Scritti Politti magazines no. 1 and no. 2 - August 1985
Interview by Green

G: Did you meet up together on Material?

D & F: No!

D: I had absolutely nothing to do with Material.

F: We met because my girlfriend at the time went to the same college as he did, and I was living in New York, born and raised in Manhattan. I met this guy Giorgio Gomelsky who produced the early Gong records...

D: I thought you didn't like to admit to that!

F: And he worked with The Yardbirds I think he managed the Crawdaddy Club, and claims to have given The Rolling Stones their first series of gigs. He's quite an infamous character. Anyway I met him when everyone in Material met him. I was into European music like Gong and Henry Cow and he was trying to bring all of them over to New York, and he succeeded and I got to play with Fred Firth, and ultimately we were in a band together: Fred Firth, Bill Laswell and myself, called Massacre. So David was listening to all this stuff as well and we met 'cos my girlfriend said "Oh you should meet him, he listens to all this weird stuff too". (Laughs)

D: I had these posters of this music festival...

F: Giorgio put on this one day festival.

D: Material used to be called Zu and I used to go see them in New York and I really liked them.

F: We at that time were crossing over from progressive aesthetics into dance music. It had a beat but it was a bit strange.

D: Sort of Electro-Dance-Weirdo stuff!

G: Was that through Ze Records?

F: No! That didn't come in till later. The early stuff was on this weird label called Red Records from Philadelphia, then we eventually got involved with the illustrious Celluloid Records - now one of the hippest labels on earth!

F: During that we decided we wanted to do a real straightforward dance club record with a bit more pop and that was a song called BUSTIN' OUT. Nona Hendryx sang on it and it was a minor dance floor hit in America - I think it was slightly popular here. And that was through Ze Records, not the last thing we did with them, that was another record with Nona Hendryx called IT'S A HOLIDAY which was pretty bad. That was a Christmas song. Right around that time was when I split from Material and that was the last thing I did with them. We did an album for Elektra via Celluloid called MEMORY SERVES which was the last thing I did with Material, and then I left and it became wildly successful! Which was a drag but during that time...

D: That's why they became successful because you left!

F: Yes probably! David and I were still in touch - it's chronologically pretty confusing but we were always in touch with each other. He was working in a 16 track studio. Take it away Dave!

D: I didn't have that playing in bands background.

G: So working in a studio you could put some of your own ideas together.

D: Well I got to do that, yeah.

F: He was splitting music college.

D: I wanted to be a composer. Although it got more and more depressing realising the situation for composers in America, sort of Boston audience - probably a very good reason. So I started dabbling in arty stuff. I was also very interested in engineering so I was working as an assistant in a horrible little 16 track studio in New York. They didn't do jingles. They did audio-visual presentations for businesses, which as you can imagine is really interesting! I did a year editing their sound-effects library.

F: Which means all these little teeny reels of cartridge tape.

D: I had to go through and check that each sound corresponded with the sound on the label! "Yes, that was dogs barking, definitely"! Some of them you can't tell what they are anyway! You get a car that won't get to go, it's like a '56 Chevy starting up - a '56 Ford or a Chevy! They had a 16 track machine so I got to fool around and I made a demo of a terrible cover of The Archies SUGAR SUGAR and Fred played on that 'cos I'd met him.

F: And I said "Hey this is pretty good you should take this to Ze Records!"

D: So I did. And Michael Zilka at Ze Records hated it. No actually he liked it but thought it was too twee for Ze Records, 'cos Ze always puts out things that correspond to the Ze Records sound.

G: So the whole label's got a very particular image to it.

D & F: Yeah.

D: And he wanted me to do something much tougher so I did something much tougher for him which I really didn't like. But I did meet Geoff Travis up there which was the Rough Trade connection. He put out SUGAR SUGAR and that's when I met Green on vacation over here. I wanted to see what Rough Trade looked like 'cos I had this vision of big record company stuff and all there was was this house! It wasn't at all what I had imagined - they had this dirty little office! So I met Green that way.

G: So what was Green doing at that time?

D: When I met him he'd just finished SONGS TO REMEMBER and I'd also put out the thing I did for Ze which was NO TURN ON RED. It came out on an NME compilation cassette, mainly because Ze couldn't put it out because I'd signed an American deal with Atlantic to release SUGAR SUGAR in America which meant they had an exclusivity thing. So it never came out officially. It was really stupid because Atlantic didn't do anything with the record either but... so I met Green over here. We were going to do a single together. Originally it was going to be my single with him singing on it and then it became a Scritti single - we thought it would be better as there was his audience already.

G: Was that the original SMALL TALK?

D & F: Yeah.

F: That was sort of the birth of this whole new phase. Right around this time Green started trying to find new management, and in the middle of all this he decided to leave Rough Trade.

D: So we couldn't put it out.

F: Hence the incredibly long beginning of the really long hiatus.

D: SMALL TALK went on for a long time, at least for me the first one with a pop beat, really sort of overtly arty thing that I liked. A lot of the thing was trying to find out how to do that so it went through a lot of mixes. Finally we roped Nile Rodgers in to re-mix it, which was a real experience to see how he sort of manipulated into restructuring it. That was quite fun - a real work experience, and then Green switched management, labels and all that stuff.

F: It got caught in all the legal tangles.

D: We did another thing for Rough Trade though, which never came out! Right after that we did L IS FOR A LOVER which Green wrote the lyrics to, which is another song that never came out. We made this other single and sort of carried on with Green. L IS FOR A LOVER may appear at some point.

F: That would probably be a good thing to do, it could be some interim single between this album and the next.

G: Were you spending most of your time home in New York?

D: Yeah, I'd only come over here the first time when we met Green and then we did all of SMALL TALK in New York. And then we did demo's for the Scritti stuff 'cos Green came over and stayed at my house and we worked on demo's for the first 3 songs with Arif which was WOOD BEEZ, ABSOLUTE and DON'T WORK THAT HARD then we did all that recording in New York.

F: At great expense!

D: And then I think Green kind of got tired of being in New York, and it's also... cost effective to work over here. Although I'm getting a bit tired of it!

F: But then the second phase started again back in New York and we worked all of last summer there. We did the basic tracks for HYPNOTIZE, LOVER TO FALL and A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE. Actually it was all done there except the singing on LOVER TO FALL and A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE.

D: But that was when Green really wasn't enjoying last summer in New York. He wanted to work over here, I like to work in New York and get pissed! The studios are great over here.

F: And there's so many of them. It's like one of Britain's biggest commodities is recording studios.

D: Musicians are a bit of a problem. There is a kind of American tradition of session musicians who can really really play well.

G: I suppose the difference here is everyone wants to be their own boss and do their own thing.

D: Well you come up with really good ideas over here but if you just want to rope somebody in to play on one of your ideas...

G: You need session players with the technical ability - that's all over in America really.

F: Yeah. It's like this whole weird family of session musicians on the East and West coasts and everybody knows who everybody else is and also knows how much everybody else charges! There's a weird camaraderie. There are session musicians here but not a cohesive group of people as there is in New York.

D: So that's the reason we got into machines so much. We realised we were going to have to do it all ourselves and since we couldn't play all the instruments we were going to have to get into finding ways around the problem so we picked up what we could, and flew some musicians over. We did that bit for stuff we couldn't otherwise get done but we tried to get around it. Although - I mean machines are very interesting to work with, but we wanted to work with musicians.

G: So Green wanted to come back here and convinced you to come over as well?

D: Well no it was never - it was one of those things that was just happening. Like we came over for a month to mix the stuff we'd done in America, which turned into 2 months, and then we decided "Oh we might as well finish the record over here" and that was going to be...

F: Didn't we decide that we were always going to finish here?

D: Oh were we? Oh well that was another 2 months - and now it's a year!

F: It just costs so much less money here to work.

D: And all management's here and all that stuff so it does make more sense to be based over here. There are immigration problems. I like it over here - except the weather! I came over last May - I spent 2 months of the summer in New York.

G: So that's the album completed and during this time you were already putting out completed tracks like WOOD BEEZ and ABSOLUTE?

D: And HYPNOTIZE - but we don't want to talk about that! (Laughs) I still like that one though! It's weird, I can see it's not particularly a pop single but it's a good album track.

G: Did you feel that WORD GIRL would be a sure-fire hit off of that or another risk as a single release?

F: I always thought it would be a hit.

D: It seemed to stand out on the record because it was so simple and direct. And it was the only one after the record was done that any of us could listen to! It was the only one that was not too laboured and everything went really smoothly.

F: It was sort of blessed from the beginning.

D: Nobody got uptight about it because it was a sort of a throw away track.

F: That was the kind of thing that was never ever intended to be a single because we spent the least amount of time on it.

D: We just needed an extra track - so we cobbled it together before we went to the studio and nobody worried about it.

G: So it just happened naturally?

F: Yes... Green came around to the flat we had at the time in Baker St. and we were just messing around with this first half of a verse and chorus. Then we were waiting to go to dinner and just started playing with a progression that David made up then we found ourselves in the studio and thinking what are we going to do for the end. We hadn't really intended to make another song out of this thing so we said "How about we stick that thing on the end?" So Green said fine! So there you have it. It's really enjoyable when things happen like that.

D: It's also a comment on the rest of the record.

G: How did you feel about going on Top Of The Pops? It must have been quite an experience!

D: I was pretty nervous!

F: I was scared!

D: If I didn't live here I wouldn't care but I have watched it so many weeks and laughed at the people on it, so then I was really nervous about it. We did another thing for Holland which I didn't really know anything about. It's apparently the biggest pop show there...

F: But if you don't live there you don't really have any respect for it.

G: You don't know what kind of audience to expect?

D: You sort of go with it, but it was fine.

F: The first Top Of The Pops, once it was over it was quite fun... it's quite an experience that show. You appreciate also, having been to Holland, how well Top Of The Pops is produced... the people here work hard at doing it, making it come off well. For instance in Holland they had this audience of kids come in and, they weren't really kids they were a bit older getting on for 17 or 18, and they sort of stand around looking bored, you know, sort of "prove something to me". On Top Of The Pops an hour before the show they're all playing records and playing around and the kids are all psyched up for it. In Holland they couldn't care less!

G: Where did you do the video for WORD GIRL?

D & F: Hastings and Hampstead. All the good bits were at the fun fair and the boat for which we went down to Hastings, and it was raining but it was to look as if we were on vacation.

G: I actually imagined it was somewhere around Niagara Falls - but maybe it was all the water!

F: Same idea, yeah!

D: It's to look as if we're on vacation.

F: Originally we were supposed to go to Spain which we really quite liked the idea of but money was a bit tight at the time.

D: So we went to Hastings instead!

G: What's the album that you've done with Robert Quine?

F: It's a record called Basic and it's just the two of us playing drum machine and guitars and bass. I play most of the bass on it and some guitar as well. It's not what's sort of expected of him, he's more famous for his solos.

D: Or infamous!

F: David and I have just worked on a song for Chrysalis for this girl Adel Bertei. He (Quine) plays a solo on it and we loved it but Chrysalis doesn't seem to love it so much, so it might get vetoed which is a bit of a drag. Basic was done on a Portastudio - the idea behind it was to do it at home, sort of low tech. We were really happy with it. It came out on EG Records, a nice respectable label. It's nice because it could have come out on a lesser independent, and when you get to the very teeny record companies they just don't have the distribution to get it out and EG seemed to do that well.

G: Well it's a small company but with the distribution that you need. Is it in that Eno series of Ambient sounds?

F: No it's not. It's just on Editions EG, and I don't know what Editions is. They put out so few records these days. Honestly Bryan Ferry albums are not Editions EG, it's more like a Bryan Ferry label. There's another record they put out - it was meant to be part of a series of records but there were only two. There was ours and a record by this guy Arto Lindsey - ex DNA and Lounge Lizards. An original man, a pretty nice guy. Quine and I are supposed to do another one when I get back home this fall. I think Basic broke even actually - made some money back! It got some nice reviews.
I met the EG people at a Lou Reed concert. It was Quine who plays with Lou Reed as I did. I played on his last two studio albums. Anyway he came to town and I hadn't seen Quine in ages, since last December.

G: So now you've finished the Adel Bertei thing - was that for a single or an album?

F: That was a single which is rumoured to be coming out the first week of August.

G: And now the next plan is to remix LOVER TO FALL?

D: Yes for the new single and then we go off to Japan, America and stuff.

G: Do you think it will take long to do a new album? Because you won't have all the contractual problems.

D: No - the whole record was sort of establishing how we all worked together anyway.

F: The other reason why was aside from us taking very long in the studio - is that the whole record was, as you may know, done in 3 phases. The first phase being the 3 songs with Arif Mardin and I don't know how many months went by.

D: At least 3 or 4.

F: It was at least 3-4 months before the next batch of songs started to materialise, and then we worked in New York, then we came to London and mixed and then we sort of fussed around for a few months getting things together again.

D: At that point we were really basing ourselves in the studio.

F: It definitely won't be two years before the next album.

D: We do spend more than the average amount of time recording - to be fair.

G: So, apart from Fred you're doing another album maybe, have you got any other projects coming up? Are you going to do anything, David?

D: Well no - I'm going to write some songs with some people and just maybe... I think it only helps really in the end anyway if you go off and do other things and come back...

G: With other interesting ideas?

F: Otherwise you end up in a vacuum. I might be doing the next Lou Reed album. I hear he's not in the studio at the moment. There's a movie coming up called Perfect. I don't know when it's coming out - it's out in America. I think I'm on it - I did a session for it! He had to change the words I don't know if he had to change the whole song. And then the next Quine record hopefully.

G: How does Scritti do in America? It seems very much a cult thing. We get lots of mail.

D: Well up until now it's always been 12"s, well Wood Beez was a 7". The album's just come out in America - basically they've just put it out on the shelves to combat the import market. Because there is a cult following and they don't want to lose sales, but there's no single out, and they're not going to put a single out until mid-July so at that point we'll (start to) see what happens.

G: By which time you'll be over and doing a promotional trip anyway.

F: Yeah to coincide. See there's that sort of danceable music that... 'cos of the 12"s it's sort of club orientated, and Scritti didn't have any exposure in America prior to that, or very very little.

D: It's in Billboard as a debut album!

F: See the first album never came out in America. I don't know if it's going to be released eventually. I suppose it will.