It's seven years since Green from Scritti Politti released an album - time spent boozing away in self-doubt. So what brought him back to his current, glowing form?
By Simon Reynolds @ The Guardian
Back from limbo ... Green Gartside.
White Bread, Black Beer - Gartside's fabulous new album, released under the Scritti Politti name that brought him fame more than 20 years ago, 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 love, has found the One. Turns out she was there all along. "We've known each other 20 years, but we haven't always been together through those 20 years," says Gartside. "But we're together now."
Even as he has found contentment in personal partnership, Gartside has made 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 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 his house in Hackney. In a weird way, it's like a return to the DIY ethos of the early Scritti. Except that "the advent of affordable home-recording technology", Gartside says, meant White Bread could sound as slick as Cupid, which cost a fortune and took years to make.
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.
There's a sense in which there's always been a kind of war inside Gartside's music - a conflict between 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 - Gartside'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 the 1979 song Bibbly-O-Tek, with its multi-tracked Gartsides 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 Gartside dubbed "messthetics". The group championed the notion that anyone can do it, an egalitarian principle that incited all manner of slender talents to pick up instruments and put out 7in 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 seemingly freed of all the extraneous conceptualisation, we are left with the pure gift for melody and harmony.
White Bread is different to anything Gartside has done before in another way: it's highly personal. Until now, his love songs have had a depersonalised abstraction; they were about love rather than being in love. 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 he wrote when he realised how many songs he'd written featuring "girl". But White Bread has plenty of visual images and place names, which suggests his writing now draws directly from real incidents. "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 he is yet to write a song entitled Alice for his wife, 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 Gartside ponder: "How brave you are/And how come I have strayed so far/And why everything came apart".
Snow in Sun also contains a promise: "You will never need to doubt me/There'll be something good about me/Soon." As much as it is the rhapsody of someone reborn through true love, White Bread is threaded with leitmotifs of shame, unworthiness and stagnation. Gartside spent most of the 1990s 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, years similarly spent wandering the pubs of London. "There's so many of them," Gartside notes. "Just got to tick them off."
White Bread, Black Beer is riddled with references to booze and, here and there, powders of various sorts. The first single off the album, The Boom Boom Bap, contains the line "I've got bellywash blood in my heart" - an allusion, Gartside 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. According to Gartside the song's about the thin line "between being in love with something and being unhealthily addicted to it".
White Bread's odd blend of joy and despondency suggest that the album documents both Gartside's (literally) wasted years and his rescue through the love of a good woman. Gartside, new to the album-as-autobiography game, prefers to describe it more abstractly, characterising its themes as "addictions and utopias, longings and loss". When I ask if he thinks he has 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!"
He is clearly in no hurry to join today's soul-baring gossip culture, where stars turn their dissolution and cleaning-up into the sales campaign for their new product. Then again, some of the references on White Bread are bizarrely autobiographical. Take the song Mrs Hughes, named after an old teacher of Gartside'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 OK.' Which stunned me, the idea that I would do only averagely. I didn't like the sound of that."
In the early part of his career, Gartside came across as super-confident in his own pop genius, but it was 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," he 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 1980s", in which 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". 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), he 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, he 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."
Gartside claims that he is "not one for regrets", but that seems more like a wishful statement of how he would like to be. Talking to him in 2005, he told me 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 positivity, something achieved by jettisoning the past and the future, nostalgia and dreams of a brighter tomorrow. In one breath, Gartside declares "All prophecy will fail"; in the next he vows "I'll never go back". But he says it is not specifically about the self-doubt and drowned sorrow that 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."
Their site ===> http://www.bibbly-o-tek.com/
· Scritti Politti play at the Guardian Hay Festival next Friday (0870 990 1299). White Bread, Black Beer is released by Rough Trade on June 5
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