Although the stresses of performing contributed (Green had always suffered from frightful stage nerves), the collapse mostly stemmed from chronic lifestyle dysfunction. “I was living without bothering to look after myself at all,” Green recalled. “Which seemed an appropriate thing to do at the time, but it creeps up on you without you noticing until you’re in a hospital bed with people leaning over asking you what you’ve eaten recently and you realize that you haven’t eaten anything recently. They ask you where you live and you realize it’s a shit-hole and they ask you when you last slept and you haven’t slept for ages. They asked if I had anything worrying me and everything was worrying me.”
A postpunk excess of drinking, thinking, and speeding brought Scritti as a whole, and Green in particular, to the brink of breakdown. “We were a sick group for some time,” Green recalled. “I used to read and write a lot, which was the only thing I did apart from being debauched and drinking too much.” In addition to the group’s debilitating lifestyle—“We partied very hard, as they say nowadays,” Green admits—there’s also a sense in which Scritti’s imperative to question everything turned toxic. “Finding minutiae overburdened with potential significance, this can contaminate your whole life to the point where you might describe it as mental illness,” Green notes wryly. “Not that I was actually bonkers, but…”
When Green’s estranged parents read about their son’s hospitalization in NME, they set him up in a South Wales cottage to recuperate. However, instead of resting his overtaxed brain, the singer embarked on a massive rethinking of the Scritti project. Shortly before his collapse there’d been tension in the band when Green broached the idea of moving in a more pop direction. He’d been listening to contemporary black dance pop such as Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall and investigating the history of soul music, from Aretha Franklin to Stax. Green had also been absorbing the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and other French post-Marxist theorists.
After the disillusionment of 1968, radical French thought had undergone a kind of implosion. It didn’t exactly become depoliticized, but certainly the lion’s share of its subversive energy was channeled into the academy. There, Derrida and his confreres beaverishly gnawed at the roots of Western thought, toppling ideas of progress, reason, truth, and the like. Absorbing the implications of the new French theories, Green gradually lost his faith in Marxism as a “science of history” that mapped the righteous path to a future society of justice and equality. Without the anchor of stable values, he found himself adrift in a world of uncertainty, where all meaning was provisional because nothing could be “proved” to be correct. It was scary, but exhilarating.
Derrida’s corrosive influence also eroded other concepts that underpinned the old Scritti Politti, such as the idea of the marginal versus the mainstream. Dissatisfied with the self-conscious “quirkiness and idiosyncrasy” of early Scritti, Green was determined to extricate his trapped pop sensibility from the thorny tangles of the Scritti sound. He hadn’t totally abandoned the idea of subversion, but his ideas of how that might work became more oblique and subtle. He envisioned a strategy of unsettling and undoing (deconstruction, the French called it) that took place inside the very language of pop. Instead of searching for some alternative zone of authentic purity and truth that supposedly existed outside the conventional forms, Green decided, it might be more productive to work within those structures. Rather than avoiding the love song altogether, it might be possible to locate and accentuate the internal contradictions and tautologies that already limned what Barthes called the “lover’s discourse.”
It says something about how old habits die hard that Green felt it necessary to generate copious amounts of text in order to convince his band of the righteousness of his new Scritti vision. One suspects that the exercise was as much for Green’s sake as for the others. “I sat down for months and months and wrote screeds of justification,” Green recalls. “There was that sense of having to have it understood, approved, and thought through by the group.” The band came down to Wales to read the book’s worth of cogitation and were ultimately swayed to Green’s new pop vision. By the end of 1980 Scritti had worked up a new sound based around old soul, new funk, and the soft, slick reggae style known as lover’s rock.
The first publicly aired work by the reborn Scritti was “The ‘Sweetest Girl,’” which Green described as “a perversion and an extension of Lover’s Rock.” True to its title, the single was sweet enough to induce a diabetic coma. Green crooned soft and high like Gregory Isaacs mixed with Al Green, over a gently pulsing rhythm section of crisp drum machine and tender but steadfast bass. Green’s hero Robert Wyatt dusted the luscious confection with ethereal flickers of reggae-style keyboards. To fans of the DIY-era Scritti, the new sound was shocking, yet strangely logical. Now that Scritti’s anxious compulsion to avoid conventional structures was gone, Green’s melodic genius gushed forth in a flood of pure loveliness, but there was still a lingering undertone of the old Scritti’s harmonic eeriness to put a tang of bitter in the sweet.
“The ‘Sweetest Girl’” sounded like a hit record, and a hit was what Green had his heart set on. Lots of hits. If “the margin” was no longer a valid concept, then the mainstream was the place that pop meaning gets made and unmade (Derrida-style). In 1978, Green critiqued the competitive structure of the charts and the record industry, but now he wanted to be top of the pops.
In spring 1981, “‘The ‘Sweetest Girl’” got its public unveiling as the opening track of C81, a cassette compilation pulled together by Rough Trade and NME to celebrate five years of the label and, by extension, the first half decade of the independent-label revolution. An absolute bargain at one pound and fifty pence, C81’s lineup included such postpunk luminaries as Pere Ubu, Cabaret Voltaire, Subway Sect, and the Raincoats. Thirty thousand readers sent away for it. Yet C81 was in many ways postpunk’s swan song. The epoch it defined was crumbling. Many of the featured artists, such as Postcard’s Orange Juice and Aztec Camera, had already broken with independent consensus. They sounded shiny, accessible, and ambitious. A few weeks before C81 was announced, NME’s last issue of 1980 looked to the future with a Paul Morley feature that essentially constituted a manifesto for “New Pop,” a shared ambition and urgency he detected among emerging groups who believed it was both possible and imperative to take on the mainstream and beat it at its own game. Of the three bands covered, Sheffield’s ABC were the most stridently confident. Originally an electronic outfit in the mold of Cabaret Voltaire, they’d recently traded in their frigid synths and oscillators for funky rhythm guitars and real drums, and changed their name from Vice Versa to ABC. Guitarist Mark White talked about pursuing a “funk vision” and described disco as “an excellent vehicle.” Watching the independent charts become “saturated with rubbish,” ABC decided that the mainstream was where the action was.
Morley may have coined the term, but “New Pop” as a concept had multiple authors. Bob Last and the Human League, and Alan Horne and Orange Juice could all claim a role in hatching the idea. Liverpool’s Zoo label also talked of aiming for the charts and touted a bunch of bright, tuneful groups (such as the Teardrop Explodes) as an antidote to monochrome postpunk. As the sensibility took hold, New Pop defined itself through a set of overlapping values: health, cleanliness, mobility, ambition. Decrying the “unhealthy” state of independent rock in countless interviews, Green seemed to transpose his own physical ill-being during the squatland Scritti days onto postpunk as a whole. ABC’s singer Martin Fry talked of “cleaning up the whole idea of pop music.” As for mobility, postpunk culture was increasingly characterized by critics and musicians alike in terms of inertia, stagnation, and wallowing. Writing about 1981’s third Futurama festival, Morley recoiled aghast from groups that “twitched in the slime,” while Green lamented the independent sector’s degeneration into “a boggy ground, a wilderness.”
Green pointed to the homemade-cassette network as particularly lamentable. “Many peo
ple tried to sell ridiculous music, filled with irritating noises and failed attempts at music,” he told Vinyl. It was time for a return to quality control, the hierarchy of the gifted over the talentless. In August 1980, NME had started the regular news column “Garageland,” which covered the cassette scene and vinyl releases so small-scale they didn’t even have independent distribution but were sold through mail order. Just ten months later, “Garageland” was closed down. Across the board, critics abruptly lost patience with the sonic mannerisms that only recently indicated charming eccentricity or honorable amateurism. Now they signified only a chronic lack of ambition.
Scritti Politti started out championing the do-it-yourself movement, but now Green renounced it as a lost cause. Still, Scritti didn’t immediately embrace the “entryist” logic of signing to a major label in order to better infiltrate the mainstream. They stayed on Rough Trade, but they moved to distance themselves from DIY’s “squattage industry” (as Green put it) in the way that they presented their music. Scritti’s early DIY releases came wrapped in hand-folded sleeves made from smudged photocopies of litter and old bottle caps. The new Scritti singles copied the stylish packaging of deluxe commodities: Dunhill cigarettes with “The ‘Sweetest Girl,’” Dior Eau Sauvage fragrance with its follow-up “Faithless,” and so forth. Green talked of admiring the “cheap classiness” of commonly available consumer disposables. “Our covers are now made in Turin by robots!” he boasted, a remark that had an odd aftertaste given Green’s once keen interest in Italian post-Communist politics. Were these perhaps the same sort of robots currently replacing the Fiat assembly line workers of Turin and other Northern Italian cities?
That sort of grim irony once would have tortured Green and probably inspired a song, but as a lapsed Marxist he’d shed the anxiety and guilt that fueled the early Scritti. “You grow up as a good, almost Catholic-leftist boy, and you learn to be scared of your sexuality, to be scared of your power,” Green recalled. Now he talked about developing an improvised form of “post-political politics,” based not on overarching ideology, but the pragmatic realization “that what you’ve got is needs, demands, and desires, and you go out and you fight for them.”
“Desire” was a big buzzword in 1981. Drifting into popular culture from the world of critical theory, it retained an electric tinge of subversion. By the late seventies, French thinkers of the sort Green had been devouring were flirting with the once unthinkable (for the Left) notion that American capitalism, despite its faults, offered a lot of space for doing it yourself and bending the law. Could it be that “desire” actually had a better time of it in pluralistic, free-market societies than in bureaucratic Euro-socialist states? This notion of America as actually more free than the Old World was naturally blasphemous within the British socialist tradition (to which Rough Trade and the independent scene broadly belonged). But then British socialism always had a puritanical streak, a disdainful suspicion of vulgar materialism and stylistic excess. Running against the grain of both independent culture and the British Left, Scritti’s celebration of consumer desire and commercial design was a heretical act.
In “Jacques Derrida,” the B-side to the new Scritti’s third single “Asylums in Jerusalem,” Green personifies desire as an insatiable she-monster. “Rap-acious, rap-acious,” he chants in a fey attempt at rapping, “Desire is so voracious/I want to eat your nation state.” The exaltation of desire as an unstoppable force that refuses to recognize any boundaries fits the tenor of the hip crit of the day, as found in journals like Semiotexte and Tel Quel. But it also sounds a lot like the way globalization works: flows of capital, goods, and culture that make nonsense of national borders.
Green recognized that utopian yearnings—for perfection, purity, the absolute—were encoded in consumerism. These same longings also expressed themselves in that form of secular mysticism known as “love.” In putting single quotes around the words “sweetest girl” in the song title “The ‘Sweetest Girl,’” Green wanted to make it clear that he knew this dream was a mythic construct, an unrealistic hope, even as he was unable to stop wanting it or prevent himself from being seduced by songs exalting this heaven on Earth. Green wanted to be pop’s deconstructionist, the Derrida of the Top 40, unraveling the lore of the love song even as he reveled in the beauty generated by its dream-lies. “The weakest link in every chain/I always want to find it,” he crooned in “The ‘Sweetest Girl,’” “The strongest words in each belief/To find out what’s behind it.” The one mysticism he permitted himself was music itself, the endless mystery of melodic beauty. “Faithless now, just got soul,” he simultaneously lamented and rejoiced on “Faithless,” a gorgeous song about the impossibility of belief couched in the deep testifying certainty of gospel.
Up-tempo reggae with a cloying, caramel-sweet melody, “Asylums in Jerusalem” received Rough Trade’s strongest push to date, but despite this, and some heavy support from radio, it ended up Scritti’s third not-quite-hit in a row. Although Songs to Remember, the debut album, reached number twelve on the U.K. album charts, Scritti hadn’t escaped the ghetto of being a cult group. Like Orange Juice a year earlier, Green underwent the public humiliation of having talked loudly about “pop” without having become popular. The problem lay partly with the music, which sounded underproduced, but mainly with the lyrics. This was heady stuff for pop music. Green’s frequent lyrical nods to his favorite philosophers like Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, while cute, certainly decreased the likelihood of the songs’ words ever being reprinted in Smash Hits, the glossy new teenybop magazine, whose soaring circulation was eclipsing the dour old “inky” music papers like NME.
“What has meaning is what sells, and what sells is what has meaning,” Green had declared after his return from the Welsh wilderness. But not enough people were buying the new Scritti and for someone with a healthy ego like Green, this was crushing. In interviews he lashed out at Rough Trade, accusing them of frittering away their money on “silly groups with silly music,” meaning Pere Ubu and Red Crayola, instead of focusing their resources on getting Scritti into the charts. Eventually, Green made a final break with the independent ideal and started talking to major labels. He also streamlined Scritti into a solo vehicle in all but name. In interviews, Green nonchalantly renounced the pseudocollectivism of the days when Scritti were a twenty-strong music/theory think tank. “I remember we were absolutely shocked when it was suddenly announced that Green was going to be the leader of Scritti Politti,” says Gina Birch of the Raincoats, “that it was no longer a democracy.” Bassist Nial Jinks was the first to chafe against the new regime and quit. Organizer Matthew Kay soon followed suit. Although increasingly superseded by the use of drum machines, Tom Morley hung on until November 1982, a few months after Songs to Remember.
Having paid off his old comrades-in-amps for the rights to the Scritti Politti brand, Green and his new manager, Bob Last, secured a lucrative deal with Virgin Records and set up a publishing company for Green’s songs called Jouissance. Scritti was no longer a band but “a kind of production company,” said Green, with the singer as the pivotal constant surrounded by a floating pool of collaborators and producers. After too many false starts, Green was determined to make good on his manifest destiny: stardom.
THIS “PRODUCTION COMPANY” model was the in-vogue notion of 1982. After Josef K, Paul Haig set up one called Rhythm of Life. He didn’t want to be in a traditional band or play live anymore, just to produce records aimed for the dance floor. In interviews, he dreamily imagined Rhythm of Life diversifying into “art and prints and video.” But the first New Pop folk to talk about replacing the rockist model of “the band” in favor of the dynamic and flexible “production company” were British Electric Foundation. Formed by ex–Human League members Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh, B.E.F. went one step beyond the entryist strategy of signing to a major label, instead styling itself as a minicorporation that negotiated with record companies as an equal. In a further innovation, B.E.F. included one
nonmusical partner, their manager Bob Last.
It was Last who had actually engineered the breakup of the Human League in the first place, perceiving that the deadlocked group would be better off as two separate outfits. Shortly after the split, Last invited a devastated Ware to visit for a weekend in Scotland and pitched him the idea of the production company. PiL was an obvious precursor, along with Robert Fripp’s talk of “small, mobile, independent, and intelligent units” replacing the unwieldy prog-era megabands. With their permanent members on a steady wage, bands were expensive. Even if they got successful enough to pay off their record company debts, the profit pie ended up being divided into many pieces. But a production company could hire (and fire) session musicians and vocalists on a flat-fee, no-royalty basis. Increasingly, with advances in music technology, they could work with endlessly compliant, unpaid machines.
“We liked the idea of setting up this complicated corporate structure before a note had been played,” says Last. “It seemed like an amusing gesture. So there was literally a partnership of shareholdings, and I didn’t play a note on anything but I had a share in it. My role was what corporations today would call strategy director.” Other contemporary inspirations for B.E.F. included the black disco production company the Chic Organization and George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic strategy of signing endless recombinations of the same pool of musicians to separate deals with different record companies.
Although Ware and Marsh were still in debt to Virgin for their part in the two unsuccessful Human League albums, Last negotiated a new contract with the company for B.E.F. “It was a really unusual deal,” recalls Marsh. “We had to deliver one major act to Virgin every year, and each year we had to provide albums for every act signed in previous years.” Heaven 17, B.E.F.’s first major “act,” featured Ware, Marsh, and their old Meatwhistle friend Glenn Gregory, who was brought in to be the lead singer. Along with the major releases, B.E.F. were also free to deliver up to twelve minor album projects every year, which Virgin would be obliged to put out. “These were essentially art projects, instrumental works, like Eno’s Ambient series,” says Marsh.
Rip It Up and Start Again Page 45
