Asylums In Jerusalem

While filing a few records away at the weekend I pulled out some discs from the S section and happened upon Scritti Politti's Songs To Remember, a record I haven't played for a long time. I put it on and spent three quarters of an hour in the company of Green Gartside in 1982. It is a very good album, a record with a long and complex back story that definitely adds to the experience of listening to it. It can of course also be listened to purely as a piece of early 80s pop music, something I'm sure Green was keen for it to be taken as when it was released- but on the other hand, you can't abandon the scratchy, squat post- punk DIY sound of Skank Bloc Bologna for the new wave/ soul pop of Songs To Remember, and name your songs things like Jacques Derrida, Asylums In Jerusalem, Lions After Slumber and include the arch quotation marks around 'The Sweetest Girl' without expecting the listener to pick up on these things. This was pop music and yet more than pop music too. 

The album was recorded in late 1980 and into 1981 but delayed at the band's request until September 1982 so that they could release some singles, build up interest and sell more copies. Green wasn't interested any longer in the post- punk/ indie ghetto. He wanted success and was eventually unhappy with Rough Trade's promotion of the album. For Green, who spent nine months convalescing at his parents' house in Wales after collapsing on stage with what was at first thought to be a heart attack but later confirmed as a panic attack brought on by massive stage fright, going pop wasn't a rejection of punk or selling, it was making pop not pap. Green lost interest in selling a few hundred records to the indie scene, he wanted to make pop music that found 'a way into people's hearts the way independent music never did'. He had spent months listening to funk, disco and soul, Stax and early 60s beat music. He also moved away from the constraints of the Marxist philosophy that inspired Scritti's earliest recordings, rejecting what he called 'monolithical Marxism'. His group he admitted were viewed as a cult band and as intellectuals and he was keen to move away from those margins. 

Asylums In Jerusalem

Songs To Remember arrives with the spring loaded bassline of Asylums In Jerusalem, a sound that bounces out of the speakers, along with Green's honeyed vocal, clear and bright, and some female, soul backing vocals in harmony. The lyrics sound like classic radio pop fayre but were inspired by Nietzshe's writings about the huge number of madhouses built in Jerusalem to contain the religious lunatics who sprung up in the wake of the arrival of Jesus, desert dwelling, locust eating prophets 'talking in tongues again/ let him shake a little/ let him rock a little'. The B-side, Jacques Derrida, references the poststructuralist philosopher of the song's title and how Green found himself torn between glamour and left wing politics, between glamour and being reactionary, and the politics of desire. 

Songs To Remember is lush and bright, sugar and honey, radio friendly but with the influences of funk and soul and digital dancehall, Prince and the nascent rap scene, vocoders and Lover's Rock running through it, along with all this thought and politics and philosophy. The rest of Scritti Politti, drummer Tony Morley and bassist Nial Jinks both left the group in the aftermath of the recording/ release of the album, leaving Green to pursue things on his own, a road that led to the pop perfection of Cupid & Psyche 85, The Word Girl, Wood Beez and Absolute. I've posted Absolute before, a song that sounds like everything great about shiny 80s pop condensed into a four minute single sung by a man with Princess Diana's hair and wearing a Nike Windjammer jacket, a jacket that in '85 was favoured by breakdancers and casuals. 'Absolute, a principle/ To make your heart invincible', Green sings as the music explodes and swoons around him. 

Absolute