Last night, d took me to Brighton. He’d bought me, for my birthday, a ticket to see Scritti Politti in concert. I have adored Green Gartside for many years - his work has been a huge part of the soundtrack to my life. He has a new album out - White Bread Black Beer - and if you have not yet purchased it, I can only urge you to buy it now. Right not. Go on. We’ll wait…. Done? Good. You won;t regret it; it’s one of the most beautiful confections of love, regret, joy, sillyness, addiction, beauty and a thousand other things. Like a huge greenhouse filled with exotic butterflies, their wings shining like mother of pearl and lapis in the late evening sunlight.
This piece is something I wrote a couple of years back, and I wanted to share it with you all today. Now, go buy the album; i’ll give you your mney back if you’re not entirely satisfied…
Songs of Innocence & Experience: A personal History of Scritti Politti.
Art is the most beautiful of all lies.
Claude Debussy.
In 1981, when Scritti Politti’s first album was recorded, I was a schoolboy who regularly wore a pair of grey nylon slacks, and a dark wine coloured polyester sweater. The album (of which I was, at that time, entirely ignorant) was called SONGS TO REMEMBER. It was a work of unusual beauty. Crafted in a world of Thatcherism, Materialism, and Nuclear proliferation, it came with an awareness of the power of the pop record to move, and of its ability to transcend its lowly birth in order to become something more than an electronically recorded collection of vocal sounds and rehearsed rhythms. It turned simple pop songs into multi-directional explorations of sanity, reality, philosophy and love. It said (if you were listening) that there was nothing wrong with enjoying a funky groove, and that there was no shame in having awareness of the importance of sex in modern music.
And what’s more, it said all of this in a song about French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
The album came out in 1982. Sometime after that, Green Gartside heard Michael Jackson’s ‘Off The Wall’, fell in love with it, and decided he wanted his next album to have a more american r’n’b sound (the lower case is deliberate: For this was an america of simple beauty and of vast emptiness; and this was to be a record with, at times, confusing rhythm, and varying shades of blue).Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.
W.H. Auden
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Cue a move to the US, an introduction to Arif Mardin (A God amongst record producers), a meeting with fellow Jazz enthusiasts David Gamson and Fred Maher, and a new album.
CUPID AND PSYCHE ’85 turned ‘Songs…’ rough edged, jazz influenced workings into brightly polished, multi-faceted gems. Pop is too simple a word to describe these songs. Art, at the time a dirty word, comes closest. For, if we believe Jean Anouilh, Art is what gives shape to life. And Cupid & Psyche, in 1985, gave shape to my life. This is the soundtrack to my personal dreams of a more interesting life. Of a world of desperate, yet fabulously longing Wood Beez (Interestingly, Mardin made his life producing Aretha Franklin’s early works); A world of glamour, of art, of sex and of beauty.By 1988 when PROVISION was released, I was living that life. Or trying to. Home was an attic bedsit in Putney, and work was a drab bank branch in Ealing.Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
Henry Adams
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On the commute between my artists’ garret on the south bank of the river, and my temple to Mammon in the Western suburbs, I would listen to the cassette of PROVISION. (Remember, kids; home taping was killing music). The songs had a funky urban rhythm that bridged my journey. They also name checked Gaultier, Kant and Motoguzzi. In one Lyric.
We always find something… to give us the impression that we exist.
Beckett.
One Saturday night in the summer of 1988, gripped by a nameless sadness, alone, and sick of waiting for my life to start, I took a tube out of Putney Bridge. Perhaps I was lovesick. For whatever reason, I found myself in Kings Cross. I’d heard it was a home to whores, artists, philosophers fakes, freaks and fools. I didn’t know what I was, but I felt sure that I was somewhere in that list. So I walked the streets, the extended version of ‘Oh Patti’ running through my headphones, and found a grim set of grey streets. It was 7:30 on a summer’s night. What can I say? I was not only lovesick, I was – an unforgivable crime – an innocent.
The innocent and the beautiful, have no enemy but time.
W.B. Yeats
Then, in a sudden surge of activity, my life began to take form. The realisation that my world, as it stood at the end of ’88 need be no more permanent than it was at the end of ’81 was a massive jolt. I could be whatever I chose to be. I could redefine myself, evolve, improve. It was what the artists I had loved for so long had done. It’s what Scritti are about.
It’s what life is for.
Have no friends not equal to yourself.
Confucius
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Fast Forward. Cue jerky movements, speedy vocals, time passing quickly. Too quickly, sometimes, but passing regardless. It’s a story – dammit, it’s a three volume novel – for another day.
1999. ANOMIE & BONHOMIE. A new album. A new hope. A new…. A new what? A new life? No, I like my life by now. I live in a big box in the suburbs. I have room for my books, my music, my things. And all of this is irrelevant. The intelligence of Jacques Derrida, the shiny hope of Hypnotize, the marvellous melancholy of Overnite, become as nothing next to the simple truth of my life: I am loved, and am in love. The beauty of songs like ‘First Goodbye’, and ‘Brushed with Oil, dusted with powder’, is still evident, but by now, life is rich enough to allow this listener to enjoy them – their smoothness, their warmth, their effervescence – without clinging desperately to them, like a drowning man to a reef.So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
F.Scott Fitzgerald
These tracks – from SONGS to ANOMIE – are like comets. Stars in life’s firmament. Their beauty is unquestionable. But nowadays, I have my life, my love, and my friends, and those rocks – more than I could ever have dreamed when I wore grey nylon and purple polyester – are all I can ever see myself wanting. df july2004The officer asked ‘How did it start?’ ‘Oh, shit, you know, I wish I knew,’ I said…
Scritti: brushed with oil…1999
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