Scritti Politti

According to horseshoe theory, the extremes of the political spectrum are closer to each other than either is to the centre.

Indeed, in the Eighties countless artists, having started their careers with a modus operandi inspired by Marxist philosophy, ended up as cogs in the neoliberal machinery championed by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. While some simply looked the other way, others felt compelled to justify themselves, even though nobody had actually asked them to.

Green Gartside (vocals, guitar) is twenty-one when, in December 1976, inspired by the Sex Pistols, he forms his first band with his friend Nial Jinks (bass) and university classmate Tom Morley (drums). The following year they drop out and move from Leeds to London, taking up residence in a squat.

At the time Gartside is a diehard Marxist who sees capitalism as absolute evil. The band is named Scritti Politti, in homage to Antonio Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks" ("Scritti politici").

Their debut single, "Skank Bloc Bologna" (1978), is dedicated to the Emilian capital, a European symbol for the militant left. The band members distribute it themselves, with photocopied, hand-folded sleeves. Record labels are the embodiment of capitalism, pitting artists against one another: they're to be distrusted, and music should be spread relying only on one's own resources.

They are clearly not alone in thinking so: within a year the British underground is saturated with artists preaching "do it yourself". A whole circuit of cassettes, tapes and 7-inches with homemade sleeves springs up, sold by mail directly by the people who recorded them.

The critics fool themselves into thinking it might last, and in August 1980 New Musical Express launches "Garageland", a column devoted to this new market. But it clogs up almost immediately: Gartside would later recall how the whole thing boiled down to a clique of people swapping noisy, unpleasant music they'd recorded in their own garages, often without the faintest idea of how to write a song or even hold an instrument. "Garageland" lasts less than a year: just long enough to realise readers don't care, and that the very artists who emerged through that approach disown it the moment they get the chance.

Scritti Politti had in fact already signed to Rough Trade back in 1979: a first crack in the Marxist edifice, though barely noticeable, since it was still an independent label after all. The aim is to sell music and enter the market without bowing to its prevailing dictates. So the embodiment of capitalism is no longer record labels in general, but major labels alone.

In early 1980 Gartside collapses after a gig. He's floored by a panic attack, worsened by his unhealthy lifestyle: he's constantly chasing booze and pills, never sleeps, and the hygiene conditions of the squat he shares with his friends are precarious to say the least.

His parents convince him to come back home to Wales for a period of convalescence, during which he regains his sobriety but radically overhauls his worldview. It's remarkable what death can do to you once you think you've looked it in the eye.

Capitalism is still the enemy, but it can't be fought from the outside: its rules have to be dismantled from within, which means infiltrating it. For a musician, that means producing hit songs. Gartside thus comes to argue that the only music that matters is music capable of selling: otherwise, it could never crack the system.

He writes lengthy notes on the subject, under the influence of Jacques Derrida's theories, who is by now replacing Karl Marx among his idols. Determined to transform Scritti Politti from the ramshackle, unlikely post-punk band of that first single into a perfect pop machine, once back in London he presents his philosophical writings to his two bandmates, trying to convince them to follow him on this new venture. Jinks and Morley agree, but that does little to secure their position within the band.

Gartside is now set on turning the band's name into his own alter ego: finally ready to record the debut album, he pushes for the use of a drum machine, thereby diminishing Morley's role at least in part, and brings in another bassist, Joe Cang, alongside Jinks, evidently deeming him more technically capable. The two bandmates are soon reduced to session players: although they see the album sessions through, both will quit shortly after. Gartside will pay them a settlement to keep using the band's name without facing any comeback.

"Songs To Remember" was completed in August 1981, but didn't see the light of day until September '82: the choice was made to release some of its tracks as 45s, in order to build anticipation around the project. What in the author's dreams was meant to be a perfect pop machine, however, didn't deliver the hoped-for results: "The Sweetest Girl", "Faithless" and "Asylums In Jerusalem" all three failed to crack the singles top 40.

The artist took it out on the Rough Trade staff, accusing them of failing to properly support worthwhile projects and of paying too much attention to the less commercial bands in their roster, who should have been dropped.

The criticism is undoubtedly unfair: an independent label, founded precisely to promote experimental music, can't change its whole direction just to please a musician with an oversized ego. On the other hand, it's also true that some of the album's tracks are quite catchy: the constant philosophical references and titles that don't reflect the actual lyrical content aren't enough on their own to explain the poor sales. After all, this is 1981-82, and the charts were seeing plenty of strangeness at the time.

The opening track, "Asylums In Jerusalem", takes its title from a text by Nietzsche, while the lyrics seem to mock everything the musician had been championing just a few years earlier: "Let him not be the same anymore, oh he'll worry yes, and he'll want to be above the law, but he doesn't know at all what he's fighting for".

The instrumental backbone is a mid-tempo lovers rock with electric piano and soul-tinged female backing vocals: yet it has the sonic cleanliness of new wave and a sophisti-pop elegance that brings it close to the contemporary work of Joe Jackson.

Another of the tenets Gartside developed during this period concerned the purity of black music (regardless of the fact that it was distributed by labels like Motown and Stax, just as tied to capitalism as Coca-Cola): drawing on it liberally became mandatory. Hence "A Slow Soul", a languid soul ballad with session player Jamie Talbot's sax left free to roam beneath the vocal line, "Faithless", a solemn agnostic gospel, and "Gettin' Havin' And Holdin'", a slow reggae number that seems to deconstruct Percy Sledge's "When A Man Loves A Woman", one of soul's most well-worn classics.

A sort of hybrid between folk rock (the rhythm is driven by acoustic guitar) and boogie, "Jacques Derrida" recounts the author's own story with just the right dose of self-deprecation, while still managing to squeeze in yet another jab at the system: "I'm in love with Jacques Derrida, read a page and I know what I need to take home the heart of my desire, I'm in love. To err is human, to forgive is divine enough to be worth trying. I was like an industry: depressed, my interest rates rising."

"Lions After Slumber" is a synth-funk track built on drum machine and slapped bass, with Gartside reeling off nouns and adjectives in an unbroken stream, a flow of consciousness with neither verse nor chorus.

"Sex" moves within a similar arrangement, but sharply speeds it up and pushes its danceable energy to the point of paroxysm: it was around this same period that Prince released "1999", and it's reasonable to think that a track like this one would have been among the highlights of that very tracklist.

The masterpiece, however, comes at the very end, with "The Sweetest Girl", Gartside's first creation after his ideological turnaround, and thus the archetype of the new Scritti Politti.

The voice is, first and foremost, that of a soul singer of the smoothest, most angelic kind: it's hard not to think of Smokey Robinson as the most direct point of reference. The rough singing and clumsy vocalizing of his earliest recordings are only a couple of years behind him, yet they seem to belong to a much more distant past. This new approach, so romantic and delicate, recurs throughout the record and creates a pleasant sense of dissonance when set against the cynicism of the lyrics.

The track's sonic architecture is astonishing: six minutes of free-form electronic reggae that dissolves into drum machines drenched in phaser effect, digital piano awash in echo, laser-like hisses, and streams of jazzy keyboards that seem to carry the old glories of Canterbury prog into the new wave era. Playing them is in fact Robert Wyatt himself, Rough Trade's newest signing, who gladly lent his talents to collaborate with Gartside (he also plays on "Asylums In Jerusalem" and "Jacques Derrida", though his presence there is far less noticeable).

Despite the internal controversies that preceded it, "Songs To Remember" debuted at number 12 on the charts. Geoff Travis, the label's owner, had reason to celebrate: it was the first time a release from their catalogue had climbed so high. Gartside, however, wasn't celebrating, evidently unsatisfied with being the most famous musician among the unfamous. The sales figures he craved were not something Rough Trade could guarantee (not for much longer, though: the Smiths would arrive just a year later). By mutual agreement with Travis, the contract was terminated.

In 1984, the doors of Virgin would open for Gartside. In the end, he landed at a major label, disowning everything he had once stood for in the days of "Skank Bloc Bologna", delivering scathing remarks about "do it yourself" and the mentality behind it, declaring Marx outdated, and essentially embracing capitalism.

With the following album, "Cupid & Psyche 85", he finally achieved major success, but by then the magic was gone: this was music that no longer carried the contradictions that had animated "Songs To Remember" and made its content so complex. Gone were the tensions between jazz virtuosity and electronic rhythms, with the latter now dominating outright; gone was the meticulous study of black music's past, replaced by a flattened embrace of its more trend-conscious contemporary forms; gone were the references to philosophers and social analysis, replaced by ordinary love songs; more than sophisti-pop, it had by then become generic synth-pop.

Having moved from one extreme to the other rather quickly, confirming the theory outlined at the start, Gartside never proved particularly compelling in either incarnation. His magic lies entirely in the transition between the two stages, in that creative short-circuit unrepeatably captured on "Songs To Remember".

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17/05/2020