Scritti Politti magazine no. 1 - August 1985 
Compiled by Geoff Parkyn

"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 on around them. That particular aesthetic and political impulse, as well as several other aesthetic and political concerns, does make us rather peculiar."

"What I want people to receive most from the new album (Cupid And Psyche 85) 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."

"We've just got to go on and be disparaging about our contemporaries. I mean, in terms of style or music or whatever - it's all dull, total crap. The shops are all full of garbage and nobody gives a monkeys."

"I think 'Cupid And Psyche 85' is quite a funny title really. There's a myth of Cupid and Psyche. They were in love with each other but would fall out of love if either tried to find out too much about the other. Psyche can't resist the temptation to know more and Cupid flees. I think in the end they do get back together, but this whole thing of over-familiarity - or desire for it - is referred to in a couple of songs on the album. Just to call it 'Cupid and Psyche' seemed a bit fey though. So I put '85' on the end, more or less to ground it, and somehow, that made it less so!"

"People tend to have this idea that I switch styles very calculatedly and opportunistically, which couldn't be further from the truth."

"I like the idea of being a musician and, at the moment, the kind of music that interests me most to make is pop music or POPULAR music, more so than a marginal music or a music that's less well-patronised or understood or appreciated. I find marginal music a very nasty and claustrophobic area of operation where the works and their meanings are determined by their history to a point where you're really quite trapped whereas I find what's happening in the mainstream, despite its formal limitations, more open an area to work."

"The meat in muslin on the back of the CUPID AND PSYCHE album sleeve was influenced by Marcel Duchamp's cover for Vogue - A PORTRAIT OF GEORGE WASHINGTON - which was also a piece of meat wrapped in muslin. There is something gutsy and unpleasant in what Scritti Politti do, it's not at all sugary inane pop music. It has a dark side, a sinister element in some measure. Sticking motorcycle jacket studs into a piece of raw meat and wrapping it in muslin has very religious connotations, it's quite strange."

"Scritti used advertising like piracy on a graphic and conceptual level. The Rough Trade records stole from Dunhill, Courvoisier and Dior. These companies spend millions of pounds training artists and commissioning these guys, then you just come along and lift it."

"I didn't tell anybody before, but I got the idea for WOOD BEEZ from Dave and Ansell Collins' DOUBLE BARREL, 'cos at the beginning he says "W...o...o...o" and he does a spiel which I always loved. I mixed that idea with an admiration for Aretha Franklin who managed to bring spirituality to inane pop. That mixture of religious faith and pop was a critically important moment."

"I would never compromise myself... I COULDN'T. I suppose people do do it... but I don't feel I have to become a part of that, or that I want to be involved in that sort of thing in any way. I mean I wouldn't like to be thought of as completely outside everything... like an oddity. I just hope that what I do sticks and people like it."