The band was a lot ‘tighter’ at the Birmingham venue and their repertoire had expanded to include some of Green’s 19080’s material.

The audience really seemed to enjoy the evening and Green announced that we had been the best audience on the tour!

Sadly, Green had to rush off to get a train back to London, as his wife was ill.

I hope she gets betters soon…

Green’s green grass of home
AIDAN SMITH

THE day that the great pop eccentric Green Gartside retired from the concert stage passed off unnoticed. Back then, the question on everyone’s lips was “Who shot JR?”

Way back then, the Gang of Four were either a) a nasty bunch of Chinese Commies, or b) a confrontational post-punk band from Leeds, but not yet c) the port-sipping Roy Jenkins and the rest of the Council for Social Democracy.

And Lady Diana Spencer was a mere kindergarten teacher and Green Gartside lookalike.

If Gartside, leading light in Scritti Politti, was an arrogant man instead of a shy one - more shy even than Lady Diaphanous when she hid behind that blonde fringe and unwittingly flashed her thighs - then he would examine what passes for a “pop comeback” these days and scoff.

“There are human years, there are dog years, and then there are Scritti Politti years,” he says with a wry smile over his Diet Coke in a rehearsal studio in King’s Cross. “They seem to go on a bit longer.”

He can say that again. The just-released album White Bread Black Beer is a genuine Event; it’s only his fifth ever. But his return to live performance is even more remarkable. Not since 1980, while supporting the Gang of Four (the band, not the Commies), has a venue echoed to that syrupy sweet voice. Paralysed after a severe panic attack, he thought he was dying.

“That was such a ghastly experience and I never thought I’d play live again,” says Gartside. “But as I get older, all my anxieties - and I’ve got lots - seem to be ebbing away. I’m happy to report to your younger readers that there are far more good things about growing old than there are bad.”

Gartside will be 51 on June 22. The hair has darkened and he now sports a goatee in keeping with his fascination with hip-hop beats, but he doesn’t look much different from the pin-up deconstructionist who created the blue-eyed soul soundtrack for the trendiest 1980s wine bars with hits like ‘The Sweetest Girl’, ‘Wood Beez’ and ‘Absolute’. The voice is intact, too.

“Well, I never used it that much,” he laughs. “So far we’ve played eight gigs, all of them intimate little affairs. It’s been me and some friends I met in a pub in Hackney that I’ll never name because I don’t want Japanese fans making pilgrimages.”

One by one, his backing band amble into the studio. “The girl behind the bar, Alyssa McDonald who’s Scottish, is my bassist. The drummer’s a plumber.” Changed days for Gartside, who persuaded Miles Davis to play on one of his old albums, and was covered by the jazz legend notoriously unimpressed by upstart white boy musicians.

Still big in Japan, Scritti Politti have just been booked to play some stadium dates in the Far East. If anything, though, he seems more daunted by gig No.9, in front of his mother Janette and a contingent from Wales including Auntie Monica. “Mum is frighteningly sprightly and highly opinionated. She’s never seen me on stage before, not even in school plays.”

So where has he been? “I went a bit barmy. I didn’t enjoy the modicum of success I had. It felt insincere and ill-deserved. I hated success but I knew I would also hate failure, so I decided that the best course of action was to do nothing.”

Admitting to possessing a “shocking” memory, he finds it difficult to account for the lost decades. “Oh, just down the pub,” he says. What, for the 12 years between the third and fourth albums, and the seven until now? “Well, there was some walking in the countryside…”

Gartside says he was never cut out for pop stardom. He was certainly never cut out for a name like Strohmeyer, especially after a teacher at Caerphilly Boys’ Technical School inquired: “That’s German, isn’t it?” It was Austrian, but still earned him taunts of “Nazi” and regular playground kickings. When his parents separated he adopted his stepfather’s name of Gartside.

There are lots of references to fathers on White Bread Black Beer; Gartside didn’t realise quite how many until he wrote down the lyrics. He doesn’t remember much of his real dad, a travelling salesman. “He died before I had the chance to be reconciled with him. He tried to get in touch with me through my old record company but I didn’t want to see him. It was all a bit of a mess. Do I regret that? Yes, I wish I knew what he looked like.”

Gartside has to take a call about the forthcoming shows. He quickly gets agitated and explains why afterwards. “No promo, no T-shirts, no badges.” Only a fully paid-up pop agitator from the Thatcher Years would fret about a lack of badges.

Precociously political, he was a member of the Young Communists at 15. After art-school he was more interested in ideas than pop, but Scritti Politti - a bastardisation of the Italian for “political writing” - emerged from a squat in Camden, with the manky living-room snapped for the cover of 4 A Sides becoming an iconic image of the post-punk scene.

“The squat didn’t have a bathroom,” he recalls with a chuckle. “But once a month we all trooped up to Kentish Town Public Baths, whether we needed a bath or not.

“I didn’t buy into Marxism as the science of history that it claimed to be. But we sold anti-fascist newspapers on the streets and were always getting into fights with the NF. We thought that capitalism was horrible and inequitable and wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could get rid of it? We lost that one.”

“I remain interested in the real philosophical, epistemological questions about knowledge, truth and all these now very unfashionable concepts. I’m still thinking about these things, but politically I’m pretty disenfranchised and don’t feel I have a home anywhere.”

In the 1980s, Gartside thought he could have some serious intellectual fun in a pop context. He wrote a song called ‘Jacques Derrida’ in tribute to the father of deconstruction. In a Q&A he told Smash Hits! that the person he’d most like to receive a letter from was the philosopher Christopher Norris. He got the letter, and later met Derrida (”Terrifying intellect, surprisingly suburban house”), but pop could not keep him amused.

“We got a lot of money from Virgin and made incredibly expensive records. We thought we could be ironic and subversive, but when you end up on American Bandstand in front of who knows how many millions, you soon realise there’s no space to play clever buggers. It’s just the machine, grinding on, and you’re part of it.”

For most of the 1990s, Green was holed up in Wales in the village of Usk, his idea of a grand day out back in childhood. The landlord of his adopted local worked hard to keep the “Isn’t that Scritti Politti playing darts?” inquiries to the absolute minimum.

Was he ever suicidal? “No, my problems are not depressive. The banes of my life are anxiety and boredom. Music is good at keeping them in check, and so is Guinness.”

And marriage. The story of how Gartside met his wife Alice is pure 1980s. “She was a friend of Glen [Heaven 17] Gregory’s wife and her parents ran this anarcho-arts lab for delinquents called Meat Whistle where all the Sheffield bands like the Human League and Cabaret Voltaire got started.” But when he moved back to Wales, Gartside cut off all ties, including personal ones.

The story of how they were reunited is pure Scritti Politti. “Alice tracked me down and started sending me these beautifully illustrated letters. We had a trial meeting in Swansea, and that went well. She suffers badly from ME, and one day I was on a train thinking about how well she copes with her illness and I suddenly thought: ‘Bloody hell, I’ve known this wonderful girl for more than 20 years, I really should get my act together…”

Return of Green, the pop-star philosopher
(Filed: 08/06/2006)

Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside has returned with a new album buzzing with ideas and pop hooks, writes Adam Sweeting

If pop decided to appoint a philosopher-in-chief, Green Gartside would be odds-on favourite, since his songs with Scritti Politti are beehives of intellectual theorising disguised beneath sleek, sweet musical surfaces.

Green Gartside
Exquisite harmonies: Green Gartside

His new album, White Bread Black Beer, is his first since 1999’s Anomie & Bonhomie, and represents a creative re-boot. He recorded it alone at home in Hackney, using an Apple Mac, a few keyboards and guitars, and it’s released on Rough Trade, where the Scritti saga began in the late ’70s.

The tracks shimmer with swoon, some melodies and exquisitely feathery harmonies, yet Green insists that the disc is rather primitive and not at all musically accomplished. When he needed musicians to play live, a momentous decision for a man who hadn’t performed on stage after suffering terrifying stage fright 26 years earlier, he recruited them from regulars at his local pub. “Ralph, the drummer, is a plumber,” Green explains. “Dickie, the guitarist, works for Friends of the Earth, and Dave’s a builder. They’re not professional musicians, except Roger, the keyboard player.”

It sounds reminiscent of the original Scritti Politti, which began as a loose collective of anarchists and activists in a squat in Camden Town, except that Scritti Mk1 operated communally, subjecting any proposal to stringent discussion and dissection. Despite the egalitarian trappings, there’s no doubt who’s controlling the new Scritti.

“It’s related to the old Scritti,” Green protests, “though it doesn’t have the production costs or my home address written on the sleeve like the old records had, which led to all sorts of interesting encounters. Either schoolboys who had run away from minor public schools would turn up, or European anarchists would bang on the door.” And his new songs? “The lyrics are a mixture of the very personal with references to bits of philosophy and politics. It’s nicely mashed up to make a chewy breakfast.”

The first Scritti was so ideologically hardcore, it could have been Pol Pot’s favourite band. The first single, Skank Bloc Bologna, evoked the riots and anarchy erupting in late-’70s Italy.

His Camden politburo were devastated when Green succumbed to reprehensible bourgeois individualism, transforming Scritti into his personal vehicle, in which he wrote the songs and hired backing musicians. He left Rough Trade, signed to Virgin, and jetted to the US, home to the roaring turbines of capitalism. “That seemed to me a more radical gesture than staying home and doing another tour with Joy Division, or whatever, which didn’t interest me remotely. And indie music settled into being what indie is.”

Liberated by his relocation to New York, Green forged the album Cupid & Psyche ‘85, an intoxicating melange of pop, soul, funk and studio technology, teeming with gems like Perfect Way, Wood Beez and Absolute. Green’s songs had lyrics that picked holes in pop’s very fabric. Miles Davis, then passing through his own computer-funk metamorphosis, recorded Perfect Way. His rapport with Green made critics salute. Had Green heard Miles’s comment that in order to escape from one’s past, it was useful to have a bad memory? “If he said that, I’m in complete agreement with him. There seems to me no point in thinking about yesterday, and with sufficient amounts of Guinness, this is quite easily achieved. You may lose some happy remembrances, but you also will not be plagued with regret and remorse.”

Back in Blighty, Green was castigated as the Rod Stewart of post-punk. Now he was suddenly a preening MTV pop star. “I did get a fair bit of stick from people who had been close to me in the Rough Trade young communist years, but it didn’t trouble me at all,” he says scornfully. “I think they were a bit disgusted, but I was gone by then.” The tension of being a double agent, pop star in public, semiotic saboteur in secret, became insupportable.

In the ’90s, he fled the limelight, opting for seclusion in Wales. Intellectual superiority carried a designer price tag. “I’m always either terribly anxious or terribly bored and terribly unhappy with myself. I guess

I have classic low self-esteem, and the only time and place you can escape is while you’re making music.”

Contentment of a sort has arrived. He recently married his girlfriend, Alys, and feels settled in Hackney. Green even permits himself an uncharacteristic rocking-chair moment. “As long as the job of professional pop musician hasn’t evaporated in the next 15 years, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t continue making records until I’m an old man. I’m quite keen on that idea, if allowed.”

As for sensitive teens, they must be out there. But the insensitive teens probably outnumber them and have much louder voices.

Ernst - yeah I know what you mean. It’s kind of embarrassing. I assume whoever is responsible for the page has done a search of anyone who’s mentioned Scritti and added them - not a bad way of letting people who’ve liked stuff in the past know there’s a new record out. I’m not been familiar with myspace until recently but it looks like the kind of site that helps people fool themselves they have lots of friends!

Marco, from what I’ve seen so far there’s a lot of people on myspace who are old enough to know better

Sam, yeah I fell in love with Scritti when I heard ‘Absolute’ at the age of 14, then immediately plundered the entire back catalogue from the Rough Trade years. I can’t believe that there are no sensitive teens out there these days with taste ready to discover Scritti for the first time. Admittedly they might not be on myspace!