NME magazine - June 1985 
Interview by Gavin Martin

THE TWO singers, a tall fresh-faced Welshman and a soft spoken bleary-eyed Mancunian, felt trapped.

Try as he might to plot a path out of the complexities of art, language, politics and even music - all abiding concerns of his group Scritti Politti - the Welshman always ended up fronting an improvised racket. He wanted to break down the ideological barriers, his self imposed stasis.

Joy Division, the Mancunian's group, had reached a ferocious inexorable peak and for him further elevation seemed impossible.

Long into the night they sat talking on the stage of an empty Electric Ballroom, feeling depressed and distanced - unable to offer solace for each other's problems. No resolutions or solutions came out of their discussion, just a mutual confirmation of boredom and restlessness. The two, Ian Curtis and Green Gartside, never met again. Within a week Curtis was dead.

Soon after Gartside returned to Wales to recover from illness and reconsider his strategy, as a post Marxist agnostic materialist, in the pop marketplace.

Thus encumbered he naturally found himself with a bit of a reputation.

"I think that's a lot of bollocks actually, the reputation. I learned a bit too late how you get reputations. For a while I did try to deny my interests but I can't deny them, they are as with me as any other formal experiences would inform anyone else's writing."

"It's very much part and parcel of how you look at the world. I don't think you can be impressed by Marx or Freud and then forget the whole concept of class or conscious, never let them impinge on your perspective. It will sometimes surface, for better or worse I might add."

And surface it did, this concern with the power of language, in songs like 'Jacques Derrida', and the new sweetened sound on the 'Songs To Remember' LP using soul inspiration, songs of faith, "to sing about faithlessness".

Too often it seemed Gartside was commenting on the pop process at the expense of his own intuition. Eighteen months after 'Songs To Remember' came 'Wood Beez' a collaboration with Arif Mardin in which he told us "I pray like Aretha Franklin". Does he really?

"Do me a favour! It's very complicated, it's the whole question of what pop is; its relationship to language, power and politics. It's also a question of music's transgression and abuse of some of the rules of language. Aretha was singing what are arguably inane pop songs and had left her gospel roots. But she sang them with a fervour, a passion, though I hate to use that word because it's been hideously tarred in recent usage. To a committed materialist whose interest had come round to language again - perhaps because of a bankruptcy in Marxism to deal with ideology or any artistic community - hearing her was as near to a hymn or a prayer as I could get."

"Obviously I couldn't make that point in a three minute pop song. All I could do was allude to it and hope that someone like you would happen along me and say that's a stupid fucken lyric."


WHEN I meet Gartside I'm pleasantly surprised to find him warm, expressive and jocular. I had suspicions that a cool, evasive New Age pop businessman had been borne out of his past confusions. But for better or for worse, to use a recurring Gartside phrase, once the beer flows the old semiotics keep surfacing and when they do he falters and corrects himself, going into long convoluted explanations. Rude and childish as it may have been I couldn't help myself from giggling at such loquacity - it's only pop'n'roll after all.

"I certainly don't subscribe to the view that pop music is any more one dimensional than any other form of production. All pop is political. I hate the critical attitude that draws boundaries and says this here is political because it's waving a flag and it's saying this."

"To me pop and the whole notion of pleasure, sex, entertainment and leisure is political. So Dead Or Alive with their swirling clothes and all the rest of it have as much political resonance as Billy Bragg. Until that's accepted we've got a long way to go. They were making political pop 30 years ago f'rchrissake and no-one called it political then."


ONE FOR THE MONEY

OK, SO there's a new album of political pop by Scritti Politti called 'Cupid And Psyche'. It's the first with new members Dave Gamson and Fred Maher, young New Yorkers in the process of relocating in London, and the first since 'Songs To Remember' some two and a half years ago.

Out of nine tracks there are three pearls - three of the finest pop songs you'll hear all year - while the rest is form held over content, a pot puree of confection stuffed into solid studio dance rhythms. When on form, on the superlative 'Lover To Fall', Scritti swing free and easy matching a dazzling and dynamic beat box inspired rhythm to classy lyrical panache - the perfect combination of rhythm and reason to obtain the "abuse of language" Green craves.

Still, the materialist Marxist in me isn't so easily persuaded. Four previously available singles is chancing it a bit.

"I think that's fair."

With the pound's value, the price of records, unemployment, AIDS...

"It's a reflection of a year's work."

But it's work you've already been paid for and now you're trying to increase the sales of an LP with singles that have already been handsome earners.

"That wouldn't worry me in going to buy an LP. People have the choice, they needn't buy it if they think it's unfair. Perhaps I'll suffer as a result."

Giving the listener value isn't isn't a priority then?

"I'm not sure that it isn't value, those sort of argument were never ones I was particularly swayed by. If you've already got four tracks and don't feel like shelling out for the remaining five then borrow it off someone else who has it and tape it. I don't know."

It's a subversive's excuse and I remain unconvinced. But the bulk of the record - a feasible sound not developed or prodded enough?

"The work went into getting the sound, not as an end in itself, but it's all part of learning as you go. It was a socially made record with Dave and Fred contributing as much as me. I do like discipline and I don't like being on my own. We're learning in public, testing each other out, our relationship and how far we can take it into music.

"The thing about the record is that it's a collection of songs quite independent from the ways in which they're presented. The fact that to you there is a homogeneity to the way they're presented, that goes unbroken, is something we're quite interested in fucking with when the time is right."


PEOPLE THINK I'M THE LIFE OF THE PARTY...

THE SLY, voluptuous 'The Word Girl' is proving itself to be more than soft skank ("How your flesh and blood became the word," sings Green - transubstantiation in post Marxist agnostic pop!) and it's also edging up the charts. How does he deal with the pop circus image play?

"I'm uncomfortable with that whole thing, I'm unable to work out its significance, to work out how much it really matters. But it would seem a sillier thing by far to try and deny it or wish not to be a part of it."

"I find it hard to imagine that you could have a pop music that develops people's attention span or literacy. God forbid that you should have a pop music that does try to do that... in some ways. By the same token I don't think the pop music I make damages people's attention span or literacy."

While finding the new socialist broad church of pop "positively good" he doesn't get asked for much participation in benefits, cause championing and the like.

"I have these torturously convoluted politics that no-one can fathom out. I also make inane pop records that don't begin, how is it?, 'you don't have to take this crap' (from a Style Council song)."

Maybe two LPs worth of love songs has given people a false impression.

"I can see how that looks, possibly how that is. It's a question of what you decide to address yourself to and I've had a few quite unproductive run-ins trying to write overtly... no overtly is the wrong word, literally political songs and they don't work well."

"My kind of politics is distinct from someone like Jerry Dammers (from the group Special AKA), I couldn't write a 'Free Nelson Mandela'. Whereas I feel upset about it my immediate reaction after years of thinking about it isn't righteous indignation. It's a kind of thinking about all the political mechanisms that operate to keep that thing happening."

"I don't immediately think - the terrible suffering of this man in prison. Dammer's response is a bit like the response of The Morning Star (UK newspaper) calling on the South African government or the Tories to do this or that. My response is to be reminded of all the mechanisms by which power is held internationally. It's a problem for us both, but it looks a bigger problem for me at the moment."


A PITY if this all makes Green sound a tortured soul as he's really a good lad. We continue an exchange of arguments and interests for hours after the interview, joined by Dave and Fred in a Mexican restaurant. Gartside seems to have an evangelical zeal for the rewriting of critical language. Starting to feel out of my depth I wonder if it's really that important.

"I don't think anyone is ever out of their depth, it's the whole myth of adulthood. I remember when I was young thinking adults must have the key to some special knowledge. Well here I am 29 finding out it's all bullshit."

Perhaps he'd like to becomc a critic or investigate music from cultures where tribal and spiritual rites overtake the function of language.

"Oh but I like dealing with language, I've no wish to ignore it."

The taxi came to rest outside the singer's rented flat in Islington. He'd done it again, he thought, filled another interview with philosophical waxings. Why couldn't he just answer the questions without tying the verbal knots? It must have been the lager he decided.

"I guess I fucked up that interview," he said to the journalist.

"Not at all, only a critic can fuck up in an interview and you're not one of those," replied the journalist.

At least not yet, he thought, not yet.