If Songs to Remember were a book, it would look like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, with the poet’s (in)famous notes attached after publication. The songs get origin stories. About “The ‘Sweetest Girl,’” singer-songwriter-guitarist-theorist Green Gartside has said, “The song wasn't about a person or the person but about the mythical notion of the ‘sweetest girl,’” hence the inverted commas in its single form. “Lions After Slumber”? See Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy, his 1819 eulogy for the dead in the Peterloo Massacre. The name “Jacques Derrida” would strike terror in those with a grad school syllabus; Gartside does not yield an inch. “It’s about how powerful and contradictory the politics of desire are,” he once remarked, no fingers crossed behind his back. “About being torn between all things glamorous and reactionary and all things glamorous and leftist.”
Because Gartside is a smart fella and music journalists swoon when artists flatter their intelligence, he has always come across as a marvelous interview subject bewitched by the diaphanous verbal webs he spins. But listeners don’t need his commentary to enjoy Scritti Politti’s 1982 Songs to Remember any more than early readers of Eliot needed him sticking his tongue out at them in those notes. Recently reissued by original label Rough Trade Records, Songs to Remember epitomizes the group’s attempt to reconcile an art-school background, 1977-era punk ethics, and an obsession with chart pop into a musical statement as stately and cohesive as a book of sonnets.
The results did not go over with the band, such as it was. Gartside told Simon Reynolds that he “wrote screeds of justification,” wanting the songs to be “understood and approved and thought-through by the group.” (When you’re explaining…) Fans familiar with 1985’s beat-tastic, falsetto-fluttery, Technicolor masterpiece Cupid & Psyche 85 may blanch at Songs to Remember’s wispy skeletal attempts at dub and acoustic pop (especially since the album has, until now, been out of print and unavailable on streaming). Did Gartside turn to megapop because he sucked as a punk? Did he understand how his brand of DIY constricted his melodic talents? Hard to say. To contextualize Songs to Remember changes how we might enjoy it, and, after all, thinking about how to enjoy art is an approach that flatters Gartside’s post-structuralist hermeneutics. Let us say that he needed to make Songs to Remember to write Cupid & Psyche 85 like a doctoral student needs to write a first draft of a dissertation; from a distance of 40 years, it’s fun to identify elements of their debut that Gartside would go on to develop or scrap.
This edition of Songs to Remember just pops: Gartside would savor the irony of a post-punk artifact polished as shinily as a new Porsche. Tracks like “Sex,” with its syncopated guitar and bass, might’ve worked on Cupid & Psyche 85 with a plushier bottom. The prominent backup singers, Jamie Talbot’s wandering sax lines, and Gartside’s Vocoderized croon on “Faithless” nod towards his affinities for trad and modern R&B. Those singers—Jackie Challenor, Lorenza Johnson, and Mae McKenna—show up again on “Jacques Derrida,” the album’s triumph. Their enthusiasm (“I want it, I want it, I WANT it!”) coax Gartside into grinning through the kind of acoustic groove on which even the most mid of lyricists can triumph. Mixing his messages like a pop wunderkind instead of a theorist, he claims to “still support the revolution” while wondering why no one’s told him who he’s working for, only don’t tell the girl whose heart he’s taking apart like the French philosopher deconstructed literary texts.
One song heralded his future assault on the UK charts. “‘The Sweetest Girl’” has lost none of its power to evoke hesitant dawn sunlight, a sense of a new beginning shared with another New Pop classic, Simple Minds’ “New Gold Dream,” but suspicious still of maximalist gestures. The drum machine hiss, Robert Wyatt’s sympathetic piano, the reggae throb of Nial Jinks’ bass in its predator-like shadowing of Gartside’s vocal—pure pop for then teens, no quotation marks necessary, except as a historical record of Gartside’s anxiety about committing to his ideas (the presence of Communist Party member Wyatt, who also believed in the pop-song-as-vessel, acted as unspoken intellectual support for Gartside’s pop moves). Madness would drop the article and the pesky punctuation for their 1985 electro-skank cover—not far removed, actually, from what Scritti Politti attempted on their contemporaneous single “Hypnotize.”
These successes sound fresh: The best versions of what Scritti Politti could accomplish in a competitive pop era. They compensate for a few dodgy tunes. “Gettin’ Havin’ and Holdin’” is a retread of “Faithless”; Gartside doesn’t need contractions on his gerunds to prove a point about gettin’ down. “Lions After Slumber,” available on the Early compilation, boasts a marvelous intro: more drum machine hiss, a twitchy slap bass, and a piano in search of a melody. Then Gartside spends the rest of the song cooing lines like, “My hunger, my refusal, my tissue, and my vodka.” Clever. A comment, perhaps, on capitalism’s need to alienate the self from others, but at five minutes, a bit much.
Songs to Remember didn’t perform as well as Gartside wanted: a No. 12 peak on the UK album chart. No matter—Gartside had gotten a whiff of a beguiling perfume. He dropped Rough Trade, signed with Virgin Records, and decamped to New York with simpatico musicians to spend part of his big advance hiring Arif Mardin to work on some tracks. Cupid & Psyche 85 was “about” pop music while containing some of the era’s most ebullient pop. “Perfect Way” earned heavy MTV rotation on its way to a No. 11 peak in America—and millions of its listeners hadn’t a clue about Jean Baudrillard.
On my iTunes app, “Faithless” segued into Jason Derulo’s “Want to Want Me.” As it should—contemporary electro-R&B joining hands with a wannabe from the distant past. The third decade of a new century offers few examples of putative radicalism finding new strength in received pop forms; the way Spotify encourages artists to “cross-platform” across genres is our facile way of attempting Gartside’s thrilling praxis. An artifact of an extinct cultural moment when postmodernism held as much sway over youth as Clash and Wire albums, Songs to Remember also works as a rebuke. More musicians should write about the attractive ideas they learn from books.
