S: I was struck by the coinage in the sleevenote you did for Early, talking about how listening to those early EPs for the first time in ages, they struck you as a bit "winceworthy"!
G: I assumed it was already in the dictionary. Maybe not!

S: "Cringeworthy", maybe--I'm not sure about "winceworthy"! Is that really still how you feel? And is it the sound of the records that make you cringe or knowing what your mindset was when you made them?
G: Well, all the music I've ever made makes me feel uncomfortable to listen to, and I would go to some lengths to avoid having to hear it if I could. Fortunately, nowadays I don't have to go to terribly tortuous lengths to avoid hearing it. I hadn't listened to the early Scritti music since it was made. It sounded awkward, a bit gauche. But then, like I say, I think that about everything I've ever done.

S: So the obvious next question: why then agree to let it be reissued if it still embarrasses you?
G: I guess the same answer would hold: I would be uncomfortable about any of my records being released, but it's part of the business of making them. The final act of the process is them being consumed. I would guess it was a consequence of just a persistent interest from Geoff Travis at Rough Trade in reissuing that stuff. He's been looking after me for a few years and… it would have been rude to say 'no'!

S: I loved those records at the time, and they still sound good to me. But I can see why they might feel like a little pocket of time that feels really strange and is hard to recover or get back inside the mindset of. At the same time, I always heard a kind of pop sensibility thing in them, so when you went pop I...
G: You knew it was on the cards?

S: Well, actually--I wasn't going to admit this--but in the summer of 1980 I think it must have been, I was all set to write you a letter, advising you that you should just go for it, do all-out pop music.
G: [archly] Well, what an insightful young man you were!

S: Well, I never wrote the letter, but it was songs like "Confidence" that made me hear that pop potential, I think. Also I'd probably picked up on people in the music papers talking about "pop" and the notion of infiltrating the mainstream. In hindsight, though, it's really clear there's this poppy melodic element even in the most fractured Scritti stuff--a Beatlesy/Bolan-y thread, as well as the obvious Robert Wyatt influence.
G: There weren't many people then who picked up on that, but it was certainly there, a history of listening to things other than the obvious. What were you doing at the time?

S: I was living at home in a small town in Hertfordshire. I think I first heard "Bibbly-O-Tek", it would have been on John Peel, and was immediately struck by it. Winding back though to your own hometown and early youth, I've read that you attempted to form a branch of the Young Communist League at your school. Today, that sounds like a fabulously hardcore thing to do, but presumably A/ in South Wales, where there's miners' unions and such, and B/ in the early Seventies, when some union leaders were Leninists, was it the case that being a communist was still on the spectrum of legitimate political opinion?
G: It wasn't actually. No, the concise answer, and I can say this with some confidence, despite how appalling my memory is generally, is that to begin with there was just me and Niall Jinks the bass player. We formed a branch of the Young Communists and after our inaugural meeting, Niall was beaten up quite badly, somewhere near the school. That was the beginning of years of violence. I haven't done interviews for a long time but I did one the other day, went out for a meal with these guys and they said 'reminisce about the time' and what came up was that there was an awful lot of violence. No, there weren't communists around, and it was a peculiar thing to do.

S: But, you know, didn't Arthur Scargill have a bust of Lenin in his office? And surely there were loads of Trotskyites and Maoists and the like on university campuses?
G: That was different, when I got to Leeds. There'd be Marxist summer schools at London universities, and you'd go and meet other young communists. That was an exciting time and you met some very interesting people. But that was once I got out of Wales really.

S: What kind of political background did you grow up in, in terms of your family's views and values?
G: Right-wing Tory, really. Working class Tory.

S: So you being a Communist, this was a strident statement then?
G: It was. It got into the local newspaper, and Niall and I were named, and it didn't go down at all well with the extended family. It heralded a beginning of a decline in my relationship with my parents. I didn't see them for years and years and years. Then I think they read in the NME that I'd got ill [in 1980] and through my sister, they proffered some help. But yeah, we fell out big time.

S: So what was the musical analogue of being a young Communist? I read this intriguing piece several years ago, about Scritti and the Desperate Bicycles, and this guy Richard Mason claimed he could detect a discernible influence from Martin Carthy in your guitar playing on "Skank Bloc Bologna". He pinpointed it precisely to Carthy's playing in Steeleye Span actually!. So after that I went out and found a load of Steeleye albums, and sure enough, on Please To See The King, tracks like "The Blackbird", you can hear the connection from Carthy's guitar playing to your playing on "Skank." But I wondered, was there a correlation between being a Communist and loving traditional music? Folk as the people's music, that sort of idea.
G: Yes, there was. Definitely. At that point, at school, the twin things I was into it were Martin Carthy--his solo albums are really astonishing, if you ever get the chance to get hold of his early or middle period stuff, it's quite fantastic. So there was an interest in traditional music. And then the other thing was Henry Cow. I first heard Carthy and Henry Cow on John Peel. It was that predictable thing of being attracted by more challenging music. In Wales, for a while, we lived in a fairly remote bungalow, and I would tape record the Peel shows on a Saturday, and for want of anything else to do, I would listen to that tape every night or day until the following weekend. And the thing that stayed with you, I found, was the challenging stuff. The music you found most difficult on the Sunday, by the next weekend had become your favorite. Does that make sense?

S: Totally. I think people forget now the state of cultural-and-sensory deprivation involved in growing up in a small town in the UK back in the early seventies. No internet, no video stores, no video games. There were only two or three TV channels and they were off during the afternoon and closed by about 11-30 at night. There was only one radio station that played pop music, and during the day time it was pretty much a wasteland, Radio One. So, if you lived in a small town, there was virtually nothing to do! Just books and records and the music papers.
G: Yes. Most extraordinary, growing up in South Wales at the time. Nowadays if I go back there to see friends, there are bands everywhere, at every bus stop and every garage, it's like everybody's in one. But there weren't any when I was growing up there. I think we had Man and Budgie--those were the only two I could think of that had come out of Wales. I didn't really care for either. Also growing up in the new town that I most associate with being there-- although I lived all over different bits of South wales-- this brand new town, Cwmbran. We lived at the end of a cul-de-sac, and beyond that there were the hills--or 'mountains', as we called them, and the other way there was just acres of estates leading to a town centre where nothing much happened. It was pretty peculiar. One of the consequences of being a new town, though, was that there was a fairly broad mix of people at school. New towns were places people used to relocate to. That's what Niall, the bass player in Scritti, had done. He came from Kent, so he was the most exotic thing I could imagine, just 'cos he came from Kent!

S: So you became fast friends at school. What was Niall like? Very political?
G: Yeah, his parents were CP people. Or at least his dad was.

S: See, it's things like that that have given me this idea that being a Communist wasn't that unusual in those days. For instance, Richard Kirk's parents were communists, he told me he had a young communist badge! But because growing up in Sheffield, hard-line socialist politics was normal, everyday, a bit mundane--he described going to the Young Communist League events as almost like going to Sunday school--he reacted against it and got into Dada.
G: Well, I didn't ever have that because it wasn't my personal home experience. Also, there's was nothing about the sense of [Communism] that I got from Niall that wasn't wholly comfortable about it sitting alongside surrealism and whatever.

S: And of course, the Surrealists, they were all communists, weren't they? Most of them.
G: I didn't feel at any point at that point that there was any impediment to the imagination involved in undertaking the business of learning about Marxism. I was already primed, and possibly not surprisingly, by the experience of growing up in South Wales, which was pretty harsh. So it wouldn't be stretching a point too far to say that a sense of inequality was formed pretty early on, and supported by all the evidence around, both domestically and in the broader community around me.

S: Henry Cow, they were a bit Marxist, right? And part of a whole Euro-rock movement, Rock In Opposition, kind of dissident left-wing prog-rock bands?
G: I didn't know much about that. I think I came to Henry Cow through… when I was at school, I was quite precociously interested in pop music, and I'd gone to the Reading Festival when I was [really young]. The top of the bill would have been The Faces, who I was pretty keen to see, but further down the bill was Robert Wyatt and Matching Mole. Have you ever heard them? Fantastic! It was really through that kind of thing that I got into Henry Cow. The Wyatt route.

S: Did you like Hatfield and The North?
G: I did like Hatfield. I got to know the people in Henry Cow a bit, because when I left home and went to college, I started promoting gigs for things like the Young Communists, and being a fan of Henry Cow I would ask them to do these gigs. And Chris Cutler, the drummer, his father was Party. So Henry Cow were lefties basically. When I was at Leeds, they would kip on the floor of our place and play gigs. I can remember when we did the first Scritti single and had stamped all the labels by hand on the kitchen table of the squat in Camden, and we put the squat's address on them. And almost by return of post, it seemed, the very day after sending it out, Chris Cutler send his copy back to us in disgust. He told us we should leave making music to--

S: Real musicians?!
G: Basically! Which I thought quite staggering.

S: Cutler didn't really get that whole do-it-yourself, emancipatory amateurism side to punk, did he?
G: No. I can remember arguing about it when punk started--we were at Leeds then-- and Henry Cow came up to Leeds, and I was like, 'Jesus Christ, this is just the fucking bomb,' and Cutler was like, 'this is appalling rubbish!'. So that was the end of that really! I did see Fred Frith quite a few times, though. He was living in New York during the late seventies and beginning of the early eighties. We went to places like the Mudd Club and saw Bambaataa gigs and so forth. Frith's father was the headmaster of a school in York and Henry Cow used to rehearse there. Not during school time, but when it was the summer holidays. And we were invited along to their rehearsals, which was an incredible privilege. I was very excited. They were fantastic, I thought, Henry Cow. I don't think many people remember them now.

S: They were very....
G: Scary!

S: Yeah, and there was a sense of rigour about what they did, of thinking hard not just about the music but about political issues. In the rather slack context of the mid-Seventies, that must have been quite bracing.
G: Yeah, it was. Bracing's a good word. It was astringent. Frightening at times, and difficult. That was what attracted me at the time, in the beginning--the difficulty.

S: Was there a similar attraction about going to Leeds Polytechnic to study art? The Poly was quite radical, right? A lot of conceptual art, critically-driven and theoretically informed art, video and performance stuff?
G: I'd got interested in conceptual art when I was at school, just reading those stupid Thames & Hudson books about contemporary art. When I went to look at art colleges, Leeds was the most-- for want of a better word -radical. Of course, it wasn't really remotely radical, but at the age I was then it was quite appealing to wander round the art college, where people were doing things like shooting budgerigars with air rifles for their degree show. I went up there when that year's degree show was on. There was one room where a chap was making himself vomit, and the next room someone was shooting budgerigars. It was fantastic!

S: So was the Poly's Fine Art department more radical than Leeds University's art faculty?
G: It was. Leeds University's art department was where the Gang of Four and the Mekons were. When I started my work at college--or my lack of work, depending on how you look at it--I stopped painting and started writing. So they were going to throw me out, this was broached fairly frequently. But somebody at the Poly had the good idea of letting the University people read what I was writing. So Tim Clark was roped in to adjudicate as to whether I was writing just complete gibberish and bullshit to get away with it, or whether I had anything sensible to say. Anyway, he helped me stay there. But by that point, I'd started a sort of counter-curriculum. I had got in with some members of the Art & Language group, and I'd organized visiting lectures. So I'd get people to come to Leeds Poly and lecture. It got very, very popular. People like Patrick Nuttgens [the first Director of Leeds Polytechnic], who was the head of the whole thing, ended up at the last few events we did. It got very politicized and interesting. I was encouraging all these lecturers and artists from Art and Language to come and basically say what was going on in our faculty was a crock of shit and that everybody was wasting their time!

S: So you were a troublemaker!
G: It was good fun. We did an awful lot of reading. Drinking and listening to music and arguing, all the stuff I continued to enjoy for the early Scritti thing.

S: When you switched from painting to writing, was this based in the belief that 'before I create anything as an artist, it's imperative that first I have to work out what is actually valid'? Have a really good hard think, before actually picking up a paintbrush?
G: I think that's fair. It sounds completely ludicrous now! Or does it? It was a conclusion that was fairly easy to come to, though. I mean, you know what British art colleges were like, right? I'm sure they're even worse now. All the clichés are true--you've got the randy old lecturer who's got scant knowledge about art really...

S: I didn't go to art college but one of my friends did, and at her place, there was a randy old bohemian lecturer with one of those scarves round his neck, and all he did was nudes, and he was a lecherous old sod, always going out with the models, or with female students.
G: I don't think such niceties were needed, you didn't have to feign an interest in the life study to start pawing and groping young girls! There is a whole other bunch of interesting things I could tell you about the experiences of art colleges generally, and drugs officers, and policemen, and art lecturers, and weird goings on. But going back to your question, I did think… well you get there and all these kids are basically left to their own devices to get on with this god-awful stuff that they haven't spent any time really thinking about. They haven't considered why it is that they're painting in the manner of x, y or z. And if you tried to have an informed discussion with any of them, you were on a hiding to nothing. I just thought 'this is fucking nuts! Somebody has to be asking some questions about what it means to be doing this, what it means to be in this kind of institution, in this country, at this time! I was like, 'Hello? Hello?! Is anybody here thinking about this stuff at all?!?!. So that's why I stopped painting and started writing.

S: You met Tom Morley at this time?
G: Yes, he was at college too.

S: Did he always have dreadlocks?
G: He didn't have the dreadlocks until we squatted in Camden. His hair was that kind of hair. He had a white 'fro, when I first met him.

S: Marc Almond and Frank Tovey--Fad Gadget--were both at Leeds Poly, doing art, right? Did you know them?
G: Yes, Marc and Frank, they were both at Leeds. But I was a bit sniffy...

S: Cos they were into performance art?
G: Oh I don't know, I'd had my moments of performance! I did a... oh blimey! I did some COMPLETELY pretentious piece when I first got there. It was called something like 'Fox Logic', and it was about the deaths of Wittengenstein and Kimber. William Kimber was a Morris dancer who died in Oxford the same day that Wittgenstein died. [William Kimber aka 'Merry' Kimber, 1872-1961, was the concertina-player of the Headington Quarry Morris Dancers and the prime instigator of the Morris Dance revival. His meeting with Cecil Sharp in 1899 was a trigger for Sharp's embarking on collecting traditional songs, leading to the formation in 1911 of the English Folk Dance Society]. So it was just all this stuff about the First World War, English traditional things, men, villagers dying, patterns, abstraction, language… It was a massive wank, really! That was my brief bit of performance. And I enjoyed it for a while. But I guess I was more snooty and sniffy about people's musical interests than I was anything else really.

S: You've spoken before about the revelatory, transformative moment of going to your first punk gig and going into the venue as one person and coming out again afterwards completely changed, a different person. Was that the Anarchy Tour hitting Leeds, the Pistols, the Heartbreakers?
G: It was the first punk tour--The Clash, The Pistols, The Damned, and The Heartbreakers. Was that Anarchy? Or White Riot? No, it was the Anarchy tour, and maybe the third date on that. They'd been prohibited from playing in Nottingham the night before. You think back, and occasionally you're reminded that you've made these claims about these Damascene moments in your life. But I wouldn't mind still describing that gig like that, in those very strong, revelatory, life-changing, clichéd terms. It was like that. I was fucking astonished.