JONATHAN WRIGHT
In the great pantheon of unlikely pop stars during the 80s, of which let’s face it there were many, Green Gartside stood out. It wasn’t that he didn’t have the good looks or musical chops, he most certainly did, but it was more that his songs were so fiercely, unapologetically clever. Here was a musician whose Scritti Politti project was originally run as a kind of collective and played improvised live shows. A lapsed Marxist whose band name was mangled Italian for “political writing” and who named a song Jacques Derrida after the French philosopher.
Yet for a while, following the release of their second album Cupid & Psyche 85 in 1985, Scritti Politti were bona fide mainstream pop stars around the world. “It’s a period I remember with absolute dread and fondness,” he says, before bursting out with laughter.
In truth, as becomes clear during Classic Pop’s two-hour conversation, Gartside is a man subject to bouts of self-doubt and anxiety. It is not unreasonable to suggest that he really wasn’t cut out to be a pop star, a status he found to be a kind of “exquisite agony”. But, as Gartside himself acknowledges, it was a fame he courted, albeit indirectly. “It was not the success that I was going for, it was an attempt to make a certain kind of music that interested me,” he says. “I liked the idea of pop music. Along with that came an obvious recognition that there would be a kind of ‘playing the pop person’ as well.”
To understand why Gartside might have made such a decision, it helps to go back to 1980 and a Scritti gig supporting Gang Of Four. Gartside hadn’t been looking after himself physically – “I was never very good at that and I’m still absolutely rubbish,” he says – and he collapsed after the show. He returned to his childhood home in Wales to convalesce and began to rethink his approach to music. Out was the idea of “getting away as far as possible from song structure, melody and all the rest of it”. In was the idea that Michael Jackson could be considered to be as radical as, say, Captain Beefheart, a rebellion against the idea of “pop music being thought of as secondary, derivative, inauthentic, inexpressive, commodified, inessential – all that stuff.”
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May 2018
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