In Promised You A Miracle, Andy Beckett’s fine cultural and political study of the UK between 1980 and 1982, the author cites Scritti Politti as an example of how the onset of Thatcherism had caused previously left-wing punks to give up their idealism in favour of a “new glossiness and careerism”. He offers a quote from Scritti frontman Green Gartside by way of example, from a 1981 interview: “What has meaning is what sells.”
Admittedly, that quote is rather asking for it. However, you only have to spend a few minutes in Green’s company to realise that the idea he turned from scratchy post-punk to pop out of commercial opportunism is patent nonsense. He agonises even now as he looks back on the transformation he made, not because he thinks he made the wrong decision but because he weighs every word he uses, every opinion he asserts. He hesitates, qualifies, often referring to a binder of notes he has made over the years in search of terminological exactitude, even though he believes there are no such things as fixed meanings, that all is “provisional”.
Gartside is currently overseeing the vinyl reissues of the three albums he made for Virgin: Cupid & Psyche 85 (1985), Provision (1988) and Anomie & Bonhomie (1999). It is, one imagines, an emotionally fraught process for him.
“Terribly fraught,” he nods. “It’s not only the anxiety about the value of my work but with the passing of time, not having listened to it for years. But also, there is an emotional history attached to all of that. It’s not like I have awful memories of making those records. But by the end of making Provision I did end up in a not very good place. I find myself ill-suited to the job.”
Success brought little joy for Green, causing him to recoil more than once into lengthy, recuperative sabbaticals in Wales. Pop was only a place he arrived at out of a deeply considered compulsion. “The only art I was interested in when I was at art school was art about art, conceptual art,” he offers. “That habit stayed with me when I started making music – and that was before the rise of that institutional, academic way of looking at popular culture.”
Scritti were certainly not the only group in the early 80s to have made the trek from punk-ish origins to knowing, entryist strategy: to enter the pop charts in the hope of perfecting the medium. The Human League did so, as did Associates, ABC and Simple Minds, all of them reaching a zenith in 1982, the year Scritti also released their excellent Songs To Remember, including The “Sweetest Girl”, which had first featured on the NME’s C81 cassette. For those accustomed to the deconstructed, calculated shambles of their early singles like Opec/Immac and Hegemony, it represented an astonishing, honeyed leap into the realms of ultra-listenability.
Green explains the transition: “I thought that a music that disrupted the conventions of pop music, the conventional structures of song, harmony and rhythm, was a music more in keeping with the ideas of Derrida, Lacan, Foucault… a world of unstable meanings, schizophrenic rebellion against capitalism – they were the ideas around [back then], which held sway with my bandmates who largely came from a Marxist background. And there did seem to be a sonic correlate between a scratchy, dissonant guitar music that wasn’t too macho, and an anti-professionalist, anti-capitalist position. There was the idea of the de-centred subject, the individual in crisis… but then, it occurred to me that Michael Jackson was no more a centred and unified subject than Captain Beefheart.”
The remainder of the class of ’82 never quite recaptured the heights they achieved that year – they faltered, split up, went stadium rock. Green, however, found his zest for pop and its manufacture redoubled as he became increasingly exposed to contemporary R&B via his sister’s record collection during a period of recuperation in Wales. This listening binge ranged from Michael Jackson and The Whispers to early hip-hop (I first learned of Run-DMC in a Scritti interview) and the electro-funk of The System. He wanted somehow to realise a music in the same idiom. The early band members having fallen by the wayside, he met David Gamson, the man responsible for the startlingly brilliant sidewalk slab of NY funk, No Turn On Red.
“It was music I would never have thought it possible to make unless Geoff Travis of Rough Trade hadn’t met David Gamson on a trip to New York,” he notes. “Cupid [& Psyche] is the work of David Gamson and myself. Geoff knew I’d ‘discovered’ black music. But contemporary R&B wasn’t sold, or discussed, at Rough Trade.
“Geoff took me to see Prince’s first London gig,” he continues. “I got some of the first hip-hop imports and pretty soon I was out in New York meeting Gamson.
His passions were funk and R&B, but he also loved the Canterbury scene, all of which appealed to me, too: Kevin Ayers, etc. We joined up and then Bob Last became our manager – he was managing ABC [and The Human League/Heaven 17] as well. When I said it was a dream of mine to make music with [R&B producer] Arif Mardin he said, ‘All right, I’ll call him up.’ And I said, ‘You can’t just ring up Arif Mardin!’ But Bob was fearless, adventurous, as well as being interested in the same ideas as me, politically and philosophically. And he had the nerve to open doors for me, doors which led me to spaces I felt terribly ill-equipped to deal with.”
By the mid-80s, when the idealism of “new pop” (a term coined by NME journalist Paul Morley and ascribed to this new, bright, entryist post-punk pop) seemed all but collapsed, the notional genre achieved a pinnacle of success via Cupid & Psyche 85. Lyrically, songs like The Word Girl, Absolute and Perfect Way dealt in the ostensible bubblegum terms of boy/girl romance, only to amount, on deeper reading, to a philosophical meditation on the futility of pursuing the absolute, of perfection in a world of unstable and shifting meanings.
Yet musically, it seemed to defy that in its sheer immaculacy. Brought to a sky-high polish by Mardin and featuring an unmatched squadron of session musicians including Marcus Miller alongside Gamson and former Material drummer Fred Maher, it remains an impossible studio confection, a dazzlingly funky, synthetic construction in the depths of whose gleaming mirror surfaces the listener is invited to revel and fall through.
“Lyrically, I didn’t want to do the ‘clever’ lyrics of the time – that school of considered, sharp, not necessarily confessional or narrative writing. My head was full of the delight in the banal – which originally means ‘communal’ – of surfaces and depths. One thing Theodore Adorno stressed was the vacuity and banality of pop. But these were things I found powerful. Empty of what? Devoid of whose idea of originality?
“Musically, there was new technology,” he furthers. “There was the Midi sequencer… and a search for that electro precision. David’s dad had been an associate of Leonard Bernstein – he had acquired a modular synthesizer very early on – so he was exposed to that from an early age. And suddenly, having signed to Virgin, we had the budget to spend time and money in studios well-equipped enough to facilitate things we wanted to try and musicians skillful enough
to execute the music. All the musicians I worked with loved Arif because he treated musicians with great kindness and civility.
So if we suggested we’d love Marcus Miller to play bass, Marcus Miller would come and play bass.”
Green himself, however, found himself overawed by the high-end New York studios, their elite production teams and session players. “Entering into the studio with Arif Mardin, I was terrified,” he admits. “Plus, I was very frightened of singing with Arif. I have a small and quiet voice which I was determined to make smaller and quieter, but he was very patient with me. I didn’t do any harmonies on that record. What was I thinking? Harmonies are what I’m really good at. And my vocals are mixed quite low, because I kind of wanted to sink back into the syncopation… I felt wholly out of my depth. I was with experts talking in a language I didn’t fully understand – like a lot of bands, we thought we knew what funk was but didn’t really understand [its mechanics] at all. But as the technology developed that gave you more of an opportunity to fanny about, sample in milliseconds. It was a vastly bigger sound palate and a very time-consuming business.”
It seems odd to think of Gartside enduring such agonies, such doubt, when there is a dimension to his music – the melody, the intrinsic beauty of his vocals – that feels effortless, as natural as blue eyes. “Melody was never the problem,” he says. “Maybe there is some sort of British pop sensibility; mine aren’t bluesy melodies. And the vocal stylings and mannerisms of R&B… I drifted towards that style from having previously sung in a London accent, which felt like an ‘honest’ voice, but what was it honest about?”
Three years would pass during which Gartside and Gamson found themselves writing songs for other R&B artists such as Chaka Khan (Love Of A Lifetime) and Al Jarreau (L Is For Lover). By Provision, Green seemingly hadn’t moved with the times, still occupied with neo-funk constructions when the idea of white fixation on black music felt a bit overplayed. Gamson has admitted he felt they became a bit lost in the production process and “didn’t see the forest for the trees”.
If it felt dated then, however, Provision feels timeless today, songs like Boom! There She Was and, of course, Oh Patti (Don’t Feel Sorry For Loverboy) not fading but shining harder. Green was attracting bigger name collaborators: Zapp’s Roger Troutman and, on Oh Patti, Miles Davis, who in his later years divined a subtle strain in glossy 80s pop (he covered Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time, Michael Jackson’s Human Nature and Scritti’s Perfect Way) to which he could relate. But did Green not feel intimidated by his august presence?
“It’s funny because Miles was a very anxious man himself,” he remembers his meeting with the jazz legend at the Hit Factory in New York. “When he came to the studio I thought he might roll in mob deep, but he didn’t. He was tentative, thoughtful, someone who spent a long time at the piano, analysing the track he was playing on, asking questions, playing nervously with his hairnet. He was not in any sense intimidating. Just the idea of being that close to Miles Davis was pretty terrifying: he’d said disparaging things about white musicians; he had a fearsome reputation. And Marcus, who had worked with him, had heard some pretty hairy Miles stories. But when I went to his apartment he placed a lot of his artwork on the floor, wanting to show it off – he had a wall-full of cassettes of live shows he’d recorded. He genuinely responded positively to things that he liked. It certainly wasn’t bandwagon-jumping. He was still living music, in the same way that Roger Troutman was alive with music: he was the funkiest man on earth.”
By now, however, Gartside found dealing with the trappings of the pop world (no inverted commas) more than irksome. “I hated it,” he admits. “I thought I’d like it – I did do a fair bit of hobnobbing. I was friendly enough with George Michael and Robert Palmer to go to dinner with them, but I never felt wholly comfortable when it came to the promotional side. I never felt worthy of the attention – TV, radio – and when it did happen, you just felt like the next guy on
the couch, the next product. There was such a depth of bullshit, particularly in the US, I wasn’t prepared for. As well as not being prepared for the separation of black and white music there.”
What’s more, he felt unable to take his work on the road. “Because we felt we weren’t able to make the music live, because of how technical it had been – it was studio work, assembling a recorded piece of sound,” he explains. “Making it happen live seemed too terrifying to us. We were all too frightened.”
After a couple more one-off efforts such as a cover of The Beatles’ She’s A Woman, Green relapsed again, exhausted and disillusioned, into a lengthy hiatus. He returned in 1999 with Anomie & Bonhomie: pointedly different to its predecessors, featuring rap collaborators such as Mos Def and chanelling three major 90s musical currents: hip-hop, trip-hop and grunge.
“Crikey, that sounds horrendous,” he says today, laughing. “Well, one reacts to [the times]. I’ve no regrets about the old records, but I can put my hand on my heart and say that I was passionately committed to making that record and working with the people involved. That was a recording completely free of anxiety. There were no keyboards on it – that was deliberate, to avoid the hyperkinetic pointillism of the previous records. It reflected its influences. Bits of it, as with the other albums, I still love very much. Working with Paul Riser, who did the strings for The Temptations, Wendy Melvoin of Wendy & Lisa… A great, great team.”
Anomie . . . merits a revisit. A relative commercial failure, it is fascinating nonetheless: subtly processed, daringly eclectic. There’s Here Come July, a dialectical backflip to the rock guitars once eschewed by Green, the cool, linear hip-hop noir of Tinseltown To The Boogiedown, and the spectral ambience of Prince Among Men. But shining through as ever is Green’s pop sensibility, on the ambrosial ballad First Goodbye, for example.
Once again, a quiet period ensued before his most recent album, 2006’s unanimously well-received White Bread, Black Beer by which point Gartside had reached a similar point to Bowie and McCartney: a secure place in the critical firmament, beneath which lies the inscription, as Matthew Arnold wrote of Shakespeare, “Others abide our question. Thou art free.” Green need agonise no more (but agonise he will…).
Cupid & Psyche 85, Provision and Anomie & Bonhomie are reissued by Rough Trade Records in November.
