Daily Telegraph - July 1999 
Interview by Neil McCormick

While he may not be prolific, Gartside has always managed to be interesting. He has presided over one of the most remarkable transformations in pop, taking various line-ups of his pop group from their radical origins in 1978 as avant-garde punks to a mid-Eighties incarnation as ultra-smooth, white soul boys, and now a Nineties return that blends American hip hop with the values of classic songwriting. Perhaps most remarkably, he has achieved mainstream pop success without sacrificing intellectual rigour and artistic excellence.

Scritti Politti's breakthrough album, 1985's 'Cupid & Psyche 85', brought together Gartside's infatuation for black American dance music and his long-standing fascination for art philosophy. He readily concedes that finer points of his lyrical and musical exploration of Roland Barthes's theories of surface and depth may have been lost on the record buyers who gave him number one singles in America and around the world [factually incorrect - James]. By the end of the decade (partly due to Gartside's disinclination to play live), Scritti Politti had become a one-man band. Gartside scored with two hit singles in 1991... and then nothing. Never the most visible of groups, Scritti Politti in effect disappeared. Until now.

For a man who has been missing for nearly a decade, Gartside does not seem particularly lost or reclusive. Tall and physically imposing, with his goatee beard and chin stud he appears younger than his 43 years and exudes an air of down-to-earth geniality, certainly more bonhomie than anomie. Mind you, given that he confesses to having spent the past few years in a cottage in the Usk valley, South Wales, living off royalty cheques with nothing more pressing to do than visit the local pub, it is hardly surprising that he seems relaxed. He expresses amusement when I enquire how he filled his time.

"I filled it with waves of Guinness," he declares. "There was a lot of boozing, rural walks. I was on the darts team. I learned to skateboard."

He concedes, however, that there was a darker psychological undercurrent to this apparently idyllic existence. What emerges during an extremely convivial conversation over a couple of pints of Guinness in a quiet hostelry is a portrait of a pop star with a real problem: fear of fame. Having pursued a fascination with philosophy since his days at art school in Leeds, Gartside is suspicious of the kind of mindless approbation with which pop stars are treated by their fans (hence his dislike, which verges on phobic, for performing live). Equally he admits that he is incapable of distancing himself from the kind of negative criticism routinely dished out by the pop press.


THE result is an almost paralysing sense of self-consciousness, which is not exactly helped by what his girlfriend refers to as his "studied indolence".

"Fear compounded by laziness will reduce you to complete inertia," he observes, with surprising good humour. "I guess when I was in Wales I was like an animal that lowers its metabolic rate to the lowest it needs to survive, becomes completely inert and if its brain wakes up and starts to be too inquisitive, kill it with Guinness! Basically what I was engaged in was avoidance on a massive scale."

What he was avoiding was not so much creating music as having to promote it. He was, in effect, avoiding interviews like this one. This was more than simply a reluctance to expose his "weakness or deficiences" to scrutiny, he says. "The business of talking about a record and going to radio stations and TV stations I found very distressing, to the point where I chose not to carry on."

He compares his feelings about the fame game to the North American Indians who think that every time you have your photograph taken a bit of your soul dies. "Every time I came from doing a station ID for radio WKR-whatever or miming on Dick Clark's American Bandstand, a bit of me died, definitely. I could feel it happening. It was the insincerity of the whole thing. Which is funny to me, because I'm mistrustful of the idea of sincerity, but something that brazenly and transparently bogus proved uncomfortable to the point of being soul-destroying."

For someone who evidently has what proponents of therapy would describe as certain deep-rooted "issues" to deal with, Gartside seems remarkably assured. A thoughtful and stimulating conversationalist with a delightfully elegant, almost old-fashioned turn of phrase, he seeks neither to impose nor conceal himself.

He does, however, strike a curious balance between the highbrow and the lowbrow. His conversation is dotted with philosophical references and he reveals that, since he discovered Wittgenstein in art school, he has been obsessed with the meaning of things. Yet his greatest enthusiasm is reserved for the simple pleasures afforded by Guinness, darts, skateboarding and hip hop music.

The latter informs his new album, combining with Gartside's seductive melodies, lush production and subtly complex lyrics to create a new identity for Scritti Politti, at once familiar and contemporary. Gartside comments that hip hop's essential simplicity helped him find a way back into recording, describing it as "bite-sized chunks that seemed manageable for someone who had become frightened of music". The sense of vulnerability inherent in this admission is both touching and mystifying.

Personally, I blame philosophy. Gartside creates the impression of someone who thinks too much. During his self-imposed exile from the music business he anaesthetised himself with alcohol and sought refuge in the visceral pleasures of physical activity. He confesses that he could not even enter his home studio because "that way madness lay". But when I ask what was to stop him creating music (which he describes as one of life's most profound pleasures) for himself, rather than for the public, he admits that it is a question he privately struggles to answer.

"Intellectually, I wonder what the worth of anything and everything is. So I guess, maybe, it's a very fundamental longing to find out if you're right or wrong. I don't think it's simply a question of wanting approval, because I find approval as uncomfortable as failure, but without it I don't know what life would be worth."

A new Scritti Politti album exists because, for Gartside, the joy of making music eventually outweighed the fear of having to take it out into the world. "I keep telling myself to erect some kind of space between me and the whole business," he says. "But it just occurred to me that anything you tell youself you are terribly unlikely to be persuaded of, aren't you?"

"What I need is somebody else to tell me that at the most basic level the value of my life is not tied up with the success or failure of this record. I should take my profound pleasure in the writing and recording of it then let the ****** go."