Scritti Politti - Overview

Overview

Initially a left-wing-inspired post-punk British rock group, Scritti Politti developed into a more mainstream pop music project in the early to mid 1980s, enjoying significant success in the record charts in the UK and the US. Scritti Politti originally consisted of Gartside (born Paul Julian Strohmeyer) as the lead vocalist, Nial Jinks as bass player, Tom Morley as drummer, and Matthew Kay as the manager who sometimes played the keyboard. Morley also created much of the artwork on the band's album covers. Gartside and Jinks had gone to school together in South Wales, and Gartside met Morley at Leeds Polytechnic, a polytechnic they both attended. They played one show as The Against in 1976, doing covers of Chelsea songs. Disillusioned and bored with art school, Gartside and Morley left in June 1978 and moved into a squat at 1 Carol Street in Camden Town, London. Jinks was invited to join the band. Gartside taught him how to play the bass in three weeks.

Gartside recorded a demo of one of his new songs, "The 'Sweetest Girl'", in January 1981, and the song was included on the C81 cassette compilation obtained with tokens from the March issues of NME. The song prompted many major labels to offer Gartside record contracts, but he decided to stay with Rough Trade Records. By August 1981, Scritti Politti's debut album was complete and ready for release, but Gartside wanted to wait, most likely because he could not decide on a title. "The 'Sweetest Girl'" was released as a single in November and reached only No. 64 on the UK music chart, but it was cited by The New York Times as one of the ten best singles of the year. The single was later covered by pop band Madness, with their version reaching No. 35 in the UK singles chart in 1986. (Nial Jinks also temporarily rejoined the band around this time.) The band's music was characterized by sophisticated studio production, Gartside's sly, punning wordplay — influenced by his reading of deconstruction (the group's 1982 debut album, Songs to Remember, features a song called "Jacques Derrida") — and the tension between the polished pop-funk stylings of their music and the subtle radicalism of the political and social messages embedded in their lyrics.

The group's most successful album, 1985's Cupid & Psyche 85, spawned three UK Top 20 hits with "Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)", "Absolute", and "The Word Girl", as well as a US Top 20 hit with "Perfect Way". The personnel for this album differed from that of their first album, and featured keyboardist David Gamson and ex-Material drummer Fred Maher, both of whom would collaborate with Gartside on songwriting and production duties. Arif Mardin would also produce three songs for the album.

This new line-up remained for the band's next album, 1988's Provision. This album was a Top 10 success, though it only produced one Top 20 hit ("Oh Patti"). After releasing a couple of non-album singles in the early 1990s, as well as a collaboration with B.E.F., Gartside became disillusioned with the music industry and retired to South Wales for the rest of the decade. He returned to music-making in the late 1990s, releasing two critically acclaimed albums, 1999's Anomie & Bonhomie (which included various rap and hip hop influences) and 2006's stripped-down White Bread, Black Beer which returned to the more experimental era of the band's history.