EVERYTHING’S GONE GREEN
GREEN is kind of blue. Talking to Uncut in the week before Christmas, the inquisitive mind behind Scritti Politti has spent the previous nine months almost completely housebound. Because Gartside’s wife has underlying health conditions, he made the decision early on in the pandemic to forgo the outside world. “I went out with Alexis from Hot Chip for one beer somewhere during the summer, and Rhodri [Marsden] from my band for another, and that’s been it,” he says. Other than the local pharmacist, “I haven’t seen a soul. It’s odd to be talking to someone again.”
It’s not the first time during a career of what he calls “sporadic music making” that Gartside has lain low. In the past 40 years there have been long periods of silence spent dealing with physical and mental health setbacks and contemplating fresh aesthetic approaches. Then as now, creativity has provided solace. Last year, he released his first new music in 14 years – covers of two Anne Briggs songs, “Tangled Man” and “Wishing Well”. “I go into my studio and make music every day,” he says. “That’s the only thing that has kept me from going completely fucking loopy.”
The present keeps him buoyant. The past, less so. Later this year Gartside and “Scritti Mk 3” are due to tour Cupid & Psyche 85, the band’s second album and a luxurious act of deluxe pop subversion. While looking forward to revisiting the record, Gartside views it as a trade-off. Fifteen years on from Scritti’s last album, 2006’s White Bread Black Beer, dealing with the past might finally “clear the way” psychologically for him to release new music.
Gartside formed Scritti Politti in 1977 with fellow students Nial Jinks and Tom Morley, while studying Fine Art at Leeds University. Their early sound was a long way from sugar-spun, session-tooled mid-’80s hits such as “The Word Girl” and “Wood Beez”. Having named the band after the work of Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, Gartside later wrote a manifesto for his bandmates outlining the philosophical merits of moving from the scratchy, abrasive, deconstructed post-punk of
