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Press Information Songs To Remember Rough Trade cassette interview Plays 'Asylums In Jerusalem' 'Asylums In Jerusalem' there, taken from the debut album by the British band Scritti Politti. Now the driving force behind Scritti Politti is Green, who writes and sings all the music. How would you describe the sort of songs you write for someone who's not familiar with the work of Scritti Politti? They're essentially pop songs and, for the moment, drawing heavily on soul music and reggae - particularly lovers' rock. However they're essentially English. I think they're very English - I don't attempt to mimic Jamaicans or Americans from the southern states - and the other sort of big influence on them is British pop from the 60s... from my childhood. And so, I don't know, it all mixed together rather eclectically. It's unusual to find someone who actually likes to draw from British 60s pop because a lot of so-called 'serious' musicians have seen it as a dirty word really, haven't they? Yes it has. I think it's much maligned, pop music, no-one to date has properly sat down and attempted, not to look at it so much sociologically, but to have thought of it analytically and to have thought of its political significance, which given how important it痴 been to all young people in the past 25 years is really undeniable, and its force, its passion, its strengths do need examining... ought to be taken more seriously. So I for one am quite happy to own up to being influenced heavily by pop, and consider myself to be making pop music, and consider that to be a fairly serious endeavour. There's quite a broad range of influences there. What sort of music do you listen to yourself? Erm, a broad range of music. At the moment largely British pop from the 60s and American soul and funk music, perhaps predictably, and reggae. Before punk, which really did change my life, I used to listen to jazz. I kind of went very quickly from the Beatles, you know, to all points East (progressively left-field music) to such that just before punk came along - the first rock music I really liked - I was listening to New York loft jazz: Anthony Braxton... the weirder the better as far as I was concerned. And punk came along and saved me from perhaps a history of obscurity. You mention punk there. I mean there's very little open punk influence in the new album, 'Songs To Remember', that I can spot. How has it actually affected what you do? I think if it weren't for punk I wouldn't have started in the first place because I'm essentially a non-musician and remain almost willfully so. Its influence is there as a motivating force in ever getting round to doing anything and its still present in the political edge that, if you listen carefully enough, you'll find sprinkled throughout the LP, although less polemically (perhaps less cogently) than was the case in the punk heyday - '77/'78. I guess the fact that punks listen to reggae as much, down at the 100 club and on Neal Street, the rest would listen to reggae perhaps as often as they listen to the indie/punk records. So the reggae influence is still there but punk's something that you tire of fairly quickly, I think. Its influence is there in the fact that the music's still a little rough around the edges but not too worried about that. Its still a lot to do with learning in public, almost, and so these are pop songs whose means of production, if you like, are almost audible... my first batch of pop songs. Going back to one of the first songs I remember hearing from Scritti Politti, which was 'The Sweetest Girl', that appeared on the Rough Trade cassette (the C81 cassette) last year. Now that seems to be a sort of classic love song but I understand that there's perhaps a little more to it than that. Well there are some lines that would appear a little uncomfortable
were they to crop up in any other classic love song, to do with the
vagaries of science and politics. It is a love song but I'm interested
in the way that the language of love songs, particularly in American and
West-Indian music, has almost become a cipher for, if you like, a kind
of sometimes desperation, a kind of struggle, a kind of hope, a kind of
loneliness, a strength... and I mean I understand the language of pop
and the language of lovers' songs to have had that worth and that weight
in those contexts. And I'm interested in that so I'll use them
intentionally, I'll pick up on them and twist that language... that very
sugary language, very often. The track 'The Sweetest Girl' - as the first piece from Scritti Politti to reach most people's ears - is rather a strange choice in a way because it's not totally representative of what you do musically. Isn't it? [Both laugh] Well I for one was quite surprised to hear the rest of your music after hearing that. Do you think perhaps it was the wrong thing to release first? No I don't think it's the wrong thing. I think the LP is very disparate in its influences and the things it attempts, and it isn't... expressive of a style that dominates the music. But it is expressive and symptomatic of an approach and a sort of feeling for melody and perhaps passion that a number of my contemporaries are sadly neglecting at the moment. Well let's move on to the band's name. You致e mentioned politics a couple of times up to now... where did that come from? "Scritti Politti"... it's a bastardisation of the Italian for "political writings", which I think is "scritti politichi" but I dropped the "tichi" bit because "Scritti Politti" sounds more like "Tutti Frutti", and I love the liberties that people take with language in pop music. I think that's one of things that indexes it to madness, and indexes madness to a kind of decline of... I don't know, a kind of mild form of anarchy, really, and those things are interesting to me. And the sexuality of rhythm as well. Rhythm is something that features very heavily in your music, in fact. I'd like to play 'Jacques Derrida' from the new album and that's a 'beaty' sort of piece. [laughs] Yeh, yes it is. It's split into two parts: the first part is a kind
of funny fusion between a soul chorus, a Beatles-type strum-along thing
with a country and western back beat, and then slips into a mutated funk
at the end, and that might be as good an indication of what makes up the
Scritti style as anything, I suppose. The lyrics, however are a little
a-typical again; Jacques Derrida being a French philosopher who's still
alive and who's... I think he'd love pop music if he weren't so old and
French and bourgeois, because he understands the connection between
politics and madness, and madness and rhythm, and the disruption of
language. And this song is a kind of affectionate nod to him and a
parody, really, of my interest in him. Let痴 go back to the beginning of Scritti Politti's history. How did you start off? Well Tom (Morley) and I were disaffected art students in the north of England, and Nial [pronounced Neil] - who was cajoled into being a bass player when he'd never seen the instrument before in his life - was an old school friend of mine who was unemployed at the time. And we saw the 'Anarchy In The UK' tour come to Leeds Polytechnic, I remember, and that was it. It was rather a 'road to Damascus' type thing and the scales fell from our eyes... or did we get blinded? I don't know, whatever happens on the road to Damascus. Anyway it happened and a group was formed, initially called 'The Against'. We made a ghastly din at a pub in Leeds, sort of suitably togged up in bondage trousers and the rest of it, and took it all painful seriously and could scarcely play. And those were our humble beginnings... great fun, it was great fun. So now we exist as an 8-piece really with three girl singers, saxophone player, synthesizers, the usual thing. But, I mean, we have learnt to play an awful lot better in the past two years and take it quite seriously now, whereas once we would have poo-pooed musicianship. I think times have changed and you either learn how to do it properly or you don't bother. Well working as an 8-piece... how is that actually run? Is it a sort of co-operative of musicians because I get the impression that you seem to be the sort of figure-head for the band now? Yes. We used to make all sorts of professions, claims to being a co-operative unit in the old Scritti and, I can speak from experience, that's completely dysfunctional and that really doesn't work like... we used to live like Marxist monkeys in a squat in Camden Town, and with 15 people all having claims to doing something essential in the group where, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. I always did write and arrange the songs, and I still do and I think it's fairly important particularly when you've got a group as unlikely as the existing Scritti, you know - people from such varied musical backgrounds - that I do rule it sort of quite firmly but gently. So I do take all of the decisions on the group's behalf. You actually seem to becoming rather a mysterious character, really, in terms of the press and that sort of thing, and being the figure-head of Scritti Politti. How do you see your image as a rock musician or star or whatever? I don't know, not a rock musician. I'd much rather be a pop musician and I'd much rather, if there is to be a route to success, I'd rather it be the pop route to success as opposed to the four years gigging round nasty little clubs in Britain and waiting 'til someone finally takes notice of you. I don't know about mysterious... I don't feel to be at all mysterious, you know, I do all the right things: I appear in all the suitably light-hearted pop-y magazines and I enjoy that, you know. I enjoy that nowadays more than I do talking to the dire young graduates from the weekly rock press, so I'm quite happy to embrace pop stardom in inverted commas, in as much as it's an index of being popular and making popular music, I suppose. You mentioned listening to New York loft jazz and that sort of thing. Now there's a track called 'Rock-A-Boy Blue' on the album which has... it ends with a nice sort of slapping acoustic [Green says "double bass"] sound, yeh. Tell me about that one. Well that... I was trying not to give vent to any of the jazz
influences in the making of that record because I wanted to move as far
away from a marginal history as possible and make a very pop-y music.
But we asked an African double bass player called Mgotse Mtauley [I'm
unsure of surname spelling - James] to come in and play some double
bass, and he got fairly carried away with the tune and continued playing
after we'd all finished and sort of packed up and gone to the pub or
something - [says lightly] it's not quite like that - and he played a
marvellous solo that - I suppose in as much as I do still listen to a
lot of jazz, I wouldn't claim to be an expert or an aficionado or
anything - it was so gorgeous, his playing, that it just had to stay
there and I feel good about it now because I feel justified in going on
to explore... I relaxed a bit and can explore jazz a little more, I don稚
have to be quite so piously an ambassador for pop as I felt I had to be.
So it's nice, it does have a jazz influence there. Up to now the music of Scritti Politti's been extremely studio based. I don't think you've actually done any gigs, have you? No, not in this form. That's because gigs scare me to death, for a start, and they are becoming less significant as a means to getting your music across. And also with a group of eight, logistically, it becomes quite complicated until you've made something of a name for yourself and can be offered the right sort of money to go out and do it. Now we have, those offers are coming in left, right and centre, and the rest of the group are sort of nagging at me to go out and do it. So I think before the end of the year we will see the mammoth Scritti Politti roadshow going about its business in public, in Britain. I'm actually beginning to look forward to that very much. What about abroad? Any chance of touring there? Yes, yes. This is terrible, people always say go and play abroad first and then get all your mistakes done in front of European audiences but that's really not fair. No, we will definitely be going to play in Europe and America next year. I'm quite firmly committed to that and I'm looking forward to it. Now what about writing because the album that's just being released is not that new in terms of Scrit's music, is it? What's been happening recently? Well since then I have been writing a lot of songs, a lot more. You get better at writing, obviously, and you gain studio experience... you reflect on some of the things that didn't work too well. So I've got a stockpile of somewhere between 40 and 80 songs that I'm fairly desperate to record, that I think are gonna be marvellous, marvellous. Especially because the group's developed such a cohesion now and everybody's so used to each other, and there's a willingness on everybody's part to chip in and help so it's gonna be good. Well to turn back to the new album then, 'Songs To Remember', erm... what sort of sound were you aiming for in the studio when you were working on the... Well the first time I wanted to make sure we had fun doing it because that was something that had been denied me with the very studious, non-musician Scritti before. And the second consideration was that we did come up with some sort of passable fusion of soul and gospel, which I relied on the girl singers for providing. A kind of slightly hap-hazard funk that I relied on Joe the bass player to come up with because he's quite brilliant. And a mish-mash of things like drum machines, sort of Kraftwerk influenced things... I don't know it's just, again, an expression of a very sort of Catholic and eclectic taste done happily on a budget in a little studio. It's simply that. I think it work very well. There's a final track from the album, 'Songs To Remember'. Let's listen to 'Sex' which has an intriguing title if nothing else. [laughs] Well yes, that is a fairly old song but I thought it was about time
that people stopped beating around the bush - or "bushing around
the beat" as I've put it in the first verse - when singing about
sex in disco songs of the sort of rather clumsy aphorisms and analogies.
And so this is an out and out kind of a hymn to sex, and it's good fun.
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