It’s hard to recall the ferocity of the ideological arguments that surrounded pop music in the early 1980s. There was much talk about hegemony, many inverted commas. There was a made-up thing called New Pop in which the scratchy energy of post-punk was traded for something more commercial. Scritti Politti were stationed at the centre of this uncertain moment, having started as a punk-inspired DIY collective in a Camden squat, before graduating to a position in which singer Green Gartside could be heard serenading the philosopher Jacques Derrida on a limited-edition picture disc (it was the flip-side of “Asylums In Jerusalem”, a marginally more commercial offering on which Green channelled Nietzsche to question the value of monological Marxism). The singles from Songs To Remember had sleeves that echoed commercial branding, and the angular sounds of those early records were traded for a waft of something softer.
The two sides of Scritti Politti can be measured by the things they influenced. The meandering “Messthetics” from Scritti’s second John Peel session inspired a post-punk archive CD label and a Fugazi spin-off band. Meanwhile, a line in the sweetly soulful “Gettin’, Havin’ And Holdin’” gave Wet Wet Wet their name.
“I’m not sure I remember the New Pop thing as such,” Green tells Uncut today. “Was it to do with rock and jazz giving access to a realm of primordial intuitive emotion and pop merely artificially representing such things? I was just enjoying pointing out that it was all bollocks.”
The first sign that Scritti Politti had evolved came with the release of the NME/Rough Trade cassette compilation C81. The tape is a box of splinters; the Postcard groups, electronic radicals like DAF and Cabaret Voltaire; Wah! Heat, The Beat. The stand-out track is Scritti Politti’s “The ‘Sweetest Girl’” which sounds like nothing else, then or now. There is a dusting of dub. The tune is technically reggae, but the heartbeat rhythm of the Roland CR-78 drum machine is caressed by the irregularities of Robert Wyatt’s piano. If it wasn’t for Wyatt, the tune could be seen as a wayward sister of The Specials’ “Ghost Town”, which came out a few months later. There is something of the fairground about it. But, while Terry Hall’s “Ghost Town” commentary was sardonic and accusatory, Green’s singing is like candy floss; corrosively lovely, almost too sweet to swallow.
Green has suggested that he envisaged “The ‘Sweetest Girl’” being sung by Gregory Isaacs and played by Kraftwerk. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kraftwerk were not keen on reggae – they had their own conceptual architecture to defend. In fact, the tension in the song is not between man and machine. It is, like much of the Scritti catalogue, a tussle between thought and feeling. Or, more precisely, those ideas, the way they are expressed, and what that might mean. Another possibility, which shouldn’t be discounted, is that Green has more of a sense of humour and is more autobiographical than is commonly supposed. As he sang on “Asylums In Jerusalem”: “With his hammer and his popsicle/They put him in the hospital”. See also the line in “The ‘Sweetest Girl’” about “the sickest group in all the world”, which surely refers to Green and his squatting comrades.
Asked to explain how he arrived at the clean sound of Songs To Remember, Green is briskly oblique. “I had forsworn certain things in favour of a hot shower in the morning and a glass of fresh orange juice. You can hear it, can’t you?” Famously, Green’s creative rebirth followed an anxiety attack, after which he fled from Camden and its accompanying lifestyle to recuperate in Caerlon, outside Newport in Wales. Sickness was part of it, but there was also dissent within Scritti Politti. Green wanted to go pop, and to escape from what he termed the group’s “bookwormish” tendencies. Listening to his sister’s record collection as he recovered hardened his resolve.
Naturally, his own bookwormish tendencies remained. Green made notes about the theory and practice of his new ideas. He mused about timelessness and being “fashionless”. It became a trade-off. For every bit of Michael Jackson and his “faux-naif” voice, there was some Roland Barthes. For every echo of Stax Records, a layer of deconstruction.
In this strange sandwich, much of what Green was doing related to language. He was simplifying, using the codes and shorthand of pop and soul. The word Green sometimes employs to describe this is “banality”, which isn’t necessarily a criticism. The root of the word, he notes, means “communal”. The puzzle for Green was how to employ this easy language alongside his interest in theory. In the judgmental rock criticism of the period – as parodied in The Cure’s “Desperate Journalist” – this tendency was characterised as subversion, but the music business has always been very accommodating to subversives. Green was actually doing something else. He was interrogating the meaning of songs, and draping the blanket of theory over his own anxiety. He hid it well, perhaps even from himself.
Is that a stretch? Well, hegemony is a tricky rhyme, but it obvious that in the formula for Songs To Remember, the pop elements weigh more heavily than the structuralism. The friskiness of the tune of “Jacques Derrida” makes it self-mocking, rather than a call to arms, even if Green does manage to advocate a revolution (“I want that too/Baby, baby, it’s up to you”).
There is, Green has suggested, a limit to the number of songs that can be written about songs, but it’s quite a generous measure. The lilting “Rock-a-Boy Blue” seems to be a finger-snapping reflection on music industry expectations (“Don’t they want to be The Beatles?”), if not a note to his former bandmates, but it exists in a state of fragile compromise. “I learned to live with the beats on the bar/Made me sick with repetition”. Similarly, “A Slow Soul” does what it says on the tin, offering a romantic lament, a slow dance, a smooch, complete with lonely saxophone. The song offers comfort, and while it isn’t clear whether Green is addressing a lover, himself or the alienated hordes, the cryptic stuff is kept to a minimum, while the mood of reassurance oozes freely. Perhaps that is misdirection. Never mind. The medicine goes down.
So, New Pop? The subversive pursuit of hit records reached some kind of peak with the Human League, when “Don’t You Want Me?” got to Number One at the end of 1981, nine months before the much-delayed Songs To Remember was released. The League’s manager Bob Last would also take on Scritti Politti, adding a few more coats of varnish and delivering commercial success. When the hits came, there was still a bit of the old post-modernist jig going on, but not enough to spook the dancefloor.
On Songs To Remember, the formula is still unstable. Green hasn’t quite perfected banality. It feels like a record that has been assembled. But it’s still quite lovely. And it’s no criticism to say that if you play “Lions After Slumber”, “Sex” and “Faithless” together, and go with the groove – ignoring the Shelley references, the cries for “amoral disarmament” and “the fallout of love” – you end up with the blueprint for George Michael’s greatest hits. “Don’t worry,” Green sings on “Sex”, “it’s the same jouissance, yeah!”
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