INTERVIEW WITH GREEN of SCRITTI POLITTI - page 4

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S: With the third single of the new pop Scritti, 'Asylums In Jerusalem", the B-Side is 'Jacques Derrida', which I'm still very fond of. The lyric is a bit cute, that central idea of 'I'm in love with Jacques Derrida'. But musically I've never quite been able to place it, that rhythm. Is it country, or Cajun?
G: I don't really know where that song's coming from either, but it's my own mutant take on The Kinks. When I went to Qales and listened to Aretha Franklin for the first time, I was also actually listening to first Kinks records for the first time. A lot of their stuff I never knew. So a big influence on that song would have been The Kinks, and there was a country influence on the Kinks.

S: Given your massive love of hip hop now, and teaming up with MCs on Anomie and Bonhomie, what do you reckon on your own rather jejeune attempt at rapping on 'Jacques Derrida'?
G: [explodes with laughter] Oh my God, I'd forgotten. Oh my GOD. [slowly pulling himself together]. Well, I guess I'm laughing, so as long as I don't have to actually hear it, the idea of it is... funny.

S: In the rap section, you go on about "desire is so contagious/I want to eat your nation state". I like those lines. 'Desire' was a big buzzword at the time, sort of drifting over from journals like Semiotexte, into the hipper end of pop culture, wasn't it?
G: Yeah, desire was all over the place! Desire was... everybody was writing about it, thinking about it: what was it, where was it, what should we do about it. Hahahahaha!

S: Another cute line is the nod to Wittgenstein in "Getting' Havin' Holdin'", where you say 'it's as true as the Tractatus'.
G: To me, a lot of it is funny. 'True like the Tractatus'--it's funny, I think. We just used to laugh. It has its levels.

S: I loved Songs To Remember at the time, and probably this wasn't your intention and from your point of view would have been considered a shortfall, but it was a big student fave that Michaelmas term, all the through the autumn and into the winter, you'd hear it in a lot of student rooms. But I imagine you had your heart set more on people who buy their records at Woolworths. The difference between Songs To Remember and the third-stage of Scritti, with Cupid & Psyche, is that by that point you seem to perfect this style of lyric writing where the words can pass for a love song but has these aporias cleverly woven in there So they work as love songs, but they have little mind-bombs inside. Songs to Remember, though, it's difficult to know what your average pop consumer would have made of a song like "Asylums in Jerusalem". From the title on down, it's not really yer typical pop ditty. It's something to do with Nietzche, right?
G: Asylums in Jerusalem was Nietzche's thing about the preponderance of desert prophets, of seers and sages. They were Jesus's competitors, and they went into the desert and sat atop forty foot poles and had visions. There were so many they had to build asylums in Jerusalem to house them.

S: So Monty Python's Life of Brian is based on reality! That you could virtually trip over messiahs in Israel back in those days.
G: That was Nietzche's point. Yes you're quite right, I did go from doing that kind of thing to writing songs that weren't called things like 'Asylums in Jerusalem'. But I am again now! Hahahaha. Oh my God, it's funny listening to my lyrics of today... I don't know what anyone would make of 'em.

S: I didn't notice this until only a few days ago, but I dug out Anomie and Bonhomie, and noticed that it continues the Scritti running theme of consumer disposables. So you have a bottlecap, echoing back to the discarded beer bottle cap photocopied and all grainy and grubby-looking on Peel Sessions, but on Anomie, it's this ultra-glossy, hyper-realist painting of a bottle cap. So it's sort of fusing the grubby realism of the do-it-yourself era Scritti cover design with the glossy glamour of 'Sweetest'/'Faithless'/Cupid & Psyche.
G: I guess the tools to hand back in the early days were the photocopier, and you would gather what there was and make use of the photocopier. So it would be whatever was on the kitchen table as the record labels were being hand stamped and the covers being folded by hand--stuff like bottle caps and match boxes. Nowadays anyone can sit around with a computer and fiddle round and take an ordinary bottle top and stick your name on it so it looks like a found object--but it's still an extension of that original design approach, in some dimension.

S: Songs To Remember was successful, but it didn't turn you into a pop star, as desired. There was never the Top 40 hit you were looking for. So you hooked up with Bob Last as your manager. He's a very smart guy, grounded in left politics and critical theory, so was he a kindred spirit?
G: Yeah. Fast Product was always very interesting. I'd always liked what was going on with them. Geoff was very tight with Bob and had a lot of respect for him. And then he had the Human League and ABC.

S: I hadn't quite realized until doing the book that Last had this amazing trinity of New Pop pioneers under his management wing: ABC, Human League, Scritti. Oh, and Heaven 17 too.
G: I think he thought the same way about things as people like Martin Fry. I never spoke to Martin about it, but I know from people like Ian Craig Marsh from Heaven 17, who I still see--he's one of the few people from my past I still occasionally see--that we would have shared a lot of common ground. And I know that intellectually and politically Bob was coming from the same area.

S: How did the connection with David Gamson and Fred Maher come about?
G: With Gamson, I went into Rough Trade one day and played Geoff some of what I'd started to write and it had obviously got a black American New York influence and as far as I can recall, he had just visited ZE records. He'd just got back from New York, and he had overheard Gamson having the meeting ahead of him [with ZE boss Michael Zilkha]. Gamson was still a schoolboy, he was at school, or maybe it was Sarah Lawrence college, the equivalent of sixth form, but he'd made a track at a local studio and taken it to Zilkha to see if ZE would put it out. Zilkha passed, but Geoff heard it through the door of the office and said he liked it and he put it out on Rough Trade. And he came back and when he heard my new stuff he said 'you should hear this thing this kid in New York has done.' And then they sent David by mistake--in typical Rough Trade fashion--a test pressing not of his song but of "The 'Sweetest Girl'", So he got to hear that, and his twin passions were--he was Anglophile, so he liked the whole Robert Wyatt thing, but he also knew Parliament-Funkadelic, he'd grown up with black radio stations in New York. So Geoff said, 'I think you should meet him' and he flew Gamson over.

S: So with the Wyatt and black music passions in common, you had a lot of musical affinity. But was he different from you, and the original Scrits, in that he was not so much of a theory head?
G: He wasn't really ... It's wrong to say that in one way, because he's an incredibly bright guy. But he was that much younger, he was still at Sarah Lawrence, still living with his folks. His mother was a dancer, and his father was an opera guy, an assistant to Bernstein, so it was a very different world. Although they were liberal and intellectual up to a point, it was worlds apart. Which wasn't to say that he wasn't... I mean, if you go to his house in LA now, you'll find really pretty interesting bookshelves. He's a smart guy.

S: But for you too, wasn't there a sense in which for a while the technicality of making these ultra-modern, super-precise records kind of took over for a while, eclipsing the theory side of things? Because making Cupid & Psyche, that was incredibly intricate work, wasn't it?
G: Yeah, it took a long, long time, and an awful lot of money. That record was interested in exploiting all the new technology at the time, and it was also about expressing those really black pop influences, the world of sixteenth notes and syncopation. A whole new language of talking about music for me. I had never spoken of bars and beats or anything before in my life. So there was a certain exhilaration in discovering that and being surrounded by musicians who could do that. But at the same time as big an influence-- although it was never expressed--was hip hop, which was what we were doing by day as it were, or by night. And I didn't stop reading and writing when I moved to New York. I was as avidly reading whatever I could--philosophy, and making notes about it and its relationship with dance music or whatever.

S: Cupid & Psyche, some of the 'love songs' on it, I'm thinking especially of "A Little Knowledge", there's quite a bleak vision of love there. "Now I know to love you/Is not to know you". Is that related to Lacan and the idea that there's no such thing as the sexual relationship, that you can't actually relate to anyone, really?
G: Yeah, that sounds about right.

S: Which is a terribly gloomy view of human love and relationships.
G: I'm very much in love now.

S: Oh are you--great!
G: Yeah. I am. And very happy too. I'm not a stranger to … I must admit I'm beginning to flag a little here. Just a bit knackered. I've been singing all morning and stuff. But please feel free to ring me again tomorrow if there's anything else. Have you and I never met?

S: Around Provision, for Melody Maker.
G: Wow. That was a low point, I think. Where was I?

S: In London. One thing that surprised me--although it makes sense now given your love of folk music--is I asked what you liked of current music and you said 'I like the Proclaimers' and that really threw me for a loop! I remember you seemed a bit worn out that day. You'd been on the treadmill of interviews around that record.
G: I didn't enjoy that record at all, and I enjoyed promoting it even less.

S: That was going to be my final question, actually. What went wrong with Provision? Was the process of recording just too protracted?
G: I don't know. I didn't take the necessary time out to figure out what I was doing. After Cupid & Psyche, we did a very big world promotional tour, because we wouldn't play live. So they said 'go round all around the world and do every little TV and radio station that there is. And then go back in the studio'. Which we were keen to do.

S: So have you really never played live since that Brighton gig supporting Gang of Four?
G: No. Which is quite extraordinary. I did the Mojo Awards and I went along with Carl from the Libertines to present an award to Geoff Travis, last year, and I was most shocked to be approached by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And they said 'we just wanted to say what enormous fans we are of your early music'. They knew all that 'Skank Bloc Bologna' stuff. They were playing it on their tour bus. They were so polite and so knowledgeable about it.

S: I knew they were big fans of Gang of Four but I didn't know they liked Scritti too!
G: They knew it all. It was amazing. I think they were surprised that A/ I was there and B/ that I was alive and C/ basically that I'd made a living out of music for 20 odd years and had only made four albums and didn't play live.

S: Did Cupid's success make you quite well off then?
G: I think it must have. I don't know how, but it's kept me afloat for years and years.

S: The Miles Davis cover version of "Perfect Way" must have helped. But you were saying about Provision...
G: I think with Provision, I was possibly holed up in White Plains living in a hotel, for a very long time--going probably quite barmy and losing a little bit of critical distance. HAHAHAHA!!! So I made sure I had plenty of that in the following years.