MOJO magazine - August 1999 
Interview by Barney Hoskyns

"I was up at 5am... and then ending up getting very drunk last night", he groans as he scans the menu for something inoffensive to his intestines. "I woke up with dreadful heartburn in the middle of the night, though the food on the shoot was very good." (It transpires that the catering on said shoot was done by Lee Majors, one of the young hip hop guns Green hired to rhyme on 'Anomie & Bonhomie'.)

Would that we could all look so good with a hangover at 42 as Mr Gartside. It's been a decade since I last clapped eyes on the man and he's barely aged a day. If anything, with his fine suedehead of hair, he looks younger than he did when 'Provision' came out in 1988. There aren't many fortysomethings who could get away with wearing a silver stud on a goatee'd chin. Then again, there aren't many fortysomethings who'd get to take the better part of a decade off from the arduous business of making pop music. Where has he been all this time? And how did he come to resurface in New York with a bunch of MCs for company?


ASK GREEN WHAT CONNECTION there is between the hip-hopping statesman of 1999 and the lanky Marxist art student who caught the Anarchy tour in Leeds in 1976 and he'll tell you, Not a lot. Ask him how he looks back on the youthful Gartside of two decades ago and he'll simply say that he fogives him - that when his boyhood hero Robert Wyatt came to play keyboards on Scritti's 'The Sweetest Girl', he told Green he "forgave himself for who he was back then and what he'd done previously in his life" - words Green has clearly taken to heart.

So what's to fogive?Oh, y'know, talking a lot of collectivist twaddle instead of actually painting, disappearing up his own theoretical backside with the aid of Jacques Derrida... all par for the course for that period. If Green winces at those memories more than some of us ("I do have problems with the past, though I say I discount it"), it may be because Scritti Mark II were such a radical revision of Scritti Mark I. Certainly it's no secret that Green quickly tired of the strictures and limitations of the post-punk "indie" scene. While the group's early singles and EPs on St. Pancras/Rough Trade were all of a piece with the effete, deconstructed funk of that period, the release of two superb Rough Trade singles - 1981's 'The Sweetest Girl' and 1982's 'Faithless' - showed that Scritti has outgrown the worthy low-budget mentality and were halfway to embracing the new decade's shiny pop aesthetic.

"An indie market had been identified, and certain features were required in the music that didn't really interest me any more," Green remembers. "I mean, I still love Pere Ubu and people like that, but the memory for me is of the old Rough Trade shop where all the groups put up their Top 10s. Because it was always indie stuff. And I finally heard Michael Jackson's 'Off The Wall' and thought, this is the fucking bomb! When the power of that funk and syncopation really hits you, there's no turning back."

Symbolically, the crunch for Green seemed to come one night when Scritti were supporting The Gang Of Four in Brighton. After the show, a sensation of paralysis overcame him, and he was never quite the same again. "I thought I'd had a heart attack or something," he says. "It was very, very frightening, and I had subsequent panic attacks - I'm sure now they were panic attacks. And that was pretty much decisively what made me stop trying to play live."

"Green is efl-aware to the point of it being paralysing," says David Gamson, the electro wizard who became one third of a new Scritti Politti after being introduced to Green by Rough Trade's founder Geoff Travis. "He is a little too clever for his own good. Performers can lose themselves, whereas he's just so analytical. Even his lyrics are self-referential. That's just the way he is."

When 'Songs To Remember' appeared in the summer of 1982, Green was already clear in his mind that he wanted to abandon Indieworld and record in - of all the ideologically unsound places - America. The profound contrast between a clunky early version of 'Wood Beez', originally slated for 'Songs To Remember', and the version recorded in New York with a phalanx of supersessionmen speaks volumes about the transatlantic quantum leap he proceeded to make. Trading original Scrittites Nial Jinks (bass) and Tom Morley (drum programming) for the likes of Marcus Miller, Steve Ferrone and Paul Jackson Jr, all of them working under the supervision of Atlantic legend Arif Mardin, Green emerged on t'other side of the Atlantic as a sort of missing link between George Michael and Roland Barthes. Like ABC and Heaven 17, Scritti Mark II - Green in tandem with Yanks Gamson and Fred Maher - became a popgrou-as-syndicate: part pretty-boy techies, part ironic venture capitalists, part videoage Steely Dan.

"There was definitely an ironical distance in what we did," he says. "There was that authorial intent that had a great deal of both seriousness and irony about it - neither of which were easily accessible to a listener, I don't think. I occasionally read things that talk about music in the '80s, and Tahtcher's name invariably comes into the first or second paragraph. I think simply to conflate Thatcherism with the type of pop music that a bunch of us from various places got into making then is just ludicrous, but I dare say it'll become the idiot's history of pop. It was all meant as ironic commentary in a way, and that for me had started back in the Rough Trade days when we lifted slick packaging off cigarette companies and whatever else."

'Cupid & Psyche 85' only served to refine the swooning electro-soul that 'Wood Beez' had blueprinted, and the album stands to this day as a shining beacon in a sea of vapid mid-'80s synth-pop. Yes, it was slick; yes, it was about dazzling surfaces. But how good it still sounds in 1999. Like Kraftwerk, Scritti used machines with rare delicacy and sensuousness. Inspired by such underrated twiddlers as The System, as well as by what Green calls "the masters of early '80s R&B production and arrangement" (Leon Sylvers, Quincy Jones et al), Green, Gamson and Maher fashioned a minor masterpiece.

"I could hear the difference myself, to be honest," says Green. "A lot of people used that technology in a clophoppish way. The Synclavier gave you enormous scope for articulating syncopation and timbre and colour, whereas a lot of people were just happy to have this horrible Oberheim blaring synth pad on an ugly drum-machine snare. So I was aware of that difference in what we were striving for."

"It was a really interesting time for technology," says Gamson. " 'Cupid & Psyche 85' started before there was MIDI - we didn't use it on the stuff we did with Arif - and then it came out about halfway through the recording of the album. So there was all these new ways of working, and it opened up a whole other way of being able to work. We used to talk about it being like a Swiss watch."

Among the many taken with 'Cupid & Psyche 85's slick precision was Miles Davis, who opted to cover the album's American Top 20 hit 'Perfect Way' on 'Tutu'. Green says he remembers feeling "shellshocked" at the news. Some time later, with Scritti at work on 'Provision', he rang Davis and asked him to play on 'Oh Patti'. "He turned up, just came to the studio on his own," Green says. "Gamson and I later went to his apartment at the Essex House to see him, and he was very courteous and generous. And then he would call at odd times of the day and night to see if something could be written for him. He was coherent and cogent, though he definitely had an elliptical relationship with the world as we construct it. He was kind of bonkers, but you could sit and talk to him."

Not a lot less bonkers was Roger Troutman, the Zapp frontman who added his inimitable voicebox keyboard interpolations to 'Provision's 'Boom! There She Was'. (Troutman was recently killed by his own brother in a bizarre shooting/suicide.) "If one allows oneself to use the word 'genius' just for want of a better word, then I wouldn't deny Roger that status," says Green. "He just was an extraordinary man, and very influential not just in terms of the voicebox thing but in terms of his arrangements and his way of dealing with the funk and articulating rhythm. Although it's not the business of 'Anomie & Bonhomie' to display any rhythmic sophistication as an end in itself, I do now have a much more profound understanding of rhythm from having spent time with people like Roger."

Davis and Troutman aside, the experience of making 'Provision' was not a happy one for Scritti Politti. "It was a bit of a mis-step," says David Gamson. "People were encouraging us to do the same sort of thing - now you've broken through it'll all blow up - but the second one should have been something completely different. I don't know, the life just got squeezed out of it completely. The record took a really long time to make, and it was recorded in London during the coldest winter in years." Even worse was the year of promoting the album - a year of "touring the world talking bullshit" while Gamson and Maher moped in the shadows because nobody wanted to speak to them. Although 'Provision' reached Number 8 in Britain, its stand-out tracks were offset by weak filler like 'Best Thing Ever' and 'First Boy In This Town'. Scritti were trapped in a formula and Green knew it. Nor did 1991's 'She's A Woman' and 'Take Me In Your Arms' (the latter recorded with Sweetie Irie) cheer him up much. Thus began the half-decade retreat.

Much of the '90s were spent hiding away in South Wales doing little besides ambling through fields or playing darts in the pubs of the Usk Valley. "I guess I had a vague idea that maybe I'd chill out there for a year. I think at least five years went by with me only half-noticing. I'm not being disingenuous when I say I have an extraordinary lack of sense of time. I guess there would have been a fair amount of disaffection with the business of making music, and there would have been moments of anger, sadness... but there was also a lot of fun, mainly with old friends who were able to drag me from the cottage to go out drinking. You could argue that it was something I needed to do. It certainly wasn't particularly useful or conducive to building a career."

In a pop world which is growing increasingly used to 'sabbaticals', Green's disappearance was less striking than it might have been in an earlier era. (Perhaps it also had something to do with the fact that our last high-profile sighting of him involved a rather crap version of The Beatles' 'She's A Woman' in the company of dancehall ruffneck Shabba Ranks.) Yet Scritti Politti had made some of the more graceful and intelligent electro-pop music of the reviled '80s, and they were much missed.

"I really didn't speak to anybody in that period," he says. "I'd split up with my manager, and I'd split up with my girlfriend. I lived alone and severed all ties. I can be a terrible lazy man, so I was quite happy to do nothing for a long time. But always somewhere in the back of my mind was the idea that I would make another record, even through the times when I felt terribly unhappy with my history in the industry."

Eventually the day came when Green mastered his fear of entering the music room he'd set up in his whitewashed cottage. And when he did, he knew it was time to incorporate the influence of hip hop in which he'd steeped himself for the better part of two decades. Far from writing songs that reflected his bucolic environment (a la Robert Wyatt, for instance), he instinctively returned to the sounds of the American street which had so intoxicated him on his first visits to New York.

"i'm mistrustful of the idea that music easily or naturally expresses environment or place or even disposition," he says. "I'd wake up and wander round the churchyard and then I'd come home and rock EPMD, and that was perfectly appropriate - or maybe the incongruity was perfectly appropriate. I admit that there's an enormous unresolvedness at the centre of this - well, it doesn't have a centre. A sense of identity and place have successfully eluded me to date, so it doesn't feel that odd."

Green's reawakened zest coincided with his sister's suggesting in 1997 that he move back to London and take over her flat in Dalston: "I really couldn't think of a good reason not to. I had made these trips up to London to buy hip hop and dancehall records, and blasting out those records in my little cottage was an essential part of staying alive." He was less than enthralled by what was happening in Britain. "Acid was a culture that I was neither in a position to enjoy nor particularly interested in. It was too four-on-the-floor for me, it wasn't funky. So I stuck with hip hop, and subsequently with what followed grunge, which was more interesting to me. I'd become pretty interested in skate culture by that time, and actually did skateboard myself, despite my advancing years. It was another taste of stuff from America."

As his recruitment of Lee Majors and Mos Def - the latter one half of the highly-regarded Black Star - suggests, Green is passionately evangelistic about hip hop. "The scant level of approval of, or interest in, hip hop amongst a lot of people continues to surprise and disappoint me," he says. "I just feel like saying, wake up, get with the fucking programme! I think it's important to recognise that hip hop has a historical and cultural status that's undeniable, unavoidable, and as big and as strong as any other genre of music. The Beatnuts are as important an influence on my life as The Beach Boys."

"Green's a very astute observer of what's going on in pop culture," says Gamson. "He's very good at picking out talent. We had gotten a record from a rap band that didn't do that well, and there was a guest thing by Mos Def on one track, and Green was like, 'Who's this guy?' Mos Def sort of blew up after we'd connected with him." If Green has any regret about working hip hop into the Scritti sound, it's simply that he didn't do it earlier. He blames his failure of nerve on a certain uneasiness about tackling this paramount black form - an uneasiness dispelled by the time he began writing the songs for 'Anomie & Bonhomie'.

"Obviously as outsiders, if you can put it that way in the relationship to any kind of music - I think it was Beefheart who said music was 'free where I get it' - we were very concerned with the politics of dealing with all of that," he explains. "Finally I resolved any problems about political correctness, and it was just time to do it. And provided one is continually reflective about hip hop and one's relationship with rappers, then it's cool to do."

Which rather begs the question: how does a tall, cerebral, vaguely posh-sounding Welshman enter into any kind of realtionship with an African-American rapper? And how, for that matter, did Green Gartside manage to earn the trust of such black performers as Shabba Ranks and Roger Troutman - not to mention Miles Davis?

"It's the telephone, it's that simple," Green says with a shrug. "You just, you know, ring people up. Or you find intermediaries, people you know who might know somebody in their world - it's chains of communications of various lengths and links. You get in touch and you make enquiries and you extend feelers and you send tapes of backing tracks...and if you and the music pass the evaluative standards that are in place and people's heads are nodding and you're not obviously an asshole... I'm surprised people don't do it more often."

"I won't pretend that it isn't fraught with a certain awkwardness for everybody. I mean, they haven't met people like me before, and when they roll in with their posse, they're people from a different culture and you have to find a common way of talking about the subject matter of the song or whatever, and you have to hang and you have to make it work... there's definitely that tentativeness between us all. From their point of view, it's totally bugged... jeez, why would he ring? What's the deal here?"

What is the deal here? And how well does 'Anomie & Bonhomie' stand up as a synthesis of '90s ghetto wordsmithery and compressed '80s funk? Do tracks like 'Tinseltown To The Boogiedown', 'Smith 'n' Slappy' and 'Die Alone' even come close to bridging the cultural gulf between Harlem and Cardiff?

'Tinseltown To The Boogiedown' itself is a gem, the play between Green's Garfunkelish purr and the raw rhymes of Mos Def and friends creating a scintillating pop-hop hybrid. But the album's other highspots tend to be those which most recall the Scritti of the last decade: the tingling 'First Goodbye', up there with such spun-sugar ballads as 'Overnite' and 'A Little Knowledge'; 'Mystic Handyman', a jollied-up Jamaican number recalling the wondrous 'The Word Girl'; and the closing 'Brushed With Oil, Dusted With Powder', a leaf from the book of Paddy McAloon (Prefab Sprout), one of Green's few real '80s peers.

Conspicuous by their absence are the hyper-syncopated keyboards that graced the songs on 'Cupid & psyche 85': thanks to a strict 'no-keyboards' policy that reflected an allergic reaction to the '80s, 'Anomie & Bonhomie' is surprisingly heavy on guitars, many of them played by Green himself.

"Being on my own had forced me back to my own resources in terms of learning technology and thinking about arrangements and how to get away from the '80s thing," he says. "You know, how was I going to make all this sound euphonious to me? At the end of it I decided I didn't want any keyboards. There wern't really any keyboards on any of the music I'd been listening to since 'Provision'. Hip hop doesn't feature keyboards per se, and nor did whatever guitar music that I'd finally got back into."

'Anomie & Bonhomie's no-keyboards/sequencers mindset is ironic considering the involvement in the album of Gamson, whose intricate, meticulous Synclavier programming had been such a defining signature of Scritti masterworks like 'Small Talk' and 'Absolute'. As it turns out, Gamson and Green had fallen out after 'Provision' and hadn't talked for several years. With Green in hibernation, and drummer Fred Maher producing the likes of Lou Reed in New York, Gamson had taken an A&R job with Warner Bros in LA. (Among the artists he produced there was the formidable Me'Shell NdegeOcello, whose bass playing features prominently on 'Anomie & Bonhomie'.)

"I wrote Gamson a letter, and he flew over to London to see me," says Green. "And now we're much stronger and deeper friends than we've ever been before. This time the division of labour was much more clear: I'm staying this side of the glass, you're staying that side of the glass. If you say I've sung the vocals enough times, then that's fine. Gamson was pretty insistent that Me'Shell would be good, but I wasn't sure she would get with it. There was a panicky moment where I could easily have left the dinner table and jumped on a plane, but we got in the rehearsal rooms and battled it out. When we needed a third guitar, Wendy Melvoin came in. Me'Shell and I had our clashes, both being fairly headstrong people, but Wendy and Abe Laboriel Jr (drummer), were very calm and civilising influences."

"This was a much more enjoyable experience than even 'Cupid & Psyche 85', because there was no big drama," says Gamson. "There was no pressure to follow anything, whereas even 'Cupid & Psyche 85' was coming off the indie thing. Now it's like, what's he doing even making a record?! So it could be anything it wanted to be. Working with Green is always challenging because he'll always come up with some idea that's like, You just can't do that.... and then the thrill is figuring out how to do that."

"I do feel like this record, more than the other two, is really Green's vision. I also have to says there's absolutely no consensus on the album: 10 different people with 10 different opinions about it. Personally I think it's totally weird, and I have no idea where it fits in. But I don't think Green cares about that."

So does another year of "touring the world talking bullshit" beckon for Green? And can we expect another long sabbatical in the first decade of the new millennium?

"I pray not," he says. "I hope that enough problems were sorted out by either directly addressing them, avoiding them or whatever... and that enough resolutions were come to and scores settled and feelings overcome."

"I'd really like to continue making music. I'm not quite sure what opportunities will come my way to do that, or whether they'll be denied me, but I'll certainly make a far greater effort to stay with it rather than buckle and disappear."