Post-Punk Then and Now by Gavin Butt

Author:Gavin Butt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Post-Punk Then and Now
ISBN: 9781910924273
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2016-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

7 “The Weakest Link in Every Chain, I Always Want To Find It”:

Green Gartside in Conversation with Kodwo Eshun (20|11|14)

This conversation with singer, songwriter, and producer Green Gartside focuses upon the ways in which Scritti Politti — the group founded byGartside in 1978, which he still leads today — functioned in its earliest years as an experiment in which a range of theoretical inputs from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks to Derrida’s Of Grammatology to Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse entered into an intensive feedback cycle with the mobilising dynamics of beat musics, that ranged from the disassembled R&B ofCaptain Beefheart to the lovers rock of earlyGregory Isaacs and the early hip-hop of Run DMC. Scritti Politti’s ongoing project to reconfigure the institution of rock music by deconstructing the form of the pop song proved to be deeply influential in the post-punk community gathered around London’s Rough Trade Records store and record label. Scritti Politti were never more controversial than in 1981, when their fourth single, ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’, first heard on NME’s compilation cassette C81, announced a revolution within the revolution that was post-punk. What is audible is that the impact of ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ on the direction and the vocabulary of post-punk permitted a series of mutations throughout popular modernism whose effects are experienced and argued over to this day.

Kodwo Eshun: When we conceived the programme for this season of public lectures, one of the figures we all wanted to have a conversation with was the man sitting next to me: Green Gartside, a figure whose work we had followed for many years now. Green Gartside is a singer and a songwriter, whose albums include Songs to Remember (1982, Rough Trade), Cupid & Psyche 85 (1985, Virgin), Provision (1988, Virgin), Anomie & Bonhomie (1999, Virgin), and then back to Rough Trade with White Bread Black Beer (2006). He has worked with collaborators such as producer Adam Kidron, keyboardist David Gamson, and drummer Fred Maher. Scritti Politti is the umbrella name for this series of productions. The one constant figure throughout these shifting line-ups is Green Gartside.

I asked Green to play some of his favourite music as everybody arrived. I’m going to tell you the names of the songs that you might have missed. We started off with Captain Beefheart’s ‘Lick My Decals Off, Baby’, followed by Matching Mole’s ‘Starting in the Middle of the Day We Can Drink Our Politics Away’, J Dilla’s ‘Workinonit’, Incredible String Band’s ‘Koeeoaddi There’, Parlet’s ‘Huff ‘N’ Puff’, Johnny P’s ‘Hold it Down’ then we had Captain Beefheart again with ‘Japan in a Dishpan’, the Supremes’ ‘Reflections’, and Willi Williams’ ‘Armagideon Time’. Those compositions give you a DNA for Green’s thinking, sonically, compositionally, artistically, politically, and aesthetically. We are going to play some compositions by Scritti Politti and talk about them. In doing so, we will map the shifting coordinates of different kinds of theories in relation to different musics and how those were lived in Leeds and London during the late 1970s and New York in the 1980s.

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