"Like a Glucose Overdose" - a piece onScritti Politti for Tidal, pegged to the new reissue of Cupid & Psyche 85
Not a great video but this single, as sound and song, still seems astounding to me.
This longer "Absolute" has some sampladelic eerieness absented from the 7-inch radio mix above - woogly vocal-science riffage.
There is also a proper 'extended for the disco floor' 12 inch version that crammed with very '80s FX and feels unnecessarily elongated.
Amazed me then and amazes me still that this single (the third leading up to Cupid) was not a hit
Another stilted video - Green seated, doubtless to get around his issues with dancing on camera.
With "Wood Beez" the dancing was out-sourced to Michael Clark!
Promo-wise "A Word Girl" was slightly better than the first three. And "Perfect Way" was efficiently slick and MTV-ready, pushing Scritti over the edge in America. But overall it's really not a medium that suits Mr. Gartside.
Interesting that Scritti Mk 3 could so amply master the ultra-pop sound of the mid-80s while still limning it with strangeness - but they couldn't pull off an equivalent feat of excelling / surpassing / subverting when it came to the promo video, such a crucial component of New Pop / the Second British Invasion
Released on my birthday, Green's first new release in fourteen years!
I've been listening to his music for over forty years now and - apart from a couple of lulls - it's continuously delighted and fascinated.
Part of the gift of "Tangled Man" is the impetus it's given me to listen finally to Anne Briggs. Just never got around to it somehow.
Gorgeous...
(I have a record-fiend friend who happily coughed up $600 for an original copy of one of Briggs's albums. I gasped when he told me - but couldn't help admiring how he brooked no obstacles to his wants and needs.)
On "the flipside", Green covers another Briggs tune
The original
Here's Green talking about how he was a folkie before he was a punkie:
“Recently, in an interview for a forthcoming book about art and music in Leeds in the 70’s and 80’s, the author asked me, as an aside, if it were true that I was wearing Morris Dancer’s leg bells at the 1976 gig there by the Sex Pistols, Clash, Damned and Heartbreakers as other interviewees present that night had reported. My DNA was reconfigured that evening so my memory is hazy but it is very likely that I was wearing the leg bell pads made for me by a school friend some years before. In fact I may well have gone to the gig straight from the evening Morris dancing lessons I attended at Leeds university.
"Because before punk gave me the liberty and license to make my own music I was geekily obsessed with ‘folk’. When I was fourteen I was enraptured by the Fairport Convention album Liege and Lief and became an underage regular at Dublin Moran’s folk club at the Castle, a very insalubrious pub down Newport docks. It’s there I was made aware of the Topic record label and the music of the Watersons, Martin Carthy (who I subsequently stalked . . . ask him) and Anne Briggs. The beautiful melodies Anne sang unaccompanied were profoundly affecting, her unornamented voice a precursor to the anti-professionalism of DIY. For a long while I walked about dressed like a 19th century farm labourer (with a bit of eyeliner) in a kind of hypnagogic reverie to an inner soundtrack of Northumbrian pipe tunes, Wassailing songs and Morris dances. Jesus.
Forward some 40 odd years and my friend and Scritti Politti bandmate Rhodri Marsden had been contacted to do an arrangement of an Anne Briggs song for a project with which he was involved. Knowing I was a fan he suggested maybe I’d like to take on the task. I was dead keen and recorded myself at home playing and singing my versions of a couple of the very few songs Annie had written many years ago...."
Interesting that Green here pinpoints Briggs's naturalistic, "unornamented" singing... because his own vocals on "Tangled" and "Wishing" have never sounded so synthetic and stylized, a quality shared by the denatured setting for the songs (bar the guitar part on "Tangled"). Far far from folk (indeed he sings, as he has since Songs To Remember, in an American accent.... rippling strands of liquid sugar spooling from his lips).
The title of this post? When I listen to "Tangled Man," I hear the lyric as "Webster's set me free". Which would fit the logophile bibbly-o-maniac Green, evoking all the places that reading has taken him... (Even the Americanized reference would be the kind of thing he'd pop into a lyric, rather than the OED).
Green's words, in song and interview, have been among the "ways to set me free", the select number of mind-expanding things that set me on my present course.
Crikey, look at this - a time capsule of 1979. And a sort of "pop promo", albeit never shown anywhere until now, for "P.A.s" - my favorite tune on 4 A Sides - using a 'single edit' shorter version of the song.
(Tip off from the ever-alert Jon Dale)
A proper good glimpse of the Carol St squat squalor - including a kitchen area that looks manky and mingin.
Means-of-production demystified with scenes of the recording sessions, record pressing, and record packaging (although it looks like they are sleeving the Peel Sessions EP, as opposed to 4 A Sides, which would be the perfectly circular and self-reflexive thing to do. But then in the record store, the young lad flicks 'n' picks a copy of 4 A Sides. Confusing!)
Although the record by itself abundantly demonstrates this, the glimpse of the three playing together reinforces the sense that Scritti had gone way beyond messthetics by this point - that is some tight white funk.
I wonder if the mysterious Denis Cullum, who posted this on YouTube, but nothing else as yet, has even more footage of the era up his sleeve.
Said to be the melody source for "Hegemony."
If so, derived most likely from this 1979 release featuring Green's hero Martin Carthy.
