Here’s Ron’s review:

Scritti Politti!

Last night, Scritti Politti played The Roxy Theatre in Hollywood.
It was their American debut show, and they said so. I had waited 25+ years to see them.

They played lots of songs from the new album, wonderful sound. Also, I could recognize “The Word Girl”, “Wood Beez”, “Die Alone”
and “Brushed With Oil Dusted With Powder”. The surprises were to hear “The Sweetest Girl” and “Skank Bloc Bologna”.

Green’s voice was very good, but he said he had a bad cold.

The band was good, the playing very tight – but there was an instance of “Laptop failure” before “Wood Beez” – Green was very funny and chatty – before they played even one note of music he greeted his Los Angeles fans by saying, “We don’t play ‘perfect Way’” – OK, Green!

There were two opening acts – I do not know what they were called, and it’s not my style of music, anyway. They wouldn’t let us sit down, “All of the tables are reserved!” – even though nobody was sitting at any of them when I asked (I looked later, maybe 3 of 24 tables had someone sitting at them). At least the ticket was inexpensive!

Scritti Politti play two more shows in the L.A. area – but I probably can’t get to either of them. They were also selling T-shirts and buttons, the CD and a poster (Only 210 made!). The T-shirt had the tour dates, I already ordered the CD from Japan (bonus tracks and a DVD!), so I bought the buttons (for the new album) and the poster (autographed).

Ron

Ron is huge music fan and a huge music collector. Check him out at Flickr.

GREEN
by Simon Reynolds

“We went to Marylebone Registry Office, because that’s where McCartney got married,” recalls Green Gartside of his wedding a couple of months ago. “We chose the shortest service, just a couple of sentences, and we didn’t really tell anyone, so we had one witness each. But this pudding of a teenager, with two different speech impediments, officiated, and he read the standard script that goes ‘thank you all for coming, it means so much to Alice and Green that all their friends and family are here’. We couldn’t really stop him as he lisped his way through it! But, no, it was a very lovely thing. I think I might even have had a tear in my eye.”

White Bread, Black Beer – Green’s fabulous new album and his first release in seven years – is radiant with love and gratitude. The pioneer of the self-deconstructing love song that reveals amorous language to be a delirium of superstitious nonsense, the melodic genius who placed scare quotes inside “The ‘Sweetest Girl’” to indicate his “deeply mistrustful” feelings about L.O.V.E…. has found the One. Turns out she was there all along. “We’ve known each other twenty years, but we haven’t always been together through those twenty years,” says Green. “But… we’re together now.”

Green’s life these days may be all conjugal bliss, but White Bread is his most solitary record. Hitherto he’s always had collaborators and creative foils: bandmates Tom Morley and Nial Jinks in the original Scritti Politti, whose fractured postpunk was exhumed for last year’s Early compilation; David Gamson and Fred Maher with the hit machine Scritti of Cupid & Psyche 85; dancehall ragga stars Shabba Ranks and Sweetie Irie on the brace of 1990 singles that turned out to be Scritti’s last hits; and a raft of New York rap MCs on 1999’s not-quite-a-comeback Anomie & Bonhomie. But White Bread is just Green on his lonesome ownsome, a solo album in effect, even though he’s still trading under the Scritti Politti brand. He played every instrument, sang every note, and produced the whole thing in the downstairs backroom of his house in Hackney. In a weird way, it’s like a return to the do-it-yourself ethos of the early Scritti. Except that “the advent of affordable home-recording technology,” Green explains, “the fact that I can get a little 56 channel digital mixing desk in my tiny room,” meant that White Bread could sound as slick and phat as Cupid, which cost a fortune and took years to make.

White Bread is different in another respect–it’s the first album Green’s done where there’s no concept. By that, I mean a sonic concept (don’t worry, despite matrimony and contentment, Green’s intellect is intact, and philosophical namedrops, including a reference to Hegel’s Owl of Minerva, still pop up in his songs). Songs To Remember was conceived as “an extension and a perversion” of soul and lover’s rock; Cupid was a (hugely successful) attempt to penetrate the American radio mainstream with precision-tooled, state-of-art electrofunk; Anomie & Bonhomie was Green meets hip hop. But White Bread seamlessly weaves together elements of everything Green’s ever been into and revisits every stage of his nearly five decades-long journey through music. Childhood favess The Beatles are here there and everywhere on the record; T. Rex and the Plastic Ono Band meld on the deliciously stompy anti-Jesus ditty “After Six”; Green’s pre-punk passion for folk-rock and traditional English music is often audible in his guitar playing; and naturally there’s hip hop in the beats and R&B in the production’s dazzling gloss. “It’s far less self-policed in that way,” agrees Green, explaining that having a studio in his own house helped because “you can go in and do whatever you want, whenever you want.”

There’s a sense in which there’s always been a kind of war inside Green’s music – a conflict between, well, his musicality and his intellectual and political concerns, which were in a sense imposed upon the music. You could hear that struggle at its most ferocious in the DIY-era music – Green’s innate pop sensibility colliding with his ideologically-driven suspicion of beauty itself as somehow counter-revolutionary, bourgeois in its analgesic and soul-soothing effects. In a 1979 song like “Bibbly-O-Tek,” with its multi-tracked Greens singing different melodies simultaneously and its collapsing rhythms, his compulsion to tamper with conventional structures interfered with but didn’t wholly thwart a pure loveliness of melody and voice.

In those days, Scritti were the postpunk underground’s leading theorists of a wilfully fractured style of rock that Green dubbed “messthetics.” The group championed the DIY notion that “anyone can do it,” an egalitarian principle that incited all manner of slender talents to pick up instruments and put out 7” singles of barely-music. “On one of the early songs, “PAs”, I even sang ‘good tunes are no better than bad tunes’,” Green chuckles. “A devoted fan told me he had heard the line as ‘good shoes are no better than bad shoes,’ which led to him neglecting to buy any decent footwear for an unfeasibly long time! But it’s true, I was mistrustful of melody as representing something that we were against.” But tunefulness “always did sneak in,” and now, with White Bread, it’s as though Green has stripped away all the extraneous conceptualization, leaving just the pure gift for melody and harmony–something that really comes from the same place as a figure like Paul McCartney. Musical beauty is the mystery that we–meaning critics and musicians–talk around endlessly. And Green, a member of the Young Communist Party and an art school educated theory-fiend, was better at talking around the subject than almost anyone this side of Brian Eno.

White Bread is different to anything Green has done before in another way: it’s highly personal. Until now, his love songs have had an eerily depthless and depersonalized abstraction; they were about love rather than in love, treating it as a system of metaphysical language, Roland Barthes’ “lover’s discourse”. Hence “The ‘Sweetest Girl’”, with its urge to find “the strongest words in each belief/and find out what’s behind them”, or “The Word Girl,” an auto-critique that Green wrote when he realized how many songs he’d written featuring “girl”. But the language on White Bread has a new concrete-ness and specificity (plenty of visual images and place names) that suggests his writing now draws directly from real incidents and interactions in Green’s life. “I’ve always disliked confessional songwriting,” he says. “But I’ve allowed myself more space to move around in lyrically this album than I ever have before, including not feeling uncomfortable about making quite specific references to my… self.”

If Green’s yet to write a song entitled “Alys”, she’s in these songs. Take “Snow In Sun,” a shatteringly pretty tune redolent of “Ticket To Ride”, where the epiphany of seeing snowflakes falling on a sunny winter day makes Green ponder “how brave you are/and how come I have strayed so far/and why everything came apart. “That came from a train journey I took to Wimbledon to see my girlfriend’s–now wife’s–father, Chris Wilkinson, perform in a play,” he explains. It turns out that Green originally met his future bride through his friendship with Heaven 17– as teenagers the group had all been involved in a Sheffield youth theatre group called Meatwhistle run by Wilkinson and his wife.

“Snow In Sun” also contains the promise “you will never need to doubt me/there’ll be something good about me/soon.” As much as it’s the rhapsody of someone reborn through true love, White Bread is threaded with leitmotifs of shame and unworthiness, intimations of crisis and stagnation. It’s well known that Green spent most of the Nineties bunkered in a cottage in the village of Usk in Wales, tinkering with hip hop beats for a few hours a day but devoting most of his energy to drinking in local pubs. But there was a smaller lull in the years after Anomie (which underperformed in the pop marketplace), years similarly (mis)spent wandering the pubs of London. “There’s so many of them,” Green notes wryly. “Just got to tick them off.”

From its title down, White Bread, Black Beer is riddled with references to booze and, here and there, powders of various sorts. “Mrs Hughes” alludes to “small paper packages washed down with gin” and confesses “I’ve been a bad, bad man… done some very wicked things”. “Dr. Abernathy” acknowledges a weakness for excess: “I don’t quite see/the stop light, the turn right”. The first single off the album, “The Boom Boom Bap,” contains the line “I’ve got bellywash blood in my heart” –an oblique allusion, Green explains, to a genetic disposition towards hard drinking–but it’s mostly about being a junkie for hip hop. One verse consists entirely of the song titles from the first Run DMC album, while the title itself is named after hip hop’s bass-boom and syncopated breakbeats. According to Green, the song’s about the thin line “between being in love with something and being unhealthily addicted to it”. Most direct of all is “Last Time I Looked”, a brilliant slice of folk-rock secreted on the B-side of “The Boom Boom Bap”, perhaps because of the line where Green sings about how you’ll find him languishing “by the tree of cocaine, in a river of beer.” Less blatantly, the gorgeously eerie ballad “Petrococadollar” seems to be a snapshot of some kind of breakdown: “I tried having thoughts/But they don’t obey me”.

White Bread’s odd blend of joy and despondency suggest that the album documents both Green’s (literally) wasted years and his rescue through the love of a good woman. Green, new to the album-as-autobiography game, prefers to describe it more abstractly, characterizing its themes as “addictions and utopias, longings and loss.” When I ask if he thinks he’s an addictive personality, he emits a strange stammering gurgle of discomfort, then admits “Yes, is the short answer”, before adding with slightly forced brightness, “But I’m perfectly well!”

Green’s clearly in no hurry to join today’s soul-baring gossip culture, where stars turn their deeply mundane sagas of dissolution and cleaning-up into elements of the sales campaign for their new product. Then again, some of the references on White Bread are bizarrely autobiographical. Take the song “Mrs Hughes.” It’s named after an old teacher of Green’s. “I was ready to leave school as part of a political statement about education or something, but she told me to stay and do my A-levels. But she didn’t say ‘you’ll do brilliantly’, she said ‘I’m sure you’ll do okay.’ Which stunned me, the idea that I would do only averagely. I didn’t like the sound of that!”

It’s a revealing anecdote. In the early part of his career, Green came across as super-confident in his own pop genius, but it was pretty clearly the brittle sort of self-belief that masks insecurity. The long exile in the Welsh countryside, and the shorter period of inactivity this decade, were partly responses to the blows to his confidence caused by the commercial shortfall of 1988’s Provision and 1999’s Anomie. “What will bring you to complete inertia is fear of the prospect that if you make a record, write a book, or do whatever, you’ll get shot down in flames,” Green admits. “As long as you do nothing, you’ll get neither praise nor condemnation.” He talks of having been able to sustain “a kind of limbo existence” (thanks to “having earned a few bob in the Eighties”) where he didn’t have “to risk how awful disapprobation might be. Generally, other people’s opinion of me has been an unhealthily large concern.” His struggle to resist this tendency to withdraw from the rough-and-tumble inspired one of the best tunes on the album, “Road To No Regret,” which he describes as “a stop-running-away kind of song, really.” Consulting a sheaf of lyrics he’s had printed out to help him get through live performances (which he recently resumed after a gap of 26 years and still finds nerve-wracking), Green reads the relevant lines: “just another drink, another cigarette/if you never play your cards you’ll never lose the bet.”

Flicking through the pages, Green also notes recurrent references to “absent fathers… the word ‘daddy’ or ‘father’ appears in about five or six songs.” His biological father departed the domestic scene early in Green’s childhood. “There’s obviously something going on there, but I’ve no idea what yet! But it wouldn’t, I guess be too difficult a conclusion to leap to that the approbation thing and the absent father is maybe… oh, I dunno, it’s too convenient a leap, maybe.“

Green claims “I’m not one for regrets” but that seems more like a wishful statement of how he’d like to be. In an interview we did in 2005, he talked about having “a terrible memory, because I’ve trained my memory to be ruthlessly poor. Cos I’m best served that way. All memories are bad, really. Memories of good things are bad, because they’ve gone, and memories of bad things are bad because they were bad things. I don’t like remembering anything, and I’ve become really good at that.” The final song on White Bread, “Robin Hood,” ends the album on a ringing note of be-here-now positivity, something achieved by jettisoning the past and the future, nostalgia and dreams of a brighter tomorrow. In one breath, Green declares “all prophecy will fail”, in the next he vows “I’ll never go back.” But he says this is not specifically about the slough of self-doubt and drowned sorrow that suspended his career and stalled his talent. “It’s that Bob Marley thing, remember? An NME journalist went on the road with Marley. They flew into Miami, checked their bags at the hotel and then went to the soundcheck. And afterwards the journalist said ‘Are we going back to the hotel now?’ and Marley said, ‘No, we’re going forward to the hotel.’ I always liked that.”

Simon Reynolds is the author of Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84 (Faber & Faber). More information about the book, in which Scritti Politti is a pivotal and extensively discussed band, at the Rip It Up site, which also features a interview with Green Gartside around the Early anthology. The early Scritti Politti track “PAs” appears on Rip It Up compilation out now on V2.

One in Q Magazine.

Kay send us a scan of a review posted in Intro in Germany, it’s a review of the 5th February gig in The Luminaire.

And finally a review in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad.


A translation of the Dutch review:

Green Gartside aka the one-man band Scritti Politti got known in the 80s with sweet, cleverly contructed hits like Absolute adn The Sweetest Girl. Gartside got disappointed with the music business and was rarely heard of. After the hiphop tinted 1999 Anomie & Bonhomie on which he collaborated with Mos Def he made the long awaited follow-up White Bread Black Beer on his own, at home in East London.
The music sounds like it, it all sounds bare and not as polished as we were expecting of Scritti Politti. Still an incorrigable romantic, with his soothing voice which threatens to burst intoa jubeling falsetto. His quest for the perfect popsong continues in his tribute to the heartbeat The Boom Boom Bap or the ballad Mrs. Hughes which could easily be on the repertoire of Simon & Garfunkel.
After a quarter century in the business Gartside conquered his stage fright and is playing live with friends from the pub. With the words ‘I never go back’ he doesn’t sing any old songs and the public gets the nice, but hardly classic material of this album. Bread and beer in stead of champagne and cake.

Jan Vollaard

Anyway, time for some links! There is a really interesting interview at Incendiary Magazine, where finally someone asks some original questions. The same website has a review as well. On the Dutch 3voor12 website there is a review as well, albeit in Dutch. I’ll translate it maybe later this evening and add it in the comments of this post. The well-respected 3voor12 site also has White Bread Black Beer on the listening post, which is really good publicity.

Some news on upcoming gigs as well! Scritti Politti will play on Bestival, which takes place on the Isle of Wight 8-10 September, and on the Big Chill festival at Eastnor Castle Deer Park 2006, 4-6 August. Apparently this place is between the Cotswolds and the Welsh Marches.

Scritti Politti: Interview
Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside tells Time Out about his colourful journey from post-punk squat-dweller to ’80s R&B technician to Hackney ‘pub rocker’, and how he learned to play live again

As an adolescent, Green was obsessed with folk…

‘At school, I used to go to a folk club in the Newport docks area. Martin Carthy was my hero. He’s a seriously funky guitarist! At art college in Leeds, I followed Carthy around the country. I was once stranded in the middle of nowhere after one of his gigs, and Martin and Norma went completely out of their way to give me a lift home, which was lovely of them.’

He liked the way that old men urinated at folk clubs…

‘They had a way of holding their cocks while they were pissing. I found that fascinating. I wrote a lyric about it on the first album. “He held it like a cigarette/ Behind a squaddie’s back/He held it so he hid its length/And so he hid its lack.”’

He lived in a Camden Town squat…

‘It was an open house on Carol Street. There were a lot of people squatting there: Dutch anarchists, public schoolboys from Brighton, artists, musicians. We put our address on the first Scritti singles, so people who bought it would just turn up and hang out. It was extraordinary, but very exhausting.’

He once took Robert Wyatt to a Clash gig…

‘I think he was initally sceptical about punk, but was impressed by that Clash show. Many years earlier, I remember being shocked when John Peel, on his radio show, told us that Robert Wyatt had been paralysed in a fall. He gave an address to write to. I wrote a fan letter to cheer him up: “My friends at school think that the drummer in the Mahavishnu Orchestra is better than you but they’re talking rubbish! You’re the best!” When I got to know Robert through working with him, I was round his house in Twickenham and I mentioned that I’d written to him in hospital. He went into the next room and brought back an old shoe-box which had my letter in it!’

He once entered a competition in Smash Hits…

‘It was for a Tommy Boy hat. I rushed off early and sent off my entry, thinking that everybody on earth would want one. In the end, I was the only person who entered the competition. I still have it now. It’s a white acrylic beanie, about a foot tall, with black nylon breakdancers on the side. I still treasure it.’

He got into a correspondence with a philosophy professor…

‘I did a questionnaire for a teenage girls’ mag and was asked, “Who would you most like to receive a letter from?” I answered, maybe too honestly, a professor at Cardiff University called Christopher Norris. I said that his book “Reclaiming Truth” was a contribution to the critique of cultural relativism that I would heartily recommend to all readers. Which is true, by the way. And, blow me, his teenage daughter just happened to read it and ran to her father’s study to say, “Daddy! A pop star wants you to write him a letter!” I ended up having a pizza with him in Cardiff. He was a frightfully clever man.’

Miles Davis used to ring him up…

‘He recorded a version of “Perfect Way” and guested on “Oh Patti”. When I was living in Islington in the late ’80s, he’d call me up in the middle of the night, which was rather surreal. He invited me to his apartment once and asked me to have one of his paintings. I worried about it for a minute – what if I picked the wrong one? – then changed the subject. Which was a bit stupid of me. I could have had a Miles Davis painting hanging in my flat!’

Scritti Politti were asked to support The Clash…

‘This was 1977, just after my life had been changed by seeing the Clash and the Pistols and the Damned on tour in Leeds. We declined because we only had three songs! We ended up supporting pretty much everyone else at the time: The Pop Group, Gang Of Four, Echo And The Bunnymen, Slits, Cabaret Voltaire, Red Crayola, Swell Maps. I also played drums in a gig with Daniel Miller on guitar… Scritti also played with Joy Division several times. I had a very long conversation with Ian Curtis not long before he died. He didn’t strike me as a particularly happy man at the time, which won’t surprise you. But he was very thoughtful.’

He stopped playing live because he’d get panic attacks…

‘The day of a gig I’d wake up shaking, sweating, getting stomach cramps, vomiting. As I started playing two gigs a week, it became almost a permanent state of paralysis. One night, after supporting Gang Of Four, I collapsed and was taken to hospital. I thought it was a heart attack. That’s when I stopped playing live. Only much later did I realise it was an anxiety problem. I did have some cognitive behavioural therapy, which was interesting, if not that useful.’

He’s started playing live again…

‘You get less anxious with age. What’s the worst that can happen? Even if it all goes tits up – and it has – the pleasure of making music always outweighs the anxiety. My band are all friends from my local pub in Hackney, which is great.’

His new album is called ‘White Bread, Black Beer’…

‘Why? It’s pretty much all I live on – Guinness and a lovely, soft, gooey, terribly-bad-for-you white bread from the local Turkish bakery. It’s also a reference to when I worked with all these R&B musicians in New York in the ’80s – if you played something they didn’t like they’d frown and say, “Oh man, that’s so white-bread”. Meaning that it came from that “white” pop culture which is seen as largely voided of nutrition, substance, goodness, or indeed “soul”. And that definitely got my antennae going, because I’m mistrustful of “soul” and I very much like white, processed pop music. Which, in a way, is what this album celebrates.’

John Lewis, Tue May 30

It’s a spring thing, a blossoming thing, a journey through the valleys and across the peaks of the artist’s own domestic landscape as he stops inverting the violent hierarchies of popular culture and comes to terms with more practical issues like the next glass of beer or the next loaf of bread. Sounds still rub and collide as frequently his syntax shifts, but with the dispersal of the clouds that masked his vision, and the recession of expectations comes a more satisfying sense of self. It’s both a road to no regret and a record of his undoing. And it’s all very, very beautifully unravelled.

from Crud Magazine

You can read another review on handbag, boomkat and an interview on intro.de, which i’m still translating to english.

If you find any other reviews we have missed, please add in the comments.

The new album weaves together elements of everything Gartside has ever loved and revisits every stage of his nearly five decades-long journey through music. The Beatles are here, there and everywhere on the record; T. Rex and the Plastic Ono Band meld on the deliciously stompy anti-Jesus ditty After Six; Gartside’s pre-punk passion for folk-rock and traditional English music is audible in his guitar playing; and there is hip-hop in the beats and R&B in the production’s gloss.

We’re quite chuffed bibbly-o-tek is linked at the bottom of the article!

White Bread, Black Beer marks a welcome return to the more specific intellectual concerns of his earlier lyrics (but the subtly nutritious ‘Cooking’ boasts unexpected swearing), and a simultaneous rediscovery of the pure pop sensibility which made his later, more mainstream work so addictive.

You can read the review after clicking on the thumbnails below.