A Short History of Scritti Politti

Scritti Politti were originally a post-punk type guitar band. However it was when the band became a solo project for Green Gartside that the band truly came alive. Gartside became known for undermining what had become a very standardized punk scene, one with its own set of genre-rules and accepted patterns of sound and display. He turned his post-punk band into a (whisper it) pop band. Punk was becoming very puritanical in its outlook on what was acceptable 'cool' and what most definitely was not. It wasn't until the mid eighties that club culture finally nudged punk to the sidelines and took over the musical quest for some kind of originality and it was Scritti Politti and Green Gartside who was there from the very beginning.

At first Scritti Politti were overtly political. Their first release, in 1980, was 'Skank Bloc Bologna'. It was the same independent band template and blueprint which had become the norm for supposedly new and pioneering bands. However, after coming back from an illness which had sidelined him after the record was released, Gartside suddenly wised up to the intentions of most indie / alternative bands. They were acting in a puritanical environment. The guitar was king of the white musical culture and Gartside didn't like it. The dichotomy was clear to him. The margins and the mainstream one almost identical in every way except one. The mainstream was eternally bound by market forces and thus uninspiring, and the margins could never achieve commercial success whilst retaining any musical or cultural agenda. Green Gartside didn't like it at all and set out to prove the theory wrong. He wanted to bake his marginal cake and he wanted the mainstream to eat it.

Scritti Politti signed to Rough Trade, protectors of the indie faith. Firstly, Gartside had to persuade the label's owner Geoff Travis that his big 'pop' idea could work. Having achieved this he set about recording the album 'Songs To Remember'. The songs were influenced by disco, soul and reggae but was generally a full-blown pop album in terms of music. Lyrically though, the songs dealt with cultural theorists and had 'clever' word play. The first single was 'The Sweetest Girl' and cost a, then, staggering £60,000 to record. It mixed up a little dub and some industrial funk and attacked Thatcherism. For a single to cost so much to make and then attack Thatcherism is quite cheeky. Many people saw the whole thing as a sell-out. The indie label splashing out large sums of money just to gain commercial success. But some saw the potential in this 'new pop'. There was some political mileage to be had from it, and if alternative labels could make some money at the same time as appearing to be 'right on' then all the better. The sell-out theorists won though as Gartside signed with a major label shortly after the release of the poor selling 'Songs To Remember'.

So the questions remains. Was Mr Gartside a fake? Or, on the other hand, did Scritti Politti sign to Virgin Records so they could mess with the mainstream from within. Green followed up the Rough Trade album with 'Cupid And Psyche 85'. It was an album of finely crafted pop, mostly soul influenced. However it did boast a number of excellent singles. 'Wood Bees (Pray Like Aretha Franklin), 'Absolute' and 'The Word Girl' all sold fairly well and were partly successful in their attempts to merge the cultural weight of alternative music with the market place success of the mainstream. There hooks, the pop structure, the band's image on the one side and the interesting experiments in rhythm provided by John Maher, who was a no-wave pioneer back in the day and meant a deal of independent credibility for Gartside, on the other. At the time Scritti Politti's importance was not obvious. Yet there is a link between his indie influenced electro soul pop and what came later in the decade. Dance music.