INTERVIEW WITH GREEN of SCRITTI POLITTI - page 2

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S: Previous to seeing the punk bands, had you been on a more musically proficient Henry Cow trip, learning your chops and all that? Had you even played music at all?
G: What I'd really learned to play by then was some traditional folk songs. Niall could play the fiddle and he knew a bunch of Morris tunes. I could play a couple of jigs and reels fairly badly! We were listening to the Henry Cows, and things like Miles Davis by that point too. Whatever else we could get our hands on that was upsetting! We weren't really playing seriously.

S: After the Anarchy show, did you decide to form a band immediately?
G: I think so, I can't really remember exactly. I've got a terrible memory because I've trained my memory to be ruthlessly poor--cos I'm best served that way! All memories are bad, really. Memories of good things are bad, because they've gone, and memories of bad things are bad because they were bad things. I don't like remembering anything, and I've become really good at that. Also, I don't really have any sense of time--I don't feel the difference between things that happened last week, or three months ago, which gets me in all sorts of trouble. What were we talking about?

S: The initial forming of Scritti.
G: I don't remember that, but I remember I was the one who persuaded Tom and Niall to blow the last of their grant on a drum kit and a bass guitar, and start learning to play them. That's what we did. We played one gig in Leeds as The Against. We supported this one other punk band in Leeds at the time, SOS.

S: Did you apply the same sort of thing you'd done with your art work--thinking very hard about it--to the initial conceptualization of Scritti, before actually making the music? Or was it more instinctive and spontaneous?
G: There wasn't a simple agenda, but there would have been lots of thinking about it. Because that was a lot of the pleasure. It's just a pleasurable thing to do--to sit around talking and thinking about things. We were possibly much better at that than we were at making music. There were lots of different forces at play, all these seamlessly contiguous areas of interest: music's relationship with language, which was a bit like art's relationship with language, and there was the whole political dimension of the linguistic turn in philosophy--that point when language became a subject of philosophy. The political dimensions of the turn towards language interested me a lot. Then there would have been music and its role in identity formation. That was something all three of us had personal experience of--how important music had been growing up, to who we were. Music's power, latent and transforming. Then there was a lot of that Gramscian talk at that time too, taling about culture and ideology in a more straightforward Marxisty way. And then there was the whole punk thing about control of production and distribution, getting up and doing-it-yourself. So these were all separate but seamlessly contiguous areas.

S: So you'd be exploring all these different issues, grappling with all these overlapping theories, simultaneous with the more practical stuff, like learning how to use an amplifier, or how to string your guitar?
G: I paid no attention to how set up an amp! Partly because we were anti-rock in a way. Rock was too solid, too strong, and too sure a sound. All its mannerism and gestures and conventions were strong, solid, and sure, and we wanted a music that's wasn't strong, solid, and sure, because we weren't strong, solid or sure. And I wouldn't have known how to make a music that was strong solid or sure. It wasn't until I started supporting the Gang of Four, and Andy Gill would tell us, 'this is how you get distortion on an amplifier, this is how loud they can go'... So it was a blend of the via negativa and being a bit gormless about it, to be honest!

S: So when did Scritti move down from London to the Camden squat? Would that have been early '78?
G: I would think it would have been around then. We did those first tracks [the 'Skank Bloc Bologna' three-track single] at Spaceward Studio in Cambridge, and whether we went to Cambridge from Leeds or from London, I can't remember, but I'd think it would have been from London. So maybe we were in the squat by '78.

S: Had you chucked in your art degree?
G: I completed it. I got a 2.1.

S: So they decided text was valid then, as artistic practice!
G: That's all my degree show was--an awful lot of writing. But it got the thumbs-up from various people. People that my lecturers thought possibly knew what they were talking about! And I was told I didn't get a first because I'd never attended any of their lectures, which is absolutely true. I did finish the art course and was thoroughly fed up with the whole business. As I remain to this day--perfectly appalled by Brit Art and everything that's come in its wake.

S: Did you ever do any painting as such?
G: Yeah, I could paint. Occasionally I draw. Get the crayons out. It's a very pleasurable thing to do.

S: What was Camden like in those days? A bit grotty?
G: It was pretty grotty. The squat was in a little terrace. Some girls from art college had gone down and squatted the year before and tipped us off about this place. When the old lady moved out… Well, we went and knocked on her door, and said, 'Are you going to be moving soon? We're going to squat your place after you've gone.' So she was complicit with us squatting this place, and they tried to get us out but they couldn't. But the Carol Street squat didn't have a bathroom. It was pretty rudimentary. The band Skrewdriver lived a few doors down, in our street. We were young communists and punks and there was an awful lot of violence. There was violence on an almost weekly basis. Like, every time you went to see a gig… We'd travel in fairly large groups, of five or six… and we'd walk, say, all the way to Stoke Newington to the Pegasus to see some band, and then walking back at whatever time of the night you'd be attacked. You'd be attacked on the London Underground, or you'd be attacked if you were out selling Challenge, the young communist paper. I was doing some part time work at the Communist Party headquarters in King Street in Covent Garden, and there were letter bombs while I was there. There had been a lot of violence in Leeds before, a lot of people I knew had been attacked. And some of my friends in Camden [were attacked], like Matthew Kay, who worked with Scritti [as organizer/manager], and people who ended up working at Rough Trade--all of this was through a Communist thing. So I remember violence, a great deal of violence. But also a lot of fantastic fun, which came from that business of putting your home address on your record sleeves, which meant that you did get the disaffected public schoolboys and French hippies and Italian Eurocommunists turning up. They would bang on your door. It was open house, and we'd be going out to gigs most nights, and you'd come back and you never knew who would be there, and you'd stay up all hours, talking, about whatever books were of interest or someone had maybe bought a new pre-release dub thing. It was just pretty good. Good times!"

S: There's a load of commune-style bands in rock history--Jefferson Airplane, Faust, Amon Duul--bands that lived together in squats or big houses. But Scritti is unique, I think, is being a collective that involved a large number of non-musicians who were on an equal basis with the musicians. How large did Scritti actually get?
G: We used to have meetings at the house--I don't know if we called ourselves a collective, we called ourselves something--and these meetings were attended by people who were going to be in their own groups, or they were fans, or just friends. And maybe of an evening, 20 people or so would attend. Some of whom went on to make their own records.

S: Like this guy Simon Emmerson, who went on to be Simon Booth of Weekend and Working Week, right?
G: Simon was one of them. And there were people like the Janet and Johns, and Methodishca Tune. Most of these people just made one or two singles. One of the key figures at the time was a guy called Bob Scotland, who was one of our closest friends, and who ended up driving a van for Rough Trade and having his own band. He was a working class Glaswegian communist, and an incredibly bright guy. He's now some fantastic Oxbridge don specializing in spores, molds and fungus! For a lot of people [early Scritti] was an exciting and fascinating phase, for two or three years...

S: These people who actually didn't write Scritti's songs or play instruments, did they still actively contribute, in terms of ideas and thinking out what the band was about?
G: Oh yeah. Around the time of changing [from Mark 1 Scritti to the pop Scritti], there was a fairly big aesthetic shift that went on. I think it was partly precipitated by my ill health, on a Gang of Four tour and various other things. I went back to Wales, and I would have never thought of just announcing that I now wanted to make a different kind of music. So I sat down for months and months and months and wrote screeds of justification. And I started listening to black music that I'd heard before but never listened to before. But yes [with the writing of the screeds of notes], there was that sense of having to have it understood and approved and thought-through. I have to stress that that was also a very pleasurable thing to do.

S: Well, flashing back to the early days again, tell me about 'Skank Bloc Bologna'. Was that inspired by what was going on in Italy in 1977?
G: I'd read a book, Red Bologna, about the time I wrote that song. I guess if I had to draw the essence of the song out of thin air really quickly-- at the time I'm sure I would have spoken with more eloquence or at least more length--I can remember there was this idea of the "bloc", the "historical bloc", coming from Gramsci's idea of hegemony. And Bologna at that time was a city in communist control, and I was interested in certain ideas of Eurocommunism. As for the skanking bit, that was what just filled our house twenty four hours a day--nonstop dub and lover's rock, really. It was just beautiful.

S: In Bologna, though, the Communist mayor was the one who actually tried to suppress the more radical Il Movimento people, who in 1977 were rioting in this really carnivalesque fashion, taking over the city center. Was 'Skank Bloc Bologna' inspired by those people, the radicals who were even more left-wing than the establishment Communist Party? Or were you just struck by the fact that it was possible to have a whole city in Northern Italy that was Communist controlled?
G: To be honest, I can't really remember… I would have been inspired by the book Red Bologna, which wasn't uncritical of what was going on. And at that time we were going to meetings where various young European communists were talking, and there were people in Italy who were setting up radio stations--they were nominally communists but they were pretty wild, do you know what I mean?

S: Oh, you mean Radio Alice, il Movimento's pirate radio station.
G: Yes, Radio Alice--things like that. I'd forgotten about that.

S: So that's what you're talking about when you're singing in "Skank" about how the Magnificent Six--the Scritti collective--are busy working on developing some reasons for political hope--"a Euro vision and a skanking scope"?
G: Yes, yes, yes. Please don't remind me of any more lyrics! It might lead to me dying of embarrassment.

S: Are you really embarrassed by them? See, what I like about those lyrics is... and this may not be what you were trying to do at all, but there was a lot of debates going on at that time but how to do the politics-in-pop thing effectively. So you had Tom Robinson with his straightforward messages, which people soon decided was pointless, just preaching to the converted. And then the step beyond TRB was Gang of Four, doing their songs that were very schematic and diagrammatic, almost case studies in false consciousness, diagrams of relationships of conditioning and exploitation. And then your songwriting in the early Scritti is the next step beyond that: it's more like a kaleidoscope that switches back and forth, almost on a line by line basis, from very mundane details of every day life to that sort of deep, abstract structure, delineating the contours of the absolute bedrock conditions of political reality, what shapes your deepest beliefs about how reality has to be. So one line you're singing about people doing shitty jobs in supermarkets, or prosaic stuff to do with bailiffs and rents, and the next line it's more like something out of Gramsci, the constraints on your consciousness. Was that what you were trying to do?
G: Absolutely. That's pretty spot on I would think. And it continues to be. The songs I'm working on at the moment --God, songs I've been working on "at the moment", more like songs that I've been working for the last God knows how many years--that continues to be how I write.

S: So it's not the approach then, it's the specific lyrics you wrote that make you wince!
G: Yes, it's any specific instance of any of it! But you're right in your analysis.

S: With the Desperate Bicycles, did you actually like their music or was it more the do-it-yourself credo that inspired you?
G: I loved their music. I really did, and we got to know them, and they were amongst the people who would come round to the house and we would talk about things. They were very similarly-minded. There was a sense of community amongst some bands at the time, and around Rough Trade, with bands like the Raincoats, and lots of others. A sense of community, and a shared feeling that... the unexamined pop life wasn't worth living. Let's put it that way!

S: So Rough Trade was a really cool milieu then.
G: I don't think we thought of ourselves as 'cool'. I thought Geoff was cool.

S: Well I didn't mean 'cool' in that sense but more like, a fertile place to be.
G: Oh definitely. For me it was the spot. And at time I was also promoting Young Communist gigs--we did one of the first Fall gigs in London, with John Cooper Clarke. I even put on Sham 69. Sham 69 and Aswad on a bill together at Highbury! And these things were always done with Rough Trade's active support. Unofficially. But Rough Trade would give us all the stuff to make the show more appealing. If you needed to borrow any record decks, or if you wanted to sell badges or singles at the gig and make a bit of money on that, Geoff would help out with that. I'm not sure one had any gauge of how remarkable that was at the time, because working with Rough Trade was our only experience of what a record label was like. It wasn't until later that I discovered how anomalous that was.

S: It does seem more and more remarkable, as time goes by. The spirit surrounding Rough Trade and a few other likeminded labels. Also, the degree of hopefulness involved, and the confidence that it all made a difference, doing these things, and doing them in this particular ethically-minded way. Rough Trade was really ambitious about wanting to create a whole alternative culture, with independent distribution, independent retail, independent media even. I think they were planning to start a magazine at one point, although when that finally came to be some yewars later it was more like a trade paper, serving the Cartel, the independent label scene. The Catalogue, it was called. But originally it was an alternative culture type magazine they envisaged.
G: There was certainly a great deal of hope. Yes.

S: In the Rough Trade milieu, did you have much interaction with Mayo Thompson?
G: Yeah Mayo… he was doubly interesting because he'd been in Art & Language and The Red Crayola. And I didn't hear the Red Crayola until I met him and he played me the old stuff and it knocked me out, I thought they were fantastic. Scritti toured Europe with the Crayola and I used to go and spend time with Mayo and his wife in their cottage. He went to live in Germany. Yeah, he was a cool cat. Did you meet him?

S: I interviewed him on the phone because of the postpunk book. He's involved in an art gallery now, and still does music.
G: He was an assistant to Rauschenberg, wasn't he?

S: I didn't know that. He's got an interesting style of talk--it was hard to do the interview because he spoke very very fast and quite quietly, he's very soft spoken and rapid in his speech. Transcription was a nightmare, but even hearing him while doing the interview was tough. But from what I could pick up, he's got this interesting manner of talk--quite tough-minded. I think he came from a military background, so there's a kind of soldier-like discipline combined with bone-dry humour, and of course the Art & Language hallmark, this penetrating rigour of thought.
G: There was an interesting crossover between the Art & Language mob and other groups on the Left, whose language became so exquisitely wrought, dense, tortured. A lot of the later writings by Art & Language, it's absolutely impenetrable, but it's a fascinating style. I recommend their old publications to anyone who wants to see an interesting mixture of the splenetic and the rigorous.

S: So the official live debut of Scritti, at Acklam Hall, late 1978, you only had four songs written at that stage, and had to repeat the entire set, to please the punters?
G: Maybe it was three, it might have been four. We just played them twice. No problem.

S: Because it was rapturously received?
G: Yeah, they liked it a lot! Which was good, I should commend that to people more often. Because by the second time you play something, it's a little familiar already. Hahahaha! It went down very well. It was terrifying. And that was already the beginning of the end, because of the nerves and panic attack stuff that later afflicted me. I used to get terribly, terribly, terribly nervous. I mean, I was very nervous about doing this interview.

S: You don't sound it! You sound totally assured.
G: It got too bad. It was a great shame really. But I just couldn't fucking do the live performing.

S: But didn't you do things like make songs up on the spot, at Scritti gigs? Wouldn't that have been even more nerve-wracking?
G: We did a lot of making stuff up on the spot. In some ways that was less nerve wracking. The idea came from a mixture of things. I was never convinced that there was any simple correspondence between the formal aspects and the political (in its fuller sense) dimensions. But I did get less interested in chords and structures for a while. But making stuff up, again, was pleasurable. In all that we've talked about, the theory and the practice, there's a central hedonistic streak in it all. It was pleasurable to struggle to make these things up on stage, not always successfully. But it was all nerve-wracking, generally.

S: In the sequence of the recordings, did you do the Peel Sessions EP before 4 A Sides?
G: I've no idea what the chronology of any of that was I'm afraid.

S: Because you were talking about the nervous strain, and that Peel Sessions EP, sounds particularly affected by that. I read somewhere, an interview you did a few years later, during the pop phase, maybe 1982, and you say something like "I listen back to the Peel EP and I can't understand that record, it feels like a really ill record." And that's what the EP sounds like--almost like the music is shaking itself apart. You get the sense of a group of people living on their edge of their nerves. There's a vein of paranoia in the lyrics of songs like "Scritlocks Door", or elsewhere, there's this strong current of despair, like with "Hegemony", where you can't see any way out of hegemony's mindlock on your consciousness.
G: Yes, that's all true. I was not well physically. There was that whole thing of making a music that was trying to be expressive of the stresses of being--this'll sound wanky--the stresses of being spoken by the language that we were being spoken by, dyouknowwhatiman? But at the time time, we were trying to be analytical of it, look inside it. And those were hard things to pull together. I guess you're right--there was a bit of despair and paranoia. But there might even have been some pleasure in the despair. That's a dangerous thing to say, and a whole other--

S: No, I know exactly what you mean--how there's a certain buzz to contemplating this totally bleak, apocalyptic, 'no way out', scenario, a reveling in it...
G: Except it can tip over into making you properly depressed and completely inert and deeply unwell and unhappy. But I didn't have too much of that. And at that time there was funk and R&B to help me. And then later hip hop. But at that point, the tail end of disco, I was getting fed up with the whole indie thing anyway. There was a concurrence between getting a bit fed up when indie became aware of itself and became something definable and something with its own set of [conventions] and becoming pretty disinterested it. Then, at this period at the tail end of disco and the beginning of hip hop, I woke up to funk and R&B. Which I'd not grown up with. I'd grown up in South Wales with a strictly whitebread kind of diet. It might have been left of center and hugely influenced by black music, but I didn't know that, I didn't know where the black music was in Henry Cow. I didn't know where the black music was in anything. I hadn't found the funk. So that was a whole adventure, discovering how all these questions of music and identity and the body and power were reinscribed in the whole black popular music and dance culture. That was a whole other way of thinking and feeling about these things.