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.