by Ari Roth
The story is well-worn: Green Gartside formed Scritti Politti in the late 70s as an angular, lo-fi post-punk band with leftist political leanings and a tendency towards snaking, Captain Beefheart-ian guitar lines and dubby sonics. Then, suddenly and abruptly, Gartside made a sharp left turn and wound up fronting a pop-oriented R&B studio project, all squeaky clean digital surfaces and hooky choruses.
Far from selling out, Gartside wound up crafting Cupid & Psyche 85, a brilliant, near-perfect record of intricate art-pop that is both immediately delightful and beguilingly hard to crack. Part of this is due to the lyrics: Gartside is known for his wit and erudition, and these songs are still full of language games and clever turns of phrase, even when compressed into a relatively straightforward pop format. He has a voice to match, high, reedy and thin, comparable only to Game Theory’s Scott Miller, or perhaps Miller’s hero, Alex Chilton of Big Star. Gartside’s vocal performances are often sphinx-like and detached, lending an airy, slightly ironic edge even to the album’s biggest choruses.
But it’s on a compositional and sonic level that this album really shines. Gartside has a completely unique melodic and harmonic language, as he twists contemporary funk and R&B cadences into complex, inventive progressions and vocal lines that remain somehow addictive and memorable. It’s no coincidence that Miles Davis would cover “Perfect Way” from this album and even feature on the unfairly maligned followup, Provision – in the eight years since the formation of the Scritti Politti project, Green Gartside had emerged as an unlikely but brilliant pop songwriter, one of the best of his age, and he deserves to be recognized as such. The production is equally distinctive, crammed full of plastic synth riffs and ricocheting drum machine presets, a dizzying collage of 80s synth pop sounds that manages to sound both appealingly dated and completely new, a ubiquitous sound for the time turned on its head and given a fresh and unexpected spin by an avowed outsider. Not that these songs don’t have grooves in the traditional sense – with session work by some of the top funk players of the era, Cupid & Psyche 85 remains utterly danceable, capital-p-Pop that even cracked the Top 10 charts in the UK.
Cupid & Psyche 85 opens with The Word Girl, a crisp, digital reggae track that stands apart sonically from the rest of the album’s more uptempo songs. The synths glitter, the drums roll, and Gartside croons an oblique but cutting critique of patriarchal gender politics masquerading as an excellent pop song. From there, the album kicks into overdrive with the uptempo “Small Talk” and the stunning “Absolute,” one of the record’s early highlights. “A Little Knowledge” is Gartside’s take on a lovelorn boy-girl duet ballad, gorgeously composed but lent an unsettling edge by the floaty, androgynous vocal performances. “Perfect Way” is probably the most straightforward song on the album, bolstered by a big chorus and a Mario Bros.-referencing piano solo. Still, there are always those little unexpected moments, such as the brilliant turnaround that leads into the central hook. “Wood Beez” was my introduction to Scritti Politti, and it remains one of my favorite songs on the album. A flawless soul-pop gem, the track sees Gartside pitting one of his most straightforward sentiments – “each night I go to bed, I pray like Aretha Franklin” (yeah, right) – against smart aleck wisecracks – “there’s nothing I wouldn’t be, that’s the gift of schizo” – and the exuberant nonsense of the chorus. “Hypnotize”, the album’s final track, is an absolute marvel of songwriting, alchemizing its jagged melodies and counterintuitive phrasing into something overwhelmingly infectious, instantly familiar and utterly unique all at once.
Not quite forgotten, not quite canonized, Scritti Politti exist in something of a critical and commercial interzone. Following his break from music, Green Gartside released several subsequent albums over the past two decades, all rewarding in their own way, each met with quiet enthusiasm from the press. The project’s past music has attracted its fair share of admirers too – ambient producer and Kompakt label boss Wolfgang Voigt recently named Cupid & Psyche 85 as his favorite album – but I still consider Gartside’s music massively underappreciated, perhaps due to its slightly dated sonic character and the comparatively small amount of music that he released during his peak. Perhaps one day this oversight will be rectified, and he will take his rightful place as one of the great pop auteurs of all time. Until then, his music will remain, ready for discovery by new fans everywhere.
