Rip It Up & Start Again: PostPunk 1978-1984 by Simon Reynolds

S: You can sense this stuff coming through towards the end of the do-it-yourself era Scritti, you can hear it in 4 A Sides, there's a kind of funk element to tracks like "P.As" and "Bibbly-O-Tek".
G: I suppose so, although it's a completely calamitously inept dabbling in that area. That was interesting from a musical perspective, the way that you can actually learn to listen, you can learn to understand the funk--which was a very, very pleasurable thing to do. In those days, I recognized some of the surface features of it without grasping much of what was going on inside it, dyaknowwhatimean?

S: 'OPEC-Immac' is one of my favorite songs on Peel Sessions, it's got a really odd structure to it, it's Scritti music reaching this point of near-disintegration, but still retains a lot of the melodic beauty, this sort of melodic eerieness that's really haunting. The lyrics are very fractured too. Can you recall what that song was trying to 'say'?
G: I can remember playing it live at the YMCA and Ian Penman playing saxophone on it, when we were supporting The Fall. What can I remember about it as a song? Well given that I can only faintly recall a bit of it...

S: There's this spoken word part, it's only semi-audible, but you sound very fraught and insistent, like maybe you're having a near-tearful argument with someone, desperately trying to get your point across, make yourself understood.
G: I think Niall was saying some of that, and so was I. Again, it was expressive of that whole thing about language and identity. But Scritti was also a group that was… we partied very hard. As they say nowadays! We were always pretty poorly. We were kind of cheese sandwich vegetarians for years. What does that account for? It's a kind of scratching, collapsing, irritated, dissatisfied music. I was listening to some music the other night, on 6 FM or whatever it's called, BBC 6, their alternative rock station, and I was struck by all the new bands: there was no trepidation. I had no sense that these people were playing with anything that they were slightly frightened of--either in themselves, or in the music. No sense that they going anywhere where they weren't sure where they would end up.

S: With so much of the music of that period, but especially Scritti, there is precisely what you're talking about: a feeling of precariousness. There's a real sense of anxiety, people grappling with these deep doubts and exorbitant hopes: where do we go next after punk? How can we make our good intentions actually have any purchase on the world? That's what I find so inspring about that whole period. Possibly it was delusory, that shared feeling that music could have that degree of power. But it seemed like for a lot of those bands, believing that it might have that power meant that it therefore became very important to work out exactly the best way of directing one's energy. To locate the correct path, the righteous way forward, became a very urgent thing.
G: I think you've put that very succinctly. Because of what was happening politically at the time. And also because of what had seeped out to us from academia--even those who hadn't gone directly into higher education--there was a lot of intellectual stuff in the air. And music became an interesting case in point for a lot of these ideas. We didn't understand fully what was going on fully with Deleuze & Guattari or Lacan or Kristeva, but there was that stuff around. But there was also a whole running fight with the BNP. And beyond those things there was just something we'd grown up with--the power of pop music. We all knew about that latent utopian possibility in the music, a transformative power, what would later be called 'counter-hegemonic'. So there was a real sense of that potential in music and a real interest in talking about it. But most of all there was a lot of music, a lot of making music. Dyouknowwhatimean?

S: Well that comes through clearly--I mean, it's obvious that underneath all the cerebration and deep thought, there is this pure musicality. If there was no musicality involved, no pleasure or beauty, it wouldn't really be worth much at all. And there's mystery too--the mystery of melodic beauty.
G: Yes. And it was also a massively romantic project, I would have to say.

S: You mentioned Kristeva and all that stuff, and although I went to university, that kind of thing--Barthes, Foucault, et al--that was stuff I read in my spare time, for fun. My actual course was History. It's really people like you, and some of the journalists on NME who quoted Barthes, who turned me onto this stuff. You have no idea… well probably you do actually, because people must have contacted you guys all the time at the squat, cos of the Scritti records--but that 'Scritto's Republic' thing, the pages from the imaginary book, on the sleeve of Peel Sessions, that was like a window opening out onto a whole world for me. The whole idea discussed in those two pages-- language as a cage, the prison-house of consciousness, grammar structuring the reality you lived within... Language as a problem, rather than something transparent, a tool that you could use in a simple empowering way... Well, being introduced to that idea was so interesting. You wrote that text, right? It's a really eloquent piece of writing. Was that influenced by reading Althusser?
G:No, Althusser was some years before. I don't know what I was reading at that point. What ever cropped up. Whatever turned up at the squat when someone would say 'have you heard of this person?' A useful thing was Compendium, the bookstore in Camden. Compendium was a really important spot. Did you know it?

S: I used to go there all the time, when I lived in London, I was really sad when it got closed down. It was full of pamphlets and fanzines, wasn't it?
G: Yeah, mad stuff. You could go downstairs and root about, and spend hours in there.

S: Was that the first place in the UK to have the early translations of the French post-structuralist theory?
G: One of them. I'd started on that stuff in the university bookshops in Leeds, there were some good ones up there. Compendium was an important place for a lot of people, its name comes up often, talking to people since. To this day people would say how important it was. It was to us, anyway.

S: So in the 'Scritto's Republic' text, it ends with this little Warwickshire folk rhyme, a "counting out rhyme". "Vizzery, vazzery, vozery vem/Tizzery, tazzery, tozery tem/Hiram, Jiram, cockrem, spirem/Poplar, rollin, gem". The sense-shredding power of folk-speech or something!. Of course at the time it would never have occurred to me in a million years that you'd have been into traditional music! Did you do actually do research in English folk music?
G: I did. I actually did a lot of research into Welsh traditional things, at the national archives in Cardiff. This is many years before. I was looking into a Welsh tradition called the Murray Flwyd, or the White Mare, which is when the skeleton of a horse is exhumed and taken round the houses at a certain time of year. Basically you had to join in with the people that came around. It was mixture of.... they were menacing, it was anarchic, and you entered into almost an MC battle. The people outside had to come up with a rhyme and you inside had to come up with a rhyme to match it. There was a sort of contest-cum-orgy. It sounded good to me!

S: On 4 A Sides, there's one particularly beautiful piece of music, "PAs". I love the sinuous melody, the sheer groove of the song. But lyrically that's partly about fascism, right? The myth that it could never happen here, in the UK, land of moderation, whereas you're saying, well, no, it could happen, all that's needed is for the right circumstances of economic collapse and mass unemployment, and for "the language" to "shut down" like it did in Germany in 1933, and Italy in 1920?
G: That's one that's hard to remember. There's the bit that I quoted in the Early CD sleevenotes, 'til doledrums roll us into battle". That song operates exactly as you mentioned earlier--it takes a line through what you would otherwise think of in sedimented terms, in spatial metaphors... it cuts across from the basic structure [of political reality] to unconscious day-to-day political stuff. It's a trawl, really…

S: So it goes from the bailiffs and the debts to resurgent fascism to--
G: Yeah, all that stuff. I think around about that time was when Geoff came in and bailed me out, as he has done on more than one occasion, and started giving me a wage. Or us a wage. It's funny, cos there were no contracts in those days, it was all just...

S: Trust.
G: Trust, yes. It was like, 'if you need some money to live, here's some money to live', and 'hen the record comes out, this is your half, this is our half' I don't know how ever it worked, but it worked. It was good.

S: You've talked a lot in the past about the Brighton gig in early 1980, supporting Gang of Four, and the nervous collapse. Was that the first time you suffered a cripplng panic attack?
G: That was the first.

S: You thought you were dying.
G: Yeah. It was the whole ambulance with the sirens going to the hospital deal.

S: This was after the gig, right?
G: I think maybe I'd made it through the gig on that occasion. We weren't living too healthily... I think maybe if I'd known what was going on, I'd have gone for some help with the whole panic attack thing. Everything from the drinking to the speed to... It's like, yipes, the very thought of it now makes me feel... weak!

S: Was there a sense too in which you were also thinking too much, worrying too much? That all that--worrying about the right path to follow--made you ill? And you must have been reading tons and tons of books, constantly.
G: There's something that certainly happens, and it happens to me--where the querying of the significance relatively of various things seems to contaminate your whole life, to a point where you might describe it as mental illness. I don't think I've ever had it that bad, but there's definitely a continuum. It's nasty, when you do, on a few occasions, reach that point of finding minutiae overburdened with potential significance. D'you-know-what-I-mean?. I know what that's like.

S: So your family rescued you.
G: They did a bit. They got me a place in Wales, to recuperate. I was never kind of deliriously bonkers, though.

S: Hahahahahahaha.
G: I possibly was actually! No, I certainly wasn't, but I did go back to Wales and got it back together in the country, man. Which is something I've had recourse to do at various other points.

S: Like in the Nineties?
G: Yeah, more of the same.

S: So, you mentioned this earlier, but this postpunk legend turns out to be true---the story of Green going back to Wales to get well and writing a whole book in order to convince his band mates that it was ideologically correct for Scritti to go in a more poppy direction?
G: It wasn't quite a book, but there was a lot of it.

S: I think the idea's quite glorious. Heroic, even!
G: Somewhere I've probably got all those writings still. I've just moved boxes and boxes of writings from a place I had in Wales up to London. I like to leave the boxes closed. But I took the risk of opening one of them and I pulled out a notebook, literally the topmost thing, and what I found was a four or five page account of my meeting Miles Davis. Going to his apartment. I'd forgotten completely I'd done this, but afterwards I'd gone back to wherever I was staying in New York at the time and I wrote the whole encounter down in great detail--what he was wearing, what we said, what we did, what we listened to. Absolutely fascinating.

S: Well, you should publish it somewhere.
G: Nah. It's possibly of interest to anyone interested in Miles, but it's just a detailed diary entry about a day spent with Miles. But I don't know what those other writings are like. I certainly wrote a lot in those years.

S: In terms of the notes you wrote to convert the band, and where your thinking was changing at this time, was one of the ideas this post-structuralist, Derridean idea that problematized the very notion of the margin? And you realizing that postpunk in general, and Scritti in particular, was based around this obsolete opposition of margin versus center, with the marginal being celebrated as a zone of authenticity and purity beyond the conventional forms of the mainstream?
G: Well, I didn't believe in authenticity or purity, and part of the whole thing was to militate against uncritical ideas of expressivity, authenticity, identity, the 'real' you, the 'real' voice. I didn't buy into any of that and part of the project was to draw attention to that. Part of going to New York and working with Arif Mardin, that was again uppermost in my mind, was of being true to an idea of inauthenticity. So when you're talking about Derrida, do you mean 'the frame'?

S: No--and here I'm going by my memories of your interviews in the music press at the time--I got the impression that you felt independent label music had become obsessively marginal, in the sense of willfully difficult and contrivedly unconventional. So the shift between the first three EPs and 'The 'Sweetest Girl'/ Songs to Remember was a shift from self-conscious marginality to a deconstructionist pop music. And whether Scritti ever subscribed to ideas of authenticity or marginality or purity, certainly a lot of the groups you'd have been associated with originally--your postpunk fellow-travellers like PiL and Pop Group--they were totally bound-up with those notions.
G: But you know, the metaphor of the margin implies a centre and the centre is conservatively defined, and so by extension the margins are conservative margins. There are these edges, but they are very conservatively determined. So I didn't really like marginality with a big M, it's something I got more mistrustful of.

S: Was there a point at which you actually handed in your Communist Party card?
G: Right from the beginning, I was active in the Young Communists at the same time as I was having trouble with the whole idea of the scientific status of the science of history that Marxism purported to be. But that didn't seem to mean that I had to leave the party. I presumed that those conversations would be had within the Party and the ground would shift. I was working in the same building at the Marxism Today people, all that crew, some of who were very bright and very interesting. But that didn't happen. We're talking only about a relatively short period of time but there just wasn't a possibility that any serious discussions about Marxism were going to go on inside the Young Communist League or the Communist Party. So I just stopped going.

S: The last song on Early is the B-Side of 'The 'Sweetest Girl', 'Lions After Slumber', which was always one of my favorite songs of yours. Where does the title come from?
G: 'Lions after slumber/unvanquishable number'--that's Blake, isn't it? I think it's the slumbering proletariat--that's basically what he was writing about, in his way.

S: The lyrics, though, are more like Whitman's idea of "I myself contain multitudes". The idea of the self as a population of heterogenous desires, impulses, states of mind, bodily attitudes, langours, fleeting perceptions... And the connection between Whitman and Blake would be there's that kind of slippage between this internal population and a kind of political populism, a rude democracy. Whitman, if I recall correctly, kind of maps his own body onto the bustling, heterogenous masses of America.
G: "Lions" is the listy one, right. What is it to do with, if I had to say something about it, it's just a little relativistic hymn. It's anti-singularity. It would mean that I am made up of a million... not points, but intersections. Something... something completely fucking stupid like that! You have to bear in mind I don't remember what on earth I was going on about. I can't recall the lyrics. Thankfully!

S: How did Tom and Niall and Matthew and the rest of the crew respond to the New Direction for Scritti's music? When they read your theoretical jottings, were they instantly swayed or were they guarded about it for some while?
G: They came to Wales and stayed in the cottage for I don't know how long--long enough for everyone to read and digest it. A bit of time. The only thing I do remember from that time in the cottage is that we were attacked by a group of bikers who kicked the front door of the cottage in. Even in Wales, you see, we could never get away from people who didn't like the look of you and wanted to kick your head in. I really didn't know which way it was going to go, or what people would make of my writings. And although the big shift was accepted in theory, I think the lived practice of it didn't sit well with Niall particularly. We were just under the general pressures of doing what we were doing, and doing other things extra-curricularly that had their own pressures... I don't remember precisely when it was, but the radical gesture of the move to pop was not as wholeheartedly embraced by Niall in particular. And there came a point where we were playing with two bass players--one who could do the funk stuff, and Niall who couldn't. And I guess from then on it became a kind of untenable position. But that possibly had a lot to do with how badly I handled things.

S: So do you reproach yourself then, for what happened with the original Scritti members?
G: Oh, I'd reproach myself for the whole fucking enterprise. I should have stayed in bed, or gone to Birmingham, or done something else. I think I was probably... well, we were young. I don't know what to say, other than that Niall was one of the fantastic influences on my life, and continues to be. But you drift apart. Things fall apart!

S: You're not in contact then.
G: No. I'm not in contact with anybody from the past, at all, ever, in any way.

S: There was this process where it was gradually revealed that, even in the earliest days of the collective, you were always the main musical figure in terms of writing the songs. And so, effectively, the leader.
G: I genuinely didn't think of myself as the leader of anything. It just felt like something we were doing. People around me, like Dennis, this guy who was another art student from Leeds, he was an incredibly bright person who'd come and say he'd just read this in something, and 'you should read it'. Or 'here's some writing by Eagleton, and what do you think of it?' And Niall was obviously very bright. There was just a lot of bright, funny, dynamic, interesting people around.

S: So all that fed into what you were doing lyrically, and in terms of conceptualizing the project. But in practical terms, musically, it was you, right? The songwriter.
G: Yeah. But there were various reasons why that didn't seem in itself feel particularly privileged. I don't think we would have let it be. I wasn't quietly going to bed at nights thinking 'I'm the one that's writing all the songs'. That really would never have crossed my mind, to think that that was a privileged thing. I knew that I wasn't any cleverer or anything else than any of the people around me.

S: It is an amazing thing, this idea of this musical collective where there were four or five times as many non-musical members as the core band, and where the non-musicians actually contributed.
G: It wasn't like everybody would come in the rehearsal room when you were figuring stuff out, but everybody expressed their opinion, I think. It didn't seem strange to me. And before punk, the only band I'd actually been close to, within sniffable distance, where you could see what the musicians might be like as real human beings, that was Henry Cow. And of course they were always reading and talking. And they walked it like they talked it. It was a whole life. It wasn't about a career in music. It was about a whole life.