Sunday Times magazine - July 1999 
Interview by Mark Edwards

"It... er..." He looks round the room for inspiration, before resuming eye contact. "It sucked," he says.

Here's the first surprise. Green is not the earnest theorist that he used to be. He's just a regular guy. As regular, that is, as anyone can be who makes two perfect pop albums then disappears for the best part of 11 years.

The second surprise is just how much Green hated the period of his 1980s success, when a string of hits including 'Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)', 'Absolute', 'Hypnotize', 'Perfect Way' and 'Oh Patti (Don't Feel Sorry for Loverboy)' meant that his blue-eyed soul sound was rarely off the radio or out of the charts.

"Being a pop star is embarrassing," he says. "It's demeaning. It's bogus. I can't think of a good word to say for it, really. It's just a terrible, terrible thing. I was fascinated with pop music. I wanted to get close to it," he continues. "But when I did get close to it, it stank."

This distaste for pop stardom is at the root of Green's long disappearance from the music industry. After finishing the promotional tour for his 1988 album, 'Provision', Green simply walked away from the business, returning to live in a cottage near his parents' home in Wales. Aside from a couple of singles in 1991 (both cover versions), he hasn't been heard from since. A new single, 'Tinseltown To The Boogiedown', breaks the silence tomorrow. A new album, 'Anomie & Bonhomie', follows a week later.

So what has he been doing for the past 11 years? "That's the hardest one to answer," Green says, with a sigh. "I don't really know what I did. I remember being thoroughly fed up with the business of making music and all that went with it, and severing all my ties with friends and musicians. Back in Wales, I was in touch with a few old schoolfriends whose capacity for sloth and booze exceeded my own - which is saying something. In that congenial atmosphere, a whole number of years ticked by, and when I next looked at my watch... oh s***. I know it sounds unlikely, but I genuinely didn't feel the time passing."

Successful songwriters, of course, have one advantage that the rest of us don't: the royalty cheque. Although Green's behaviour at first seems odd, given the certain knowledge that money would be coming in regularly, many of us might also opt for such a lifestyle. And anyway, presumably he continued to create, to write?

"No, no," Green admits. "I took all my gear to Wales, and set it up in one of the bedrooms. But I just used to tiptoe past the room, such was my loathing of music. The idea of me making music made me sick." While memories of promotional duties - sitting "on a beige sofa with two make-up-encrusted Americans sipping coffee" - fill Green with dread, his dislike of the music business infected his opinion of his work as well. "I always dislike the music I make," he says. "I'd rather sit in the corner and stick pins in my eyes than be invited to listen to my back catalogue... small as it is."

At this point, it may be useful to remind ourselves that Green's back catalogue is actually phenomenal. After a shaky start, Scritti Politti announced their pop potential with the 1982 album 'Songs To Remember'. The two albums that followed - 'Cupid & Psyche 85', and 'Provision' - should, quite simply, be in any pop fan's collection. With a meticulous attention to detail reminiscent of late Steely Dan, Green and his cohorts - Fred Maher and David Gamson - produced two impeccable collections of pop-soul.

Now, finally, he's back with more, and with a new sound informed by hip-hop - the genre that Green says "kept him alive" during his extended break. He made regular trips to London to buy the latest hip-hop records. Finally realising that "I was denying myself one of the few profound pleasures that I had ever discovered - the actual making of music", he began to put together his own beats in the "dreaded room upstairs".

Now the songs he worked on in that room have made it onto record, but they won't make it to live performance because Green suffers from stage fright. "It's a catalogue of woe isn't it?" he laughs. "Oh, I didn't like that because it was horrible and I don't like this because it's frightening. I'm aware what it sounds like. The greater part of me really wants to say 'Shut the f*** up', slap me round the back of the head, and say 'You horrible, whingeing, ungrateful brat of a man'."

The new single reveals that Green has lost none of his melodic talent: one listen to the divine chorus and you're hooked. But that's the only place you'll hear Green on the track. In a neat variation of current rap practice, Green has treated himself almost as a pop sample on his own track, with rappers Mos' Def and Lee Majors taking up most of the vocal duties.

The new album is a stunning comeback. Eschewing keyboards in favour of a live guitars-bass-and-drums band (plus beats, of course), the sound is tougher than before on the faster tracks, but Green's voice is as pure and beautiful as ever on gorgeous ballads such as 'First Goodbye', 'Born To Be', and 'Brushed with Oil', 'Dusted With Powder'.

And here's another surprise. Green actually admits to liking his voice. Well, almost. "I still would rather listen to anybody else but me," he says. "But I no longer have to leave the room during playbacks, which I used to do. Actually, I don't like it, I've just got over hating it."

Green is smiling when he says this. But I still want to have one more go at piercing his seemingly impregnable armour of low self-esteem. He may not like his distant back catalogue, but with the pleasure of making this album fresh in his memory, does he still like it?

"I'm just looking the other way. I'm distracting my gaze," he says. "It's not my business to like it or otherwise, or to know whether it's succeeded or failed. What am I going to do? Sit at home and listen to it and say 'Good work, Green'?"

Maybe just once, I suggest.

"Perhaps I wish I could," he says. "But by the time you've finished it, and listened to it a million times in the studio, it could be anything. Making music is a process in which you grab your fleeting pleasures as they go by."

He smiles once more. "This is whingeing again, isn't it?"