in one go, we did three songs with Arif Mardin, then decided we - that's me, Fred Maher and David Gamson, who now constitute Scritti - would like to try and produce ourselves. Of course it's been a long time coming but I think people expect that of us by now!" Are you prepared for another dip in the charts? "I think so. I've obviously got no hand in determining the critical reception, although having said that, the record does seem slightly incongrous. The pop charts do seem to be a very different place nowadays from what they were a couple of years back, things seem a bit quiet. Even the professional eclecticism, where you could say you liked Dollar and Coltrane, doesn't really seem worthwhile these days. The only thing that is going to matter at the moment in the absence of something galvanising is some conviction. We've got it." The Scritti of old was an occasionally marvellous thing but its main problem was that the peripheral nature of its fairly pure vision precluded any real impact. The people who listened were the sort of people who, if not already converted, were at least already aware of what the group were on about. The pop kids still had Stars in their eyes and didn't really give a fig for Green's thrashy mess. Now Scritti have taken up residence in the middle of the rush can we expect something worthwhile? "It is true that as the marginality of what we were doing became reified and settled down we became an 'alternative' that wasn't an alternative at all. It was time to move out of that environment and that way of going about things, and move in to the pop fold. As for the notion of purity, well, it's not a word I'd like to use since it implies things that are impure. If anything, then it's the stuff that IS impure that appeals to me. The pop move, in terms of a self-conscious vision of a purpose for the group, was merely a very honest embracing of a pop sentiment that I gave free rein to." "Strange as it may seem, I'm involved in a business of trying to make things simpler rather than convoluted. I do have to be honest about heterogeneity, about the different strands. I dislike things that pretend to be, or aspire to be a 'whole'." The Scritti pop meanderings burst forth at a strange time. It was the time when the new pop articulacy was left to the NME and the rest of the serious adult press. It was before the likes of Smash Hits and No. 1 were there not only to deal directly with the Pop consumer but also to filter and disguise and set up a whole series of icons of total blankness. Now all threats are channelled and contained. The Jesus & Mary Chain are headlined 'A Shocking Controversial Group' and stuck next to Wham!, A Pretty Boy Bland Pin-Up. It's all the same flat surface, there's no sense of importance. Perhaps a 1985 Scritti couldn't break through with such ease. "I don't know. It's an effect of the doldrums that we are in, that premium is placed on the attempt to find a champion, which is perfectly understandable. I don't however think that the kind of anti-pop noises being made at the moment necessarily mean anything. Anti-pop what? Anti-pop whom? To what ends? The Jesus & Mary Chain are not actually that interesting, it's just a need to re-invent things to keep it moving along." "The magazines don't filter out challenges; indeed they may be all too hasty to let them in and then smooth them away. I get annoyed at the whole English tradition of marginalising pop, I've always loathed that. Pop music is demonstratively very important by virtue of the number of records it sells. The importance also lies in the historical divisions between different types of music rather than any single 'power'." So do you see Scritti within a historical context? "Scritti occupies a funny place in that it never would have happened if it hadn't had the jolt of punk, that strange hiccup. It forced everyone who might otherwise never have thought about it or done it to question what was going around them. That particular aesthetic and political impulse, as well as several other aesthetic and political concerns, does make us rather peculiar." Did punk allow people to get away with too much? "I don't think so. It did get stale through lack of imagination, as these things are wont to do, and ended up setting up just a series of closures. But the force behind it was necessary." "It was the eventual lack of purpose that made me want to get out and I was lured by the appeal of pop, particularly black pop music. I had gotten very ill and very bored and it looked like British rock and roll had come home to roost. I went away and listened to a whole lot of stuff that I ordinarily wouldn't have listened to, and that was it. I'd loved the mighty Chic and The Jacksons before, but to hear Shirley Brown and The Staples Singers was great. It was unheard of amongst the NME boys not to have been listening to that sort of thing for years, but it was honestly my first encounter with it." At what level were you comprehending the importance of black pop? "It was basically an instinctive appreciation. At the same time, were I to bring my lumbering conceptual apparatus to bear on it, then it would seem more important, more pertinent, more economical and more powerful than all the overblown, overinvested expressivity of post-Punk Britain." The time of your convalescence involved the writing of a thesis on rhythm and an admittance of a certain loss of faith. How come? "I lost faith in the possibility of a science of history. I'd been unhappy with humanist politics, which seemed in essence too nebulous. Marxism seemed to offer an understanding of the present in materialist terms through the notion of a science of history. It was like you could plot points on a map, join them up and project a path along which you could be sure things would travel. Doing a lot of reading, though, I realised that the past didn't offer itself up as an object available for the scrutiny of history. I began to think about history in terms of the individual and in turn was led to think about the formation of the unconscious. It brought me back to a consideration of language that I'd been familiar with at art college when I was interested in the way that meaning could be ascribed to abstract paintings." Isn't all this rather irrelevant? "No, because while reading all this stuff I found lots of points at which it sparked with the whole business of making pop music. Pop's assertion of rhythm, its interruption of language, its sexuality, the way that it presents identity and dissolves identity, and the means with which it does so, converge with lots of philosophical concerns." "Perhaps the best thing, though, is the way that pop resists all these attempts at analysis and explanation, and that it does it so beautifully!" It was this struggle with pop's apparently unanalysable concerns that provided us with Scritti's most exciting moments. The core of pop's problems - the girls and the love and the heroes - were juxtaposed with a novel self-consciousness. The Sweetest Girl found herself in inverted commas, semiotically plonked in a sweet-as-candy sea that was somehow both dangerous and irresistible. Likewise, old Aretha was prayed to, transformed into an ironic, pseudo-religious R'n'B metaphor, and at the same time the inspiration for the thumpiest of dance songs. The latest single, The Word Girl, is ostensibly about just that, the word 'Girl' as it's sprinkled into pop's rich broth. It's also a hit record. Scritti Politti obviously aren't making merely clever-clever Barthesque gestures any more. "They were fairly crude flags, but then again they're only titles. Scritti is expressive of KNOWING that pop in turn is expressive of these things. It doesn't amount to any cocky self-consciousness because I can't pretend to any mastery of it. I'm still marvelling at it, rejoicing in it and trying to exploit it." How easy is it to enter the pop thing against the grain, to execute a series of 'unpop' gestures, such as writing a song about Jacques Derrida, as on the Songs To Remember album? "It came very easily. The act of writing a pop song came as something of a relief to me, an enjoyment at least. The irony of mentioning Derrida was not lost on me but it wasn't particularly self-conscious." How have Scritti developed? "They've probably gained something. Recently having been a Transatlantic unit they will have suffered from confusion, and I must admit that working with all these different people in all these different ways has meant that some very personal concerns have had to be sacrificed. A happy surrender though. There's no way that you can walk into the Power Station in New York with Arif Mardin and David and Fred, and, although they're playing your music with all your pecuilar whimsies, expect to be able to mash them into what you are." Was there an over-sophistication for a while? "No, I think it was just the allure of black pop music and a boredom with what was being done in Britain that drove me to America to use certain forms and certain ways of going about doing things." What is the dominant inspiration behind what you do? Is it intolerance or love? "For the past two years it would definitely have been a love for certain musical modes and approaches, but increasingly I sense a dissatisfaction in all sorts of ways that may lead me to perhaps try another path." In what way? "Well, this I don't know at the moment. I think it's really time for me to try again to address the problem of just what I can do with politics. I wanted the LP to be politically inspired and I've tried to maintain a political dimension." At one time you said that, no matter how poppy you wrote a song, it would always subvert, corrupt or twist. "That still holds true. No matter how poppy, how straight-ahead, at the simplest level that is the language I live with, that is the language of my consciousness. When I write a line, a word that I see as a rhyme might be a word drawn from political theory rather than from whatever might 'pop' into someone else's consciousness, do you see what I mean? Even at that level my doggerel is a kind of politically-informed doggerel." How does your approach compare with that of, say, ZTT? "I think ZTT do things rather badly. I've got some time for Paul Morley, but basically it's a shambles. Don't get me wrong - I like shambles, but it's an undynamic shambles." What about things like the packaging? "It's a bit too silly for me. Paul is clearly playing with things he doesn't fully understand and that's fine because that's what I and probably you are doing, but his vanity is losing a sense of proportion." Is what he is doing feasible within current pop environs? "Well I don't really know what he's trying to achieve. There are exciting things about Frankie Goes To Hollywood but it's the conditions of production that are interesting, the Trevor Horn and Frankie relationship. And of course it's a lot to do with the historical accident of having three scallies and a couple of faggots in a group like that doing what they do. That's more important than the ZTT boxer shorts." "There is a self-consciousness but there is also basically a lack of balance to the humour. It's overblown, not really forceful enough, and, most of the time, not vulgar enough, vicious enough or political enough. It's a little verbose and unfocussed." How satisfied have you been with the packaging of your own records? "Oh, you know, I think they've been good." Have the motives behind the sleeves changed as time has gone on? "Yes. The middle ones were appropiations of Dunhill, Courvoisier and Dior, whereas the new ones are a bit more personal, with a slightly different focus. The appropriation is a lot more immediate." Does an understanding of Scritti rely on a knowledge of what came before? "No. What I want people to receive most from the new album is enjoyment. The making of music is Pleasurable and the enjoyment of music is Pleasurable. That's Pleasurable with a big 'P' which can admit all similar degrees of discomfort and unease and challenge. Hopefully to some extent it's moving and funny but also pointing somewhere along the way to an understanding that there is a different way of looking at pop music." For a while, about a year ago, as the trio of Pray Like Aretha Franklin/Absolute/Hypnotize rippled across the airwaves, Green became the thing you always thought he might be but could never quite visualise, a high profile pop star. From classically wasted rocker to Princess Diana lookalike, even Jackie readers wanted him on their walls. How content can one be with the role of fluffy, flimsy pop star? "I wasn't particularly happy but I was always in a rather contradictory position. I was never very sure about it although it's something that I can't imagine not doing. I mean, I wasn't herded into it or anything, and I didn't feel there was anything dishonest about it. That doesn't mean that I didn't realise that it wasn't wholly putting over what I was and what my concerns were and what I was doing there." So what now for Scritti? "I really don't know. A lot depends on how the next record is received and then, well... I think a change. Exactly how much of a change and in which direction, I'm not sure. I've perhaps neglected my politics too much recently. There's new things to be addressed, new ways of addressing them, new ways of presenting and representing what I'd like to be doing. Does that make sense?" Away from the flow of alcohol and ebullience, it's all too easy for Green to come over as nothing more than The Word Boy. In truth one often senses his delight in the use of ten words when one will suffice. When he does latch you onto his wavelength, though, it's easy to find him inspirational. If you doubt the words and the signs then just listen to the LP. It says it all very well, and for that alone Green has every reason to be pleased as punch.
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