The cause of the itch

I phoned up Green Gartside yesterday, to ask him some questions about a forthcoming Rough Trade reissue of the early Scritti Politti singles and eps. A tiny sliver of the Q&A will appear in Uncut next month, but I thought enough people might find the transcript interesting to justify putting it up here. As the interview begins, I have just interrupted Mr Gartside while he was engrossed in Halo 2.

Does the fact that you’ve agreed to this reissue mean you’re fonder of these records than you once were?

I’m not really fond of any of the music I’ve made and I’ve normally done my best to make sure that as few people get to hear it as possible! It’s always uncomfortable for me to listen to anything I’ve ever done. I mean, you try and make sure that the last time you leave the studio after having prepared the final mix is the last time you ever hear it. You go to extraordinary lengths (or you don’t) to make sure you never hear it again. It’s uncomfortable – let’s put it that way.

Would you rather other people didn’t hear it either?!

I can just reiterate that I find the whole business… uncomfortable is the word. The whole thing is so sonically and politically and emotionally… early. And that’s something you either feel comfortable with or feel a bit uncomfortable about. And I suppose I tend to the latter.

Do the contingencies of history and fashion affect how the music sounds?

You mean do I get to hear it afresh? The nearest I ever came to that was, I remember talking to Robert Wyatt a long time ago about how much I disliked… let’s just say, earlier work. And he said he felt the same way, and it was agony for him to listen to early stuff, until he took the imaginative leap into assuming that the music was by somebody else. It’s not an easy trick to pull off, and I’ve been mistrustful of it. I guess on those grounds I would certainly be prepared to forgive whoever made it!

There’s a lot of nostalgia for that scratchy early punk-funk sound at the moment…

It’s just the way things go, the amount of time that’s elapsed. I guess at the moment it is fashionable, and it’s for those with the stomach for it, and the spare time, and it’ll be rewritten and reread and I’m not sure I’ll take a whole heap of notice. I spend as little time thinking about the past as I’m able to and when called upon to try and remember the past I find years of active forgetfulness strategy and Guinness have done pretty well at blurring it all into a relatively inaccessible realm.

A band like Bloc Party, talking about themselves as an ‘autonomous unit’, seem to be entirely composed of these fashionable but empty signifiers…

And what was your degree in young man?! How empty are those gestures? Well that’s a very big question… I don’t know. I guess with a lot of it… Having been there “the first time around”, there’s not a lot to interest me about people who sound like any number of bands who could have walked into Rough Trade on a wet Wednesday back in the day. Not a very edifying spectacle I’m afraid.

Isn’t it depressing, this stripmining of cultural history?

That’s the way it goes! I guess that’s part of what drove me away from the whole indie thing in the first place – it became reified, fetishised, whatever. Institutionalised, really. It seems to have become quite comfortable with morphing through the shapes. And that’s when I headed off to America and hip hop and all things away from that. Although I’m back to that, now days… I accept the fact that I’m white and I play the guitar! So that’s who I am.

Simon Reynolds is about to publish new book about post-punk. I think he mourns a certain cultural purpose/mission, a sense that music was about more than just other music…

I have a sense that it would be mistaken, in my view, I’m not sure there was a fall from that Eden. And I’m not sure I’d be able to judge what form musical production and consumption might take in the future. Technology is bound to have a huge effect on all of that. It’s pretty unimaginable, the popular music of the future. I’d be neither too despairing of the future nor too enthusiastic about the past. It’s sounds boring I know!

Did you have much musical ambition before punk?

I played. I listened to a lot of music. I think I was probably headed for the Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham. I don’t know if I could have done the academic thing… Maybe.

But there was a Damascus moment?

There really was, yes. It’s not fanciful to say, particularly on the evening in Leeds when I saw the Pistols, The Clash, The Damned and The Heartbreakers, I entered the room one person and left… quite another.

How did you measure the success of those first singles? Just the fact that you had released them? Been played on John Peel? Sold 500 copies?

Ambition was a very funny idea at the time. I guess it’s an interesting question: what one’s hopes were for the business of making music. There were significant numbers of us then who viewed the whole business of having a career or ambitions for our music in a different way. I guess, yes it felt good if you had a few of them returned to you with nasty comments! We always put our home address on the records so people could get in touch. At the height of it, people were getting in touch from all over Europe in their droves. That’s a slight exaggeration. But that was enormous fun, staying up all night, drinking and arguing with dirty eurocommunist crusties. That kind of direct feedback. I remember, the last band I really liked before punk was Henry Cow, and I used to try and promote gigs for them when I was a student. And Chris Cutler, their drummer, was one of the first people to go out and buy our single and promptly stick it in an envelope and send it back to us saying we should leave the business of making music to real musicians!

Are you still engaged with strands of what you once called the “rich axminster of pop”?

I make music whenever I’m not in the pub! I’m working on a new album and it’s going… slowly. There’s a lot of it, but not a great deal of it is really… finished. But it’s supposed to be being finished fairly soon, so I’m getting into a bit of a panic about that. But yes, I make music, I’ve got a studio at home, an engineer who works with me every day, and I… continue.

Do you listen to the East London pirates, are you still up with hip hop?

I’m off hip hop at the moment. I’m really just listening to… myself. And lots of old reggae. But it depends – the music I’ve recorded in the last couple of years, I don’t know which of it is going to make the final cut, and what it will all add up to. Which influences will be expressed and which will be put aside for my 60s!

And is the music still informed by philosophy and critical theory?

I’m still addicted to it a bit. It’s a cliché to say it’s an abiding passion. It’s just like an itch, really. It’s a very pre-postmodern desire to think about epistemology and stuff… That’s probably the roots of it, the cause of the itch.

Comments

[philT]

this is terrific news. they were touchstone records for my friends and i me and i've been annoyed that green hasn't wanted them to see the light of day.

[Marco Raaphorst]

Great to hear a new CD is coming. And I hope Green isn't afraid about it. Release it and let it live ;)

Kind regards,

Marco Raaphorst

[composer/sound designer]
_____________________________________________________
Melodiefabriek - http://www.melodiefabriek.nl/en/

[k punk]

good on ya Green! fucking delete the lot - your new fans are so UGLY, they're sooooo 1983, Cunts reading Derrida and the like - you know, the middle classes

[Harold]

Good to hear he is working on new stuff. I really liked A&B, and was mystified as to why it sank without a trace. It was a very progressive mix of hip/hop and pop. be interesting to see what the next phase of his evolution sounds like

harold
san jose, ca