The Guardian newspaper - July 1999 
Interview by Michael Bracewell

Scritti Politti was the brainchild of a former student of fine art at Leeds Art School called Green Gartside, and the band quickly found its place within the pages of the music press as a group that could bring the revolutionary fervour of an artistic manifesto to the potential of pop music after punk. For Gartside, however, the process of making post-punk singles with quirky titles was to be a victim of the continual processes of self-questioning that had led to his disaffection with art school and brought him to music in the first place.

It is this same instinct for questioning that has caused Gartside to take sabbaticals from making music, sometimes disappearing for three, five, or six years at a time between records. His career has been punctuated by absences, with each absence registering a period of creative change. Having hit the temper of pure pop in the early 80s with the LP 'Cupid & Psyche 85', Gartside withdrew from making music until he produced the luscious 'Provision' in 1988. Now, after another period of extended seclusion in his native south Wales, Gartside has reunited Scritti Politti for a new album, 'Anomie & Bonhomie'.

A gorgeous montage of pop harmonies and hard-edged hip-hop, 'Anomie & Bonhomie' seems set to catch the mood of the times once more. But, despite the eagerness of critics to applaud him, and despite having had one of his songs covered by Miles Davis and another by Madonna, Gartside remains the endlessly self-questioning student of artistic practice, attempting to ward off deep-seated anxieties about his own creativity by developing a form of pop that can best be compared to the joyous, multi-layered music of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. He is also a frighteningly articulate speaker on the academic and political philosophy of artistic practice, which puts a whole new spin on his brilliance at pop. Imagine Phil Spector with the mind of Roland Barthes and you begin to get the picture.

"At art school, I basically set up my own syllabus, because it didn't seem as though anyone was particularly interested in talking about why we were all studying art or whether or not any of it made any sense. I had been attracted to Leeds as an art school because of its reputation at the time for performance art. When I first went there, they had a show on, and in the first room there was a guy who was eating until he made himself vomit, and in the next room there was someone shooting budgerigars or something. And I thought, 'Wow! Clearly this is the result of some fantastic thinking.' I imagined that these people had gone through the most extraordinary realms of reasoning before they would even consider shooting a budgerigar or making themselves sick. But sadly it wasn't so. Called upon to explain or defend themselves, they couldn't. They were just fucking around, basically - which I thought was a waste of time."

Gartside left Leeds for a squat in Camden, and Scritti Politti released its first LP, 'Songs To Remember', on the Rough Trade label. Following a horrendous panic attack during a concert supporting the Gang Of Four in Brighton, Gartside gave up touring for good and began his first sabbatical from making music. A crisis had been prompted in his creative thinking, it would seem, between the radically "independent" sound of early Scritti Politti, and a newly awakened awareness of the power and potential of black musical forms. His deep and enduring collaboration with David Gamson - who produced 'Anomie & Bonhomie' - also began.

This was the start of a pattern that saw Gartside retreat whenever he experienced a particular form of success or prominence. "I feel awful when I hear myself whingeing about things, because I have been very fortunate, I suppose. But if you wanted to map out a career, then I've probably done all of the wrong things - by not playing live, and by disappearing for years on end. At times, it's made me both unhappy and uncomfortable to be doing what I do, but here I am again. Because when I have stopped, it has been interesting to realise how much I've been denying myself a profound pleasure in making music, which I missed and wanted back."

Much of Gartside's unhappiness with a professional career in pop music has been exacerbated by the requirements of the pop industry for him to promote his product with all the more ruthlessness, because he chooses not to tour or play live. With the conversion of Scritti Politti's independent radicalism into commercially successful, intellectual pop music on 'Cupid & Psyche 85', the group were sent on a near-endless round of interviews on regional American daytime television.

"I'd wake up and find myself on a cream sofa in Portland, with two-pan-sticked people and an audience of pensioners. It wasn't the best place to talk about my record. And this was so clearly and absolutely wrong. I can remember doing American Bandstand, and being asked a question of such jaw-dropping inanity that the little voice inside me which is always wondering and questioning things was getting louder by the minute. And in the end the little voice became a deafening roar: 'What the fuck are you doing?' When I found myself caught up in the lived reality of pop as an industry, there was nothing there for me."

The intellectualism behind Gartside's approach to making music has always been couched in a playful exuberance that rescues it from earnestness. He has a formidable originality as a lyricist, managing to slip highly complex concepts into his songs under the cover of jaunty rhyme schemes and clever wordplay. Indeed, there is still a generation of music lovers for whom Scritti Politti's bouncy number from 1982, Jacques Derrida - a tribute to the French philosopher - seemed to mark that moment in the 80s when notions of high and low culture finally became indistinguishable.

"Derrida finally got to the record because some of his disciples sent him a copy, and we ended up going out for dinner in Paris. But sadly the French equivalent of the BBC got wind of this, and it can be a little off-putting trying to hold a conversation with people thrusting microphones at you. But I did ask him why he had never written about music, and he replied, in a perhaps typically Derridean way, that he felt all of his books ultimately aspired to a condition of musicality."

And yet, despite all of this, the music of Scritti Politti seldom comes across as arch or ironic. As the new songs on 'Anomie & Bonhomie' testify, Gartside can use popular music as a kind of fluorescent clay out of which to model meticulous, extraordinary music. Above all - to use the language of art schools - the songs on the LP convey an experience of listening to music that is almost tactile, with Gartside's breathless vocal style being matched by the hard-edged, sultry rapping of Mos' Def.

"This new record has a slight channel-hopping feel to it," says Gartside. "It abuts one form of material against another, without trying to play with any metaphysical nonsense about organic forms. It's a bit like one of those ice-creams that are lots of different colours."

And the thing is, when you listen to the record, you know exactly what he means.